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Internal and External Reasons

In Ross Harrison (ed.), Rational action: studies in philosophy and social science. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 101-113 (1979)

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  1. Vague Value.Tom Dougherty - 2013 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (2):352-372.
    You are morally permitted to save your friend at the expense of a few strangers, but not at the expense of very many. However, there seems no number of strangers that marks a precise upper bound here. Consequently, there are borderline cases of groups at the expense of which you are permitted to save your friend. This essay discusses the question of what explains ethical vagueness like this, arguing that there are interesting metaethical consequences of various explanations.
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  • Constructivism in Ethics.Carla Bagnoli (ed.) - 2013 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Are there such things as moral truths? How do we know what we should do? And does it matter? Constructivism states that moral truths are neither invented nor discovered, but rather are constructed by rational agents in order to solve practical problems. While constructivism has become the focus of many philosophical debates in normative ethics, meta-ethics and action theory, its importance is still to be fully appreciated. These new essays written by leading scholars define and assess this new approach in (...)
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  • The Normative Source of Kantian Hypothetical Imperatives.Camillia Kong - 2012 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 20 (5):661-690.
    This paper offers a critique of Christine Korsgaard’s interpretation of Kantian instrumental reason. Korsgaard understands Kantian hypothetical imperatives to share a common normative source with the categorical imperative – namely self-legislating, human rational agency. However, her reading of Kantian hypothetical imperatives is problematic for three reasons. Firstly, Korsgaard’s agent-centred approach renders incoherent Kant’s analytic-synthetic division. Secondly, by minimising the dualistic framework of Kant’s practical philosophy the dialectical character of practical rationality is lost: norms of instrumental reasoning therefore become confused with (...)
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  • (1 other version)Epistemic Contextualism: A Normative Approach.Robin Mckenna - 2012 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 94 (1):101-123.
    In his Knowledge and Practical Interests Jason Stanley argues that the view he defends, which he calls interest-relative invariantism, is better supported by certain cases than epistemic contextualism. In this article I argue that a version of epistemic contextualism that emphasizes the role played by the ascriber's practical interests in determining the truth-conditions of her ‘knowledge’ ascriptions – a view that I call interests contextualism – is better supported by Stanley's cases than interest-relative invariantism or other versions of epistemic contextualism. (...)
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  • Varieties of Goodness at Work: The Relationship between Business and Morality.Claus Beisbart - 2012 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 55 (4):405-430.
    Abstract What do we mean to say when we call some person a good business manager? And where do the criteria flow from by which we judge people good business managers? I answer these questions by drawing on von Wright's distinction between several varieties of goodness. We can then discriminate between instrumental, technical and moral senses of the expression ?to be a good business manager?. The first two senses presume that business managers have a characteristic task or that they engage (...)
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  • Personal Autonomy, Decisional Capacity, and Mental Disorder.Lubomira V. Radoilska - 2012 - In Lubomira Radoilska (ed.), Autonomy and Mental Disorder. Oxford University Press.
    In this Introduction, I situate the underlying project “Autonomy and Mental Disorder” with reference to current debates on autonomy in moral and political philosophy, and the philosophy of action. I then offer an overview of the individual contributions. More specifically, I begin by identifying three points of convergence in the debates at issue, stating that autonomy is: 1) a fundamentally liberal concept; 2) an agency concept and; 3) incompatible with (severe) mental disorder. Next, I explore, in the context of decisional (...)
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  • On the Objectivity of Welfare.Alexander F. Sarch - unknown
    This dissertation is structured in such a way as to gradually home in on the true theory of welfare. I start with the whole field of possible theories of welfare and then proceed by narrowing down the options in a series of steps. The first step, undertaken in chapter 2, is to argue that the true theory of welfare must be what I call a partly response independent theory. First I reject the entirely response independent theories because there are widely-shared (...)
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  • Can Trust Itself Ground a Reason to Believe the Trusted?Edward Hinchman - 2012 - Abstracta 6 (S6):47-83.
    Can a reason to believe testimony derive from the addressee’s trust itself or only from reliability in the speaker that the trust perhaps causes? I aim to cast suspicion on the former view, defended by Faulkner, in favor of the latter – despite agreeing with Faulkner’s emphasis on the second-personal normativity of testimonial assurance. Beyond my narrow disagreement with Faulkner lie two broader issues. I argue that Faulkner misappropriates Bernard Williams’s genealogy of testimony when he makes use of Williams’s genealogical (...)
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  • Moral Realism without Values.Noell Birondo - 2006 - Journal of Philosophical Research 31:81-102.
    In this paper I draw on some of the work of John McDowell in order to develop a realist account of normative reasons for action. On the view defended here, there can be correct moral judgments that capture the reasons there are for acting in certain ways; and the reasons themselves are just some of the morally relevant facts of the situation about which the judgment is made. Establishing this account relies crucially, I argue, on an appeal to substantive ethical (...)
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  • "Ought" and the Perspective of the Agent.Benjamin Kiesewitter - 2011 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 5 (3):1-24.
    Objectivists and perspectivists disagree about the question of whether what an agent ought to do depends on the totality of facts or on the agent’s limited epistemic perspective. While objectivism fails to account for normative guidance, perspectivism faces the challenge of explaining phenomena (occurring most notably in advice, but also in first-personal deliberation) in which the use of “ought” is geared to evidence that is better than the evidence currently available to the agent. This paper aims to defend perspectivism by (...)
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  • The possibility of morality.Phil Brown - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 163 (3):627-636.
    Despite much discussion over the existence of moral facts, metaethicists have largely ignored the related question of their possibility. This paper addresses the issue from the moral error theorist’s perspective, and shows how the arguments that error theorists have produced against the existence of moral facts at this world, if sound, also show that moral facts are impossible, at least at worlds non-morally identical to our own and, on some versions of the error theory, at any world. So error theorists’ (...)
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  • Taking Something as a Reason for Action.Markus E. Schlosser - 2012 - Philosophical Papers 41 (2):267-304.
    This paper proposes and defends an account of what it is to act for reasons. In the first part, I will discuss the desire-belief and the deliberative model of acting for reasons. I will argue that we can avoid the weaknesses and retain the strengths of both views, if we pursue an alternative according to which acting for reasons involves taking something as a reason. In the main part, I will develop an account of what it is to take something (...)
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  • Because I Believe It’s the Right Thing to Do.Joshua May - 2013 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (4):791-808.
    Our beliefs about which actions we ought to perform clearly have an effect on what we do. But so-called “Humean” theories—holding that all motivation has its source in desire—insist on connecting such beliefs with an antecedent motive. Rationalists, on the other hand, allow normative beliefs a more independent role. I argue in favor of the rationalist view in two stages. First, I show that the Humean theory rules out some of the ways we ordinarily explain actions. This shifts the burden (...)
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  • Kant, Skepticism, and Moral Sensibility.Owen Ware - 2010 - Dissertation, University of Toronto
    In his early writings, Kant says that the solution to the puzzle of how morality can serve as a motivating force in human life is nothing less than the “philosophers’ stone.” In this dissertation I show that for years Kant searched for the philosophers’ stone in the concept of “respect” (Achtung), which he understood as the complex effect practical reason has on feeling. -/- I sketch the history of that search in Chapters 1-2. In Chapter 3 I show that Kant’s (...)
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  • Against Normative Naturalism.Matthew S. Bedke - 2012 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (1):111 - 129.
    This paper considers normative naturalism, understood as the view that (i) normative sentences are descriptive of the way things are, and (ii) their truth/falsity does not require ontology beyond the ontology of the natural world. Assuming (i) for the sake of argument, I here show that (ii) is false not only as applied to ethics, but more generally as applied to practical and epistemic normativity across the board. The argument is a descendant of Moore's Open Question Argument and Hume's Is-Ought (...)
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  • Interests Contextualism.Robin McKenna - 2011 - Philosophia 39 (4):741-750.
    In this paper I develop a version of contextualism that I call interests contextualism. Interests contextualism is the view that the truth-conditions of knowledge ascribing and denying sentences are partly determined by the ascriber’s interests and purposes. It therefore stands in opposition to the usual view on which the truth-conditions are partly determined by the ascriber’s conversational context. I give an argument against one particular implementation of the usual view, differentiate interests contextualism from other prominent versions of contextualism and argue (...)
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  • Hume on Justice.Rosalind Hursthouse - 2010 - In Charles Pigden (ed.), Hume on Is and Ought. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 264.
    What motivates the benevolent or charitable agent is regard for another’s good or well-being, but talk about regard for others’ good or well- being is simply talk about benevolence or charity in different terms. Yet Hume clearly holds that the regard for another’s good is a motive to produce benevolent acts that is distinct from a sense of their benevolence. So what is the difference? ‘Well’, one might say, ‘intuitively, rights are very different from wellbeing.’ Yes indeed. And that, I (...)
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  • Judging Life and Its Value.Brooke Alan Trisel - 2007 - Sorites (18):60-75.
    One’s life can be meaningful, but not worth living, or worth living, but not meaningful, which demonstrates that an evaluation of whether life is worth living differs from an evaluation of whether one’s life is meaningful. But how do these evaluations differ? As I will argue, an evaluation of whether life is worth living is a more comprehensive evaluation than the evaluation of whether one’s individual life is meaningful. In judging whether one finds life worth living, one takes into account, (...)
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  • On the Relationship between Reasons and Evidence.Christopher Cloos - manuscript
    How are reasons and evidence interrelated? According to one prevalent view, reasons and evidence are equivalent: evidence is a reason, and a reason is evidence. On another view reasons and evidence are conditionally related: if there is evidence, then there is a reason. On a different view reasons and evidence are disjunctively related: reasons or evidence can be substituted for each other. In this paper, I argue against these common views, and I defend the view that reasons and evidence are (...)
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  • Autonomism Reconsidered.James Harold - 2011 - British Journal of Aesthetics 51 (2):137-147.
    This paper has three aims: to define autonomism clearly and charitably, to offer a positive argument in its favour, and to defend a larger view about what is at stake in the debate between autonomism and its critics. Autonomism is here understood as the claim that a valuer does not make an error in failing to bring her moral and aesthetic judgements together, unless she herself values doing so. The paper goes on to argue that reason does not require the (...)
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  • Preferentism and Self‐Sacrifice.Chris Heathwood - 2011 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 92 (1):18-38.
    According to the argument from self-sacrifice, standard, unrestricted desire-based theories of welfare fail because they have the absurd implication that self-sacrifice is conceptually impossible. I attempt to show that, in fact, the simplest imaginable, completely unrestricted desire-based theory of well-being is perfectly compatible with the phenomenon of self-sacrifice – so long as the theory takes the right form. I go on to consider a new argument from self-sacrifice against this simple theory, which, I argue, also fails. I conclude that, contrary (...)
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  • Teleological explanation: A species of causal explanation.D. Lynn Holt - 1988 - Philosophical Psychology 1 (3):313-325.
    Abstract The thesis that teleological explanations are best understood as causal explanations is defended (contra Valentine). I shift the focus of debate from behavior simpliciter to allegedly rational behavior. Teleological explanation, in the case of rational agents, involves reason?giving; and the reasons agents give for acting must be causative of that action if those agents are to be rational in practice. I argue initially that to abandon the claim that reasons are causes of action is to abandon that which renders (...)
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  • Well-Being as the Object of Moral Consideration.David Sobel - 1998 - Economics and Philosophy 14 (2):249.
    The proposal I offer attempts to remedy the inadequacies of exclusive focus on well-being for moral purposes. The proposal is this: We should allow the agent to decide for herself where she wants to throw the weight that is her due in moral reflection, with the proviso that she understands the way that her weight will be aggregated with others in reaching a moral outcome. I will call this the "autonomy principle." The autonomy principle, I claim, provides the consequentialist's best (...)
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  • (1 other version)Agency and Alienation.Jennifer Hornsby - 2004 - In Mario De Caro & David Macarthur (eds.), Naturalism In Question. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. pp. 173-87.
    It is argued that the standard story of human action, as it is standardly naturalistically understood, should be rejected. Rather than seeking an agent amidst the workings of the mind (as in Velleman's "What Happens When Someone Acts"), we need to recognize an agent’s place in the world she inhabits. And in order to do so we have to resist the naturalistic assumptions of the standard causal story.
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  • Intention rationality.Michael E. Bratman - 2009 - Philosophical Explorations 12 (3):227-241.
    The practical thought of planning agents is subject to distinctive rationality norms. In particular, there are norms of intention consistency and of means-end coherence. I discuss the normative significance of these norms and their relation to practical reasons. I seek a path between views that see these norms as, at bottom, norms of theoretical rationality, and views that see the idea that these norms have distinctive normative significance as a 'myth'. And I seek to distinguish these norms from principles about (...)
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  • Things That Make Things Reasonable.John Gibbons - 2010 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (2):335-361.
    One fairly common view about practical reason has it that whether you have a reason to act is not determined by what you know, or believe, or are justified in believing. Your reasons are determined by the facts. Perhaps there are two kinds of reasons, and however it goes with motivating reasons, normative reasons are determined by the facts, not your take on the facts. One fairly common version of this view has it that what's reasonable for you to do (...)
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  • Morality, reasons, and sentiments.Eric Vogelstein - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 155 (3):421-432.
    Morality is commonly thought to be normative in a robust and important way. This is commonly cashed out in terms of normative reasons. It is also commonly thought that morality is necessarily and universally normative, i.e., that moral reasons are reasons for any possible moral agent. Taking these commonplaces for granted, I argue for a novel view of moral normativity. I challenge the standard view that moral reasons are reasons to act. I suggest that moral reasons are reasons for having (...)
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  • John Cook Wilson.Mathieu Marion - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    John Cook Wilson (1849–1915) was Wykeham Professor of Logic at New College, Oxford and the founder of ‘Oxford Realism’, a philosophical movement that flourished at Oxford during the first decades of the 20th century. Although trained as a classicist and a mathematician, his most important contribution was to the theory of knowledge, where he argued that knowledge is factive and not definable in terms of belief, and he criticized ‘hybrid’ and ‘externalist’ accounts. He also argued for direct realism in perception, (...)
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  • First-personal authority and the normativity of rationality.Christian Coons & David Faraci - 2010 - Philosophia 38 (4):733-740.
    In “Vindicating the Normativity of Rationality,” Nicholas Southwood proposes that rational requirements are best understood as demands of one’s “first-personal standpoint.” Southwood argues that this view can “explain the normativity or reason-giving force” of rationality by showing that they “are the kinds of thing that are, by their very nature, normative.” We argue that the proposal fails on three counts: First, we explain why demands of one’s first-personal standpoint cannot be both reason-giving and resemble requirements of rationality. Second, the proposal (...)
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  • The majesty of reason.Simon Blackburn - 2010 - Philosophy 85 (1):5-27.
    In this paper I contemplate two phenomena that have impressed theorists concerned with the domain of reasons and of what is now called ‘normativity’. One is the much-discussed ‘externality’ of reasons. According to this, reasons are just there, anyway. They exist whether or not agents take any notice of them. They do not only exist in the light of contingent desires or mere inclinations. They are ‘external’ not ‘internal’. They bear on us, even when through ignorance or wickedness we take (...)
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  • Sobel on Pleasure, Reason, and Desire.Attila Tanyi - 2011 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 14 (1):101-115.
    The paper begins with a well-known objection to the idea that reasons for action are provided by desires. The objection holds that since desires are based on reasons (first premise), which they transmit but to which they cannot add (second premise), they cannot themselves provide reasons for action. In the paper I investigate an attack that has recently been launched against the first premise of the argument by David Sobel. Sobel invokes a counterexample: hedonic desires, i.e. the likings and dislikings (...)
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  • Public health ethics and liberalism.Lubomira V. Radoilska - 2009 - Public Health Ethics 2 (2):135-145.
    This paper defends a distinctly liberal approach to public health ethics and replies to possible objections. In particular, I look at a set of recent proposals aiming to revise and expand liberalism in light of public health's rationale and epidemiological findings. I argue that they fail to provide a sociologically informed version of liberalism. Instead, they rest on an implicit normative premise about the value of health, which I show to be invalid. I then make explicit the unobvious, republican background (...)
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  • A new argument for evidentialism?Masahiro Yamada - 2010 - Philosophia 38 (2):399-404.
    In his “A new argument for evidentialism” (Shah, Philos Q 56(225): 481–498, 2006 ), Nishi Shah argues that the best explanation of a feature of deliberation whether to believe that p which he calls transparency entails that only evidence can be reason to believe that p. I show that his argument fails because a crucial lemma that his argument appeals to cannot be supported without assuming evidentialism to be true in the first place.
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  • Two Accounts of the Normativity of Rationality.Jonathan Way - 2009 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 4 (1):1-9.
    Recent views of reasons and rationality make it plausible that it can sometimes be rational to do what you have no reason to do. A number of writers have concluded that if this is so, rationality is not normative. But this is a mistake. Even if we assume a tight connection between reasons and normativity, the normativity of rationality does not require that there is always reason to be rational. The first half of this paper illustrates this point with reference (...)
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  • (1 other version)Minding the Gap: Bernard Williams and David Hume on Living an Ethical Life.Sagar Paul - 2014 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 11 (5):615-638.
    Bernard Williams is frequently supposed to be an ethical Humean, due especially to his work on ‘internal’ reasons. In fact Williams’s work after his famous article ‘Internal and External Reasons’ constitutes a profound shift away from Hume’s ethical outlook. Whereas Hume offered a reconciling project whereby our ethical practices could be self-validating without reference to external justificatory foundations, Williams’s later work was increasingly skeptical of any such possibility. I conclude by suggesting reasons for thinking Williams was correct, a finding which (...)
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  • (1 other version)Instrumental rationality.Ralph Wedgwood - 2011 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 6:280-309.
    Is there any distinctive aspect of rationality that deserves the label of “instrumental rationality”? Recently, Joseph Raz (2005) has argued that instrumental rationality is a “myth”. In this essay, I shall give some qualified support to Raz’s position: as I shall argue, many philosophers have indeed been seduced by certain myths about instrumental rationality. Nonetheless, Raz’s conclusion is too strong. Instrumental rationality is not itself a myth: there really is a distinctive aspect of rationality that deserves the label of “instrumental (...)
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  • Desires as additional reasons? The case of tie-breaking.Attila Tanyi - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 152 (2):209-227.
    According to the Desire-Based Reasons Model reasons for action are provided by desires. Many, however, are critical about the Model holding an alternative view of practical reason, which is often called valued-based. In this paper I consider one particular attempt to refute the Model, which advocates of the valued-based view often appeal to: the idea of reason-based desires. The argument is built up from two premises. The first claims that desires are states that we have reason to have. The second (...)
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  • Knowing what one wants.Krista Lawlor - 2009 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 79 (1):47-75.
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  • Rationalist restrictions and external reasons.Matthew S. Bedke - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 151 (1):39 - 57.
    Historically, the most persuasive argument against external reasons proceeds through a rationalist restriction: For all agents A, and all actions Φ, there is a reason for A to Φ only if Φing is rationally accessible from A's actual motivational states. Here I distinguish conceptions of rationality, show which one the internalist must rely on to argue against external reasons, and argue that a rationalist restriction that features that conception of rationality is extremely implausible. Other conceptions of rationality can render the (...)
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  • Motivation.John Broome - 2009 - Theoria 75 (2):79-99.
    I develop a scheme for the explanation of rational action. I start from a scheme that may be attributed to Thomas Nagel in The Possibility of Altruism , and develop it step by step to arrive at a sharper and more accurate scheme. The development includes a progressive refinement of the notion of motivation. I end by explaining the role of reasoning within the scheme.
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  • Subjectivism and idealization.David Sobel - 2009 - Ethics 119 (2):336-352.
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  • Decisions, Reasons and Rationality.Garrett Cullity - 2008 - Ethics 119 (1):57-95.
    What difference do our decisions make to our reasons for action and the rationality of our actions? There are two questions here, and good grounds for answering them differently. However, it still makes sense to discuss them together. By thinking about the relationships that reasons and rationality bear to decisions, we may be able to cast light on the relationship that reasons and rationality bear to each other.
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  • Is there a nexus between reasons and rationality?Michael Smith - 2007 - Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 94 (1):279-298.
    When we say that a subject has attitudes that she is rationally required to have, does that entail that she has those attitudes for reasons? In other words, is there a deep nexus between being rational and responding to reasons? Many have argued that there is. For example, Derek Parfit tells us that 'to be rational is to respond to reasons '. But I am not so sure. I begin by considering this question in the domain of theoretical rationality. The (...)
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  • Practical reason, value and action.Alison Hills - 2007 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 4 (3):375-392.
    How should we decide which theory of practical reason is correct? One possibility is to link each conception of practical reason with a theory of value, and to assess the first in combination with the second. Recently some philosophers have taken a different approach. They have tried to link theories of practical reason with theories of action instead. I try to show that it can be illuminating to think of practical reason in terms of the success conditions of action, but (...)
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  • Moral coherence, moral worth and explanations of moral motivation.Aristophanes Koutoungos - 2005 - Acta Analytica 20 (3):59-79.
    Moral internalism and moral externalism compete over the best explanation of the link between judgment and relevant motivation but, it is argued, they differ at best only verbally. The internalist rational-conceptual nature of the link’ as accounted by M. Smith in The Moral Problem is contrasted to the externalist, also rational, link that requires in addition support from the agent’s psychological-dispositional profile; the internalist link, however, is found to depend crucially on a, similarly to the externalist, psychologically ‘loaded’ profile. It (...)
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  • Internal reasons and the ought-implies-can principle.Jonny Anomaly - 2008 - Philosophical Forum 39 (4):469-483.
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  • (2 other versions)The Humean theory of reasons.Mark Schroeder - 2007 - In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Volume 2. Oxford University Press UK. pp. 195--219.
    This paper offers a simple and novel motivation for the Humean Theory of Reasons. According to the Humean Theory of Reasons, all reasons must be explained by some psychological state of the agent for whom they are reasons, such as a desire. This view is commonly thought¹ to be motivated by a substantive theory about the power of reasons to motivate known as reason internalism, and a substantive theory about the possibility of being motivated without a desire known as the (...)
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  • Reasons for Action.Pamela Hieronymi - 2011 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 111 (3pt3):407-427.
    Donald Davidson opens ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’ by asking, ‘What is the relation between a reason and an action when the reason explains the action by giving the agent's reason for doing what he did?’ His answer has generated some confusion about reasons for action and made for some difficulty in understanding the place for the agent's own reasons for acting, in the explanation of an action. I offer here a different account of the explanation of action, one that, though (...)
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  • (1 other version)Practical Reasons and Moral 'Ought'.Patricia Greenspan - 2007 - In Russell Schafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. II. pp. 172-194.
    Morality is a source of reasons for action, what philosophers call practical reasons. Kantians say that it ‘gives’ reasons to everyone. We can even think of moral requirements as amounting to particularly strong or stringent reasons, in an effort to demystify deontological views like Kant’s, with its insistence on inescapable or ‘binding’ moral requirements or ‘oughts.’¹ When we say that someone morally ought not to harm others, perhaps all we are saying is that he has a certain kind of reason (...)
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  • Interpreting Anscombe’s Intention §32FF.Anne Newstead - 2009 - Journal of Philosophical Research 34:157-176.
    G. E. M. Anscombe’s view that agents know what they are doing “without observation” has been met with skepticism and the charge of confusion and falsehood. Simultaneously, some commentators think that Anscombe has captured an important truth about the first-personal character of an agent’s awareness of her actions. This paper attempts an explanation and vindication of Anscombe’s view. The key to the vindication lies in focusing on the role of practical knowledge in an agent’s knowledge of her actions. Few commentators, (...)
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