Abstract
In his important recent book Schroeder proposes a Humean theory of reasons that he calls hypotheticalism. His rigourous account of the weight of reasons is crucial to his theory, both as an element of the theory and constituting his defence to powerful standard objections to Humean theories of reasons. In this paper I examine that rigourous account and show it to face problems of vacuity and consonance. There are technical resources that may be brought to bear on the problem of vacuity but implementation is not simple and philosophical motivation a further difficulty. Even supposing vacuity is fixed, the problems of consonance bring to light a different obstruction lying in Schroeder’s path. There is a difference between the general weighing of reasons and the context specificity of the correct placing of weight on them in deliberation and this difference cannot be fixed by the resources in the account. For these reasons we are still waiting for a plausible Humean theory of reasons.
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Notes
I’m indicating in brackets where these prongs are particularly prominent but they also feature in other chapters.
See also Russell (1918), p. 179 ff. for discussion on these points.
Schroeder uses the words ‘yields’ and ‘predicts’ and we will discuss this later.
Although Schroeder doesn’t state this explicitly he confirms in a communication as a referee of this paper that this is the natural thing to say.
In terms of the formal model we are about to look at we would get this: A reason, 〈r, x, a〉, has weight just in case there exist Q, V ∈ S S such that 〈r, x, a〉 ∉ Q ∪ V and [(Q ≻ V and (Q ⊕ 〈r,x,a〉 ⊁ V or Q⊁ V ⊕ 〈r,x,a〉 or Q ⊕ 〈r,x,a〉 ⊁ V ⊕ 〈r,x,a〉)) or (Q ⊁ V and (Q ⊕ 〈r,x,a〉 ≻ V or Q ≻ V ⊕ 〈r,x,a〉 or Q ⊕ 〈r,x,a〉 ≻ V ⊕ 〈r,x,a〉))].
e.g. Schroeder accepts that if R is a reason to Φ then the existential fact of there being that reason to Φ is itself a reason to Φ but obviously adding the two together doesn’t increase the weight of reasons to Φ.
These lower case letters are presumably a typo since Schroeder is using upper case for variables, but it is in line with the notation we’ll be using in place of his.
It might be thought that ∅ shouldn’t be a member of S S but Schroeder’s definition of S S entails it and his recursive definition of the weightier-than relation requires it to be so. I believe any problems can be technically ironed out but as is evident here, it’s presence complicates the partitions.
As you can see Schroeder uses R for a set of reasons when he has already used that to stand for a reason, and uses S for a set of reasons that is a subset of S as earlier defined. Later he uses ‘A’ for a set of reasons when earlier it stood for an action. For perspicuity throughout the discussion I shall generally correct these and other notational flaws, including his use of capital letters as variables, with the terminology already introduced.
S A is a set of reasons for doing act A and S ~A is a set of reasons for not doing act A.
I am using ‘d > e’ as the name of an act type.
I have extended our notation in a way that is, I hope, intuitive. W d>e >W d<e is the act of placing more weight on W d>e than on W d<e and W(W d>e > W d<e ) is the set of all the right kind of reasons to do so.
likely because the complexity that blocks comprehension rises by level rather than across ≻ at a single level.
By the generality of the weight of reasons I mean that any reasons may be weightier than any others. My reasons may be weightier than yours, my reasons to do one thing may be weightier than my reasons to do another and so on. This appears in Schroeder’s theory as allowing that any sets of reasons that are members of S S may be weightier than any other.
For example, cf. Dancy’s distinction between reasons and enabling conditions.
One might also take wrong kinds of reasons or motivating reasons as not reasons at all, as in the previous paragraph.
There is a bullet that could be bitten here, namely to say that it is correct to place some weight on any reason to do anything when deliberating about any other thing but this is at least strongly counter-intuitive.
That is to say, the difference between them is supposed to be only the difference between ‘an extensional thesis rather than an analysis’.
Schroeder’s S X,A is our T x,a but because the indices reduce the potential for confusion (unlike his earlier ambiguous use of S) I have kept his notation here.
It might be that because 〈r, Fred, a〉 are 〈r, me, a〉 are in S, r is a reason for both of us but that is beside the point, not least because that is not the general case and we are trying to allow for Fred’s reasons to be heavier than mine. In Schroeder’s theory that requires the set including 〈r, Fred, a〉 to have more weight placed on it that the set including 〈r, me, a〉.
I’m being a bit short here, but an example might be a general agent neutral reason for parents to look after their children and then because I am the parent of this child there is an agent neutral that I feed him but no agent neutral reasons of this kind that anyone else do.
Alternatively, you might take an agent neutral reason to do a to be the set {〈r, n, a〉:〈r, n, a〉∈S and ∀x ∈ X〈r, x, a〉∈ P x } but that is not going to help at all since it is not in S S and so can’t be a relatum of ≻.
In fact there is a problem with Right Kind of Reasons which manifests in the oddness of saying ‘the activity of doing that act’, something that gets said because the relativity of Right Kind of Reasons is restricted to a single act variable. It can be shown that this doesn’t work but the problem can be fixed by formulating it with both an act and an activity variable: The Right Kind of Reasons to do a certain act are reasons to do it shared by everyone engaged in a certain activity, such that the fact that they are engaged in that certain activity is sufficient to explain why these are reasons for them. Then this gives us Correct Deliberation: the correctness of placing more weight on D than on E is for the reasons to place more weight on D than on E that are shared by everyone deliberating to be heavier than the reasons not to do so that are shared by everyone so engaged, and for the fact they are deliberating to be sufficient to explain why those are reasons for them.
i.e. sets in P x,a for specific x and a.
i.e. sets in S S\∅, which is partitioned by each of {P x,a \∅: x ∈ X,a ∈ A}, {P x \∅: x ∈ X} and {P a \∅: a ∈ A} and which partitionings are the formal ground of the problems.
Schroeder questions whether ‘every adjustment would need to be motivated on Humean terms’ although agrees that one might be motivated to think this ‘by a reading of the somewhat aggressive dialectical posture of the book’ Schroeder (2012c).
References
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Acknowledgments
My thanks to the referees and to Simon Robertson for their very helpful comments.