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Defending the wide-scope approach to instrumental reason
Full text linkThe Wide-Scope approach to instrumental reason holds that the requirement to intend the necessary means to your ends should be understood as a requirement to either intend the means, or else not intend the end. In this paper I explain and defend a neglected version of this approach. I argue that three serious objections to Wide-Scope accounts turn on a certain assumption about the nature of the reasons that ground the Wide-Scope requirement. The version of the Wide- Scope approach defended here allows us to reject this assumption, and so defuse theobjection
A puzzle about enkratic reasoning
Full text linkEnkratic reasoning – reasoning from believing that you ought to do something to an intention to do that thing – seems good. But there is a puzzle about how it could be. Good reasoning preserves correctness, other things equal. But enkratic reasoning does not preserve correctness. This is because what you ought to do depends on your epistemic position, but what it is correct to intend does not. In this paper, I motivate these claims and thus show that there is a puzzle. I then argue that the best solution is to deny that correctness is always independent of your epistemic position. As I explain, a notable upshot is that a central epistemic norm directs us to believe, not simply what is true, but what we are in a position to know
Reasons as premises of good reasoning
Full text linkMany philosophers have been attracted to the view that normative reasons are premises of good reasoning – that for some consideration to be a normative reason to ? is for it to be the premise of good reasoning towards ?-ing. However, while this reasoning view is indeed attractive, it faces a problem accommodating outweighed reasons. In this paper, I argue that the standard solution to this problem is unsuccessful, and propose an alternative, which draws on the idea that good patterns of reasoning can be defeasible. I conclude by drawing out some implications of the resulting view for the debate over pragmatic reasons for belief and other attitudes and one influential form of reductionism about the normative
Review: Morality and the Emotions. Edited by Carla Bagnoli. (Oxford UP, 2011. Pp. vi + 304. Price £37.50.)
No full textTwo arguments for Evidentialism
Full text linkEvidentialism is the thesis that all reasons to believe p are evidence for p. Pragmatists hold that pragmatic considerations –incentives for believing –can also be reasons to believe. Nishi Shah, Thomas Kelly and others have argued for evidentialism on the grounds that incentives for belief fail a ‘reasoning constraint’ on reasons: roughly, reasons must be considerations we can reason from, but we cannot reason from incentives to belief. In the first half of the paper, I show that this argument fails: the claim that we cannot reason from incentives is either false or does not combine with the reasoning constraint to support evidentialism. However, the failure of this argument suggests an alternative route to evidentialism. Roughly, reasons must be premises of good reasoning, but it is not good reasoning to reason from incentives to belief. The second half of the paper develops and defends this argument for evidentialism
Weighing Reasons, edited by Errol Lord and Barry Maguire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, xi + 301pp. ISBN: 9780199315192, hb £34.99
No full textReview of Alex Worship, Fitting Things Together: Coherence and the Demands of Structural Rationality (OUP, 2021)
No full textHow Important Are Possessed Reasons?
Full text linkCentral to Errol Lord’s The Importance of Being Rational is the notion of a possessed (objective, normative) reason. For Lord, rationality is a matter of correctly responding to possessed reasons, what rationality requires and permits is that we react in ways that are appropriate given our possessed reasons, and we ought – full stop – to react in ways that are decisively supported by our possessed reasons. Thus for Lord, possessed (objective, normative) reasons are very important indeed. This paper raises some challenges about this picture. In §1, I offer objections to Lord’s accounts of rational requirements. In §2, I offer objections to a central argument for his view of what we ought to do. If successful, these objections suggest that possessed reasons are not as important as Lord thinks. In §3, I consider his account of possessed reasons itself
Rationality, instrumental
Full text linkThis is a short introductory article. I focus on three questions: What is instrumental rationality? What are the principles of instrumental rationality? Could instrumental rationality be all of practical rationality
Review of Practical Shape: A Theory of Practical Reasoning, by Jonathan Dancy (OUP, 2018)
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