Mike Smith

According to Bernard Williams, all reasons for action are what he calls ‘internal reasons’, where an agent has an internal reason to act in some way just in case she would be motivated to act in that way if she were to deliberate correctly. Though Williams is supposed to have an anti-rationalist conception of what it is to deliberate correctly, his official account includes separate roles for knowledge and the imagination. An agent would desire something if he were to deliberate correctly, according to Williams, only if he would desire that thing if he knew all the relevant facts and only if he were to fully and accurately imagine what it would be like for that thing to obtain. This provides us with a puzzle, as rationalist accounts of deliberation can be understood as assigning separate roles to knowledge and the imagination. Williams's official account of deliberation thus looks just like the rationalist's. Solving this puzzle requires us to get clearer about what it means to deliberate correctly and about the differences between rationalist and anti-rationalist accounts of desire.

Can we draw substantive conclusions about the reasons for action agents have from premisses about the desires of their idealized counterparts? The answer is that we can. The argument for this conclusion is Rawlsian in spirit, focusing on the choices that our idealized counterparts must make simply in virtue of being ideal, and inferring from these choices the contents of the desires that they must have. It turns out that our idealized counterparts must have desires in which we ourselves figure as both agents and patients, and in which others must figure too, though only as patients.

The requirements of instrumental rationality are often thought to be normative conditions on choice or intention, but this is a mistake. Instrumental rationality is best understood as a requirement of coherence on an agent's non-instrumental desires and means-end beliefs. Since only a subset of an agent's means-end beliefs concern possible actions, the connection with intention is thus more oblique. This requirement of coherence can be satisfied either locally or more globally, it may be only one among a number of such requirements on an agent's total set of desires and beliefs, and it has no special connection with reasoning. An appreciation of these facts leads to a better understanding of both the nature and the significance of instrumental rationality.

Jonathan Dancy’s Practical Reality is, I think, best understood as an attempt to undermine our allegiance to these two purported constitutive claims about action. If we must think that psychological states figure in the explanation of action then, according to Dancy, we should suppose that those psychological states are beliefs rather than desire-belief pairs. Dancy thus prefers pure cognitivism to Humeanism. But in fact he thinks that we have no business accepting any form of psychologism in the first place; no business accepting a theory that explains an agent’s actions by reference to that agent’s psychological states. For though it is indeed a truism that actions are explained by reasons, Dancy argues that psychological states are only rarely, if ever, reasons. He thus prefers the unadorned normative story, a story which contents itself with explaining actions by laying out the considerations in the light of which the agent acted as he did, to any form of psychologism. I will consider Dancy’s arguments for these claims in turn.

Reason and Value collects fifteen brand-new papers by leading contemporary philosophers on themes from the moral philosophy of Joseph Raz. The subtlety and power of Raz's reflections on ethical topics - including especially his explorations of the connections between practical reason and the theory of value - make his writings a fertile source for anyone working in this area. The volume honours Raz's accomplishments in the area of ethical theorizing, and will contribute to an enhanced appreciation of the significance of his work for the subject.

Michael Smith has written a series of seminal essays about the nature of belief and desire, the status of normative judgment, and the relevance of the views we take on both these topics to the accounts we give of our nature as free and responsible agents. This long awaited collection comprises some of the most influential of Smith's essays. Among the topics covered are: the Humean theory of motivating reasons, the nature of normative reasons, Williams and Korsgaard on internal and external reasons, the nature of self-control, weakness of will, compulsion, freedom, responsibility, the analysis of our rational capacities, moral realism, the dispositional theory of value, the supervenience of the normative on the non-normative, the error theory, rationalist treatments of moral judgment, the practicality requirement on moral judgment and non-cognivist. This collection will be of interest to students in philosophy and psychology.

The Sources of Normativity is an ambitious and demanding book. It is impossible to do full justice to The Sources of Normativity in a review essay such as this. I shall therefore concentrate on Korsgaard’s partisan goal: her defence of a Kantian view about the sources of normativity. It was evidently this part that most excited the commentators when they first heard Korsgaard deliver her Tanner Lectures. I suspect it is the part of the book that will most excite the general reader as well. Certainly it was the part that most intrigued me.

Kieran Setiya begins Reasons Without Rationalism by outlining and arguing for a schema in terms of which he thinks we best understand the nature of normative reasons for action. This is: " Reasons: The fact that p is a reason for A to ϕ just in case A has a collection of psychological states, C, such that the disposition to be moved to ϕ by C-and-the-belief-that-p is a good disposition of practical thought, and C contains no false beliefs. " As Setiya points out, Reasons contrasts with both the ‘advice’ model of normative reasons , which is the view that I myself prefer , and the ‘imitative’ model , preferred by the likes of McDowell .The intuitive idea behind Reasons should be clear enough. Insofar as normative reasons are normative, they are considerations that would justify an agent's acting in a certain way in certain circumstances: there is, thus, a justificatory dimension. But insofar as they are reasons, they are considerations on which the agent might act in those very circumstances: there is thus an explanatory dimension as well. Part of the attraction of Reasons is that it tells us why the considerations that are normative reasons have these two features: a consideration is a normative reason only if, given other things that the agent believes and desires, the disposition to be moved by a belief concerning that consideration is itself a good disposition of practical thought .Reasons is, however, just a schema. …

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 question in this domain is whether, when a subject has the beliefs that she is required to have by the norms of theoretical rationality, she is responding to reasons that there are for having those beliefs. Armed with a moderately clear answer to this question in the theoretical domain, I consider their relationship in the practical domain. When a subject has the desires that she is required to have by the norms of practical rationality, is she responding to reasons that there are for having those desires? Part of the interest of these questions lies in improving our understanding of reasons for action. I will say a little about this towards the end

On one influential view, a person acts autonomously, doing what she genuinely values, if she acts on a desire that is her own, which is (on this account) a matter of it being appropriately ratified at a higher level. This view faces two problems. It doesn’t generalize, as it should, to an account of when a belief is an agent’s own, and does not let one distinguish between desires (and beliefs) happening to be one's own and their being the ones a person would need to have in order to be autonomous. The paper develops an alternative unified account of what it is for desires and beliefs to be one’s one, and argues that an account of acting autonomously should pay attention not to which desires and beliefs are one’s own, but to whether they are ones the agent has reason to have and to act on.

On one influential view, a person acts autonomously, doing what she genuinely values, if she acts on a desire that is her own, which is (on this account) a matter of it being appropriately ratified at a higher level. This view faces two problems. It doesn’t generalize, as it should, to an account of when a belief is an agent’s own and does not let one distinguish between desires (and beliefs) happening to be one’s own and their being the ones a person would need to have to be autonomous. The paper develops an alternative unified account of what it is for desires and beliefs to be one’s one and argues that an account of acting autonomously should pay attention not to which desires and beliefs are one’s own but to whether they are ones the agent has reason to have and to act on.

This paper considers the conception of leadership and management found in the UK government’s school leadership initiative. It contrasts earlier ‘scientific’ theory with the more recent ‘humanistic’ theory on which the initiative appears to be based, and finds that they share significant features and flaws. Moreover, despite the moral tone of the new initiative, it finds on examination that it is based on an emotivist theory of ethics that in practice may require the headteacher to be manipulative in her leadership and management of the school. Finally, it outlines an alternative conception of leadership.

Managerialism has changed the nature of the curriculum and imposed upon us new conceptions of the teacher and teaching. In this paper a brief outline and critique of it are provided and its reductionist effects noted. Against this managerialism a conception of the school as an educational community is developed, based on Oakeshott's work. From within this conception a critique of planned or utopian change is mounted and a concept of incremental change outlined. At the same time a concept of teacher autonomy is elaborated which is in contrast to rational autonomy but which restores a voluntaristic role to teachers.

The five essays in Part III of Philip Pettit’s Rules, Reasons and Norms are a brilliant blend of normative and empirical concerns. Their starting point is the distinction between two sorts of question we can ask about institutions. Institution arrangements bring about certain outcomes: they foster attitudes, cement relationships, and provide certain people with benefits and others with burdens. One question we can ask concerns the justification of institutions; the other concerns the feasibility of institutions, relative to some outcome. Let me begin by explaining the distinction. I will then say a little about the use Pettit makes of it in his essays.