Keshav Singh

Like many other world religious and spiritual traditions, the Sikh tradition is philosophically rich. However, its contributions have been wholly unrepresented in Western analytic philosophy. The goal of this Element is to present a central aspect of Sikh philosophy, its ethics, by using the tools and methods of analytic philosophy to reconstruct it in a form that is understandable to Western audiences, while still accurately capturing its unique and autochthonous features. On the interpretation of Sikh ethics this Element presents, the Sikh ethical theory understands ethics in terms of truthful living – in particular, living in a way that is true to the fundamental Oneness of all existence. Features of the Sikh ethical theory discussed include its account of vice and virtue, its account of right conduct, and the philosophical relationship between ethical theory and practice. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

There are myriad cases where holding a particular belief would be of purely practical value to the believer. All such cases provide putative examples of practical reasons for belief, but there is extensive debate over whether such reasons truly exist. The goal of this paper is to make progress in the debate over practical reasons for belief by reframing it around a different question: are practical reasons for belief authoritatively normative? It is argued that the answer is no–in this sense, practical reasons for belief are normatively impotent. This is because practical reasons for belief cannot bear on the deliberative ought–the sense of ought connected to normative authority. Practical reasons for belief can only bear on the evaluative ought–the sense of ought connected to what would be ideal. As such, believers are not accountable for bringing practical reasons to bear in doxastic deliberation. If this view is right, it is contended, anti-pragmatists can preserve what matters to them even while granting the existence of practical reasons for belief.

Despite many disagreements, contemporary theorists of rationality largely agree that substantive rationality is to be understood in terms of correctly responding to reasons. While recent literature focuses on questions about the relationship between substantive and structural rationality, or which kinds of normative reasons are involved in substantive rationality, comparatively little attention has been paid to the question of what it is to correctly respond to reasons. Recent dispositionalist accounts of correctly responding to reasons mark an exception to this trend. In this paper, I argue that dispositionalist accounts make a crucial mistake in eschewing an essential role for the agent’s first-personal normative outlook. As a result, they cannot make sense of the fact that rational evaluation is a form of credit or criticism. I conclude that a successful account of correctly responding to reasons must capture the agent’s first-personal normative outlook as an indispensable component of rational evaluability.

It is now standard to distinguish between two kinds of rationality: substantive rationality, which consists in holding attitudes that are substantively reasonable or justified, and structural rationality, which consists in holding attitudes that fit together in the right ways. What, if anything, unifies these two kinds of rationality? In this paper, I propose that norms of rationality arise because we are epistemically limited beings who cannot directly ensure the correctness of our attitudes. Substantive and structural rationality represent two different ways of manifesting a fundamental commitment to getting things correct, given our epistemic limitations. Correspondingly, substantive and structural irrationality are distinct rational failures. Substantively irrational attitudes involve a failure to live up to the commitments that constitute those attitudes. Structurally irrational combinations of attitudes are constituted by inconsistent commitments, which guarantees that we will fail to live up to at least some of our commitments in holding these attitudes.

Both actions and beliefs are subject to normative evaluation as rational or irrational. As such, we might expect there to be some general, unified story about what makes them rational. However, orthodox approaches suggest that the rationality of action is determined by practical considerations, while the rationality of belief is determined by properly epistemic considerations. This apparent disunity leads some, like Rinard (2019), to reject orthodox theories of the rationality of belief in favor of pragmatism. In this paper, I argue we should reject pragmatist approaches to unifying the rationality of action and belief. Instead, I argue, we should embrace a correctness‐based view of rationality, on which rationality is fundamentally about getting things correct as best we can, given our epistemic limitations. On such a view, the facts about rational action and belief are a function of the facts about correct action and belief. I contend that the apparent disunity of orthodox theories is created by the fact that action and belief have different correctness conditions. Nevertheless, on the correctness‐based view, this disunity is merely apparent. This renders pragmatism's revisionary implications for the rationality of belief unnecessary to take on in order unify it with the rationality of action.

In this commentary, I raise a few questions about Schmidt’s argument against (R-E): whether facts about incoherence are directly reasons for suspension on particular propositions, as opposed to reasons against sets of attitudes; whether (R-E) should really be formulated in terms of a broad category of “doxastic attitudes” that includes transitional attitudes like suspension; and whether incoherence-based reasons really must fit into the category of “epistemic reasons,” as opposed to be a more general category of right-kind reasons. Though my questions reflect some skepticism about the specifics of Schmidt’s argument, I conclude that it succeeds in what I take to be its broader aim.

In this essay, I develop an account of belief as commitment to the truth of a proposition. On my account, to believe p is to represent p as true by way of committing to the truth of p. To commit to the truth of p, in the sense I am interested in, is to exercise the normative power to subject one’s representation of p as true to the normative standard of truth. As I argue, my account of belief as commitment of the truth explains a variety of features of belief that separate it from attitudes like acceptance, supposition, and imagination. Most importantly, it explains the distinctive connection between belief and evidence. Moreover, my account helps solve three further puzzles about belief, regarding doxastic voluntarism, the aim of belief, and Moore’s paradox.

Our concern in this paper lies with a common argument from racial discrimination to realism about races: some people are discriminated against for being members of a particular race (i.e., racial discrimination exists), so some people must be members of that race (i.e., races exist). Error theorists have long responded that we can explain racial discrimination in terms of racial attitudes alone, so we need not explain it in terms of race itself. But to date there has been little detailed discussion of whether it is better to explain racial discrimination in terms of race or in terms of racial attitudes alone. Our goal is to offer a novel and detailed argument in defense of explaining racial discrimination in terms of racial attitudes alone, by attending to the neglected phenomenon of misperception discrimination, which involves differential treatment due to misperceived race. We argue that the discriminatory action in misperception cases must be explained in the same way as cases where (according to the realist) the victim’s race is accurately perceived. Thus, the victim’s actual race cannot provide the best explanation. The main upshot of our argument is that explanatory arguments from racial discrimination to realism about race fail.

Metaethical constitutivists seek to ground normativity in facts about what is constitutive of agency. One strand of constitutivism locates the foundations of normativity in constitutive aims, which are standardly conceived of in teleological terms. I present three challenges that show that the teleological conception of constitutive aims is inadequate for the constitutivist project. I then sketch an alternative conception of constitutive aims in the form of a commitment-based conception. On the commitment-based conception, actions and attitudes constitutively represent their objects as having certain properties, and their constitutive aims are fixed by the accuracy-conditions of these representations. Because such representations constitutively involve a commitment on the part of the agent to the object’s having the relevant property, they generate authoritative norms for the agent. I conclude that, unlike the teleological conception, the commitment-based conception promises to yield a unified constitutivism that delivers authoritative normative standards for both actions and attitudes.

ABSTRACT In his ‘Rationality versus Normativity’, John Broome argues against the view that rationality is reducible to normativity. Broome’s argument rests on the claim that while rationality supervenes on the mind, normativity does not. In this commentary, I argue that Broome's arguments succeed only against views on which reasons and normativity are univocal. Once we admit of multiple kinds of normative reasons, some fact-given and others non-factive, a version of the reasons-responsiveness view emerges that is untouched by Broome's arguments. On such a view, rationality supervenes on non-factive reasons, not on fact-given ones, so rationality supervenes on a kind of normativity that supervenes on the mind. This shows that Broome has not refuted reasons-responsiveness views wholesale. Moreover, because Broome’s arguments do refute univocal versions of reasons-responsiveness views, they provide a justification for preferring non-univocal versions of reasons-responsiveness views to univocal ones.

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in analytic philosophy that engages with non-Western philosophical traditions, including South Asian religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. However, thus far, there has been no engagement with Sikhism, despite its status as a major world religion with a rich philosophical tradition. This paper is an attempt to get a start at analytic philosophical engagement with Sikh philosophy. My focus is on Sikh ethics, and in particular on the theory of vice and virtue that can be gleaned from Sikh scripture. According to this theory, the five major vices have a unified source in the vice of haumai. Haumai is a kind of false conception of oneself as singularly important, and correspondingly, a false conception of the world as revolving around oneself, as a world of objects there for one’s use. Vice, then, comes down to the failure to recognize the importance of others. The corresponding picture of virtue is that virtue consists in a recognition of the importance of others, through the recognition of an ultimate reality on which all are One. After reconstructing the Sikh theory of vice and virtue, I conclude with some comparative remarks on Sikh and Western ethics.

This chapter discusses some of Anscombe’s contributions to the philosophy of practical reason. It focuses particularly on Anscombe’s view of what it is to act for reasons. I begin by discussing the relationship between acting intentionally and acting for reasons in Anscombe's theory of action. I then further explicate her view by discussing her rejection of two related views about acting for reasons: causalism (the view that reasons are a kind of cause of actions) and psychologism (the view that reasons are mental states like desires and beliefs). In the process, I try to show that Anscombe’s rejection of these theses does not leave us with mystery, but rather sheds light on an interesting and serious heterodox view of acting for reasons. I conclude by suggesting that though Anscombe's views have been taken sufficiently seriously by philosophers of action, they should be taken more seriously by philosophers of practical reason.

This paper defends an account of moral worth. Moral worth is a status that some, but not all, morally right actions have. Unlike with merely right actions, when an agent performs a morally worthy action, she is necessarily creditworthy for doing the right thing. First, I argue that two dominant views of moral worth have been unable to fully capture this necessary connection. On one view, an action is morally worthy if and only if its agent is motivated by the features of the action that make it right. On the other, an action is morally worthy if and only if its agent is motivated by the action’s rightness itself. Neither of these views captures the connection between moral worth and creditworthiness, because each view leaves room for cases of accidentally doing the right thing. Next, I develop a new account, which I call the Guise of Moral Reasons Account. On my account, morally worthy actions are right actions that are motivated by moral reasons as such. This account rules out cases of accidentally doing the right thing, thus capturing the necessary connection between moral worth and creditworthiness for doing the right thing.

Susanna Rinard has recently offered a new argument for pragmatism and against evidentialism. According to Rinard, evidentialists must hold that the rationality of belief is determined in a way that is different from how the rationality of other states is determined. She argues that we should instead endorse a view she calls Equal Treatment, according to which the rationality of all states is determined in the same way. In this paper, I show that Rinard’s claims are mistaken, and that evidentialism is more theoretically virtuous than its opponents sometimes give it credit for. Not only does evidentialism not make an exception for belief, but it fits naturally into a unified, explanatorily powerful account of the rationality of intentional mental states. According to such an account, the rationality of all intentional mental states, including belief, is determined by the right kind of reasons for those states. Since the right kind of reasons for belief just are evidential considerations, this unified account entails evidentialism. I conclude, contra Rinard, that evidentialism can be situated within a general account of rationality that is at least as theoretically virtuous as pragmatism, if not more so.

In this paper, I defend an account of the reasons for which we act, believe, and so on for any Ф such that there can be reasons for which we Ф. Such reasons are standardly called motivating reasons. I argue that three dominant views of motivating reasons (psychologism, factualism and disjunctivism) all fail to capture the ordinary concept of a motivating reason. I show this by drawing out three constraints on what motivating reasons must be, and demonstrating how each view fails to satisfy at least one of these constraints. I then propose and defend my own account of motivating reasons, which I call the Guise of Normative Reasons Account. On the account I defend, motivating reasons are propositions. A proposition is the reason for which someone Ф‐s when (a) she represents that proposition as a normative reason to Ф, and (b) her representation explains, in the right way, her Ф‐ing. As I argue, the Guise of Normative Reasons Account satisfies all three constraints on what motivating reasons must be, and weathers several objections that might be leveled against propositionalist views.