Michael Smith

Some contemporary theories treat phenomena like weakness of will, compulsion and wantonness as practical failures but not as failures of rationality: say, as failures of autonomy or whatever. Other current theories-the majority see the phenomena as failures of rationality but not as distinctively practical failures. They depict them as always involving a theoretical deficiency: a sort of ignorance, error, inattention or illogic. They represent them as failures which are on a par with breakdowns of theoretical reason; the failures may not have exact theoretical analogues, exact analogues in the breakdown of belief, but they are of essentially the same, cognitive kind. Our approach gives us quite a different view of things. The pathologies which we identify in our taxonomy are distinctively rational failures and distinctively practical failures; they are failures of pure practical reason.

Granted that desire is always present in the genesis of human action, is it something on the presence of which the agent always reflects? I may act on a belief without coming to recognize that I have the belief. Can I act on a desire without recognizing that I have the desire? In particular, can the desire have a motivational presence in my decision making, figuring in the background, as it were, without appearing in the content of my deliberation, in the foreground? We argue, perhaps unsurprisingly, that yes, desire can figure in the background without figuring in the foreground: we call this the strict background view of desire. But we then show, and this is where the surprise comes, that the strict background view of desire has significant implications for contemporary moral philosophy.

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.

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.

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

Much work in recent moral psychology attempts to spell out what it is for a desire to be an agent’s own, or, as it is often put, what it means for an agent to be identified with certain of her desires rather than others. The aim of such work varies. Some suggest that an account of what it is for a desire to be an agent’s own provides us with an account of what it is for an agent to value something. Others suggest that an account of what it is for a desire to be an agent’s own tells us what it is for an agent to be free or autonomous.

The ' state of nature ' could be understood in two senses; both in terms of its nature 's current condition and of that unmediated and pre-contractual relation between humanity and the environment posited by political philosophers like Locke and Rousseau and now championed by anarcho- primitivism. Primitivism is easily dismissed as an extreme, naïve and impractical form of radical environmentalism but its emergence signifies contemporary disaffection with the ideology of 'progress' so central to modernity and capitalism. This paper offers an ethico-political interpretation of primitivism 's critical relation to modernity in terms of the dialectic between amorality and immorality within what is characterised as modernity's ' culture of contamination '.

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.

According to the standard story of action, a story that can be traced back at least to David Hume , actions are those bodily movements that are caused and rationalized by a pair of mental states: a desire for some end, where ends can be thought of as ways the world could be, and a belief that something the agent can just do, namely, move her body in the way to be explained, has some suitable chance of making the world the relevant way. Bodily movements that occur otherwise aren't actions, they are mere happenings

We ordinarily suppose that there is a difference between having and failing to exercise a rational capacity on the one hand, and lacking a rational capacity altogether on the other. This is crucial for our allocations of responsibility. Someone who has but fails to exercise a capacity is responsible for their failure to exercise their capacity, whereas someone who lacks a capacity altogether is not. However, as Gary Watson pointed out in his seminal essay ’Skepticism about Weakness of Will’, the idea of an unexercised capacity is much more difficult to make sense of than it initially appears. The aim of ’Rational Capacities’ is to provide the needed explication of this idea.

In On What Matters Derek Parfit argues that facts about reasons for action are grounded in facts about values and against the view that they are grounded in facts about the desires that subjects would have after fully informed and rational deliberation. I describe and evaluate Parfit's arguments for this value-based conception of reasons for action and find them wanting. I also assess his response to Sidgwick's suggestion that there is a Dualism of Practical Reason. Parfit seems not to notice that his preferred value-based conception of reasons for action augurs strongly in favour of a view like Sidgwick's. 1.

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.

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.

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. …

Simon Blackburn attempts to answer these questions in the early part of his wonderful new book Ruling Passions (Blackburn 1998). Unsurprisingly, despite my admiration for his book, I think he fails to identify a special feature of desires and aversions that makes them especially suitable for expression in normative claims. For all that he says the desires and aversions he picks out are much like the addict’s desire to take drugs. There are revisions Blackburn could make which would make his account more plausible. However, if he were to make these revisions, then he might just as well abandon his non-cognitivism in favor of a version of non-cognitivism’s close cognitivist cousin: subjectivism.