Sigrun Svavarsdottir

This chapter defends the thesis that an agent can display more or less rationality in selecting ends, even final ends, against the background of a conception of practical rationality as an excellence in the exercise of cognitive capacities in one’s practical endeavors. It moreover argues that Humeans and anti-Humeans alike should accept this conclusion, while refocusing their disagreement on the question of whether excellence in the exercise of cognitive capacities in one’s practical endeavors invariably yields a configuration of attitudes which precludes that some specific kinds of ends make good sense to the agent, so that having these kinds of ends is a sure sign of irrationality. By way of preliminaries, the chapter also offers a new (partial) account of ends and motivates the cognitive excellence conception of practical rationality in preference to conceptions of practical rationality as responsiveness to normative reasons or as coherence of attitudes and actions.

Some philosophers, working on the nature of personal integrity, have thought it noteworthy that “integrity” has its etymological roots in a Latin word meaning _one_ or _a whole_, and they have construed the integrity of a person and the integration of the self as one and the same phenomenon. The chapter challenges this view, arguing that coherence of attitudes, while crucial to the integration of the self, is not crucial to personal integrity. The chapter includes a close examination of the notion of coherence of attitudes, including an examination of how coherence is affected by hierarchical relations between first-order and second-order desires. It also examines how evaluations of integrity take into account that we are reflective agents: agents that have awareness of themselves and their own states of mind, that have attitudes towards their own attitudes, and that exercise some regulative control over their attitudes.

This chapter advances a judgment externalist explanation of the close connection that is drawn between value judgment and motivation. The explanation relies on the thesis that the canonical method for ascertaining that something has value is to get clear on what the object is like and see whether one either values it for its own sake or at least empathizes with those who do, where valuing is a conative attitude distinct from the attitude of judging to have value. This thesis is defended against several objections, including objections that Mark Johnston has raised against a similar characterization of the canonical method of value inquiry offered by David Lewis.

This chapter works from the guiding idea that rationality is the excellence of a rational agent qua rational, and goes on to defend a neo-Humean conception of evaluations of theoretical and practical rationality, according to which such evaluations make essential reference to an agent's ends or goals in assessing the rationality of the agent's beliefs, actions, and intentions. Evaluations of theoretical and practical rationality differ according to the types of goals relative to which we make evaluations of rationality. This view is defended appealing to intuitions about irrationality with respect to particular cases, which are best explained by the neo-Humean; a defence which is neutral with regard to metaphysical issues about the nature of reasons. This defence is admittedly partial because it does not fully address questions about the justificatory force of rationality evaluations, leaving important tasks for the neo-Humean to tackle.

This chapter defends the thesis that an agent can display more or less rationality in selecting ends, even final ends, against the background of a conception of practical rationality as an excellence in the exercise of cognitive capacities in one’s practical endeavors. It moreover argues that Humeans and anti-Humeans alike should accept this conclusion, while refocusing their disagreement on the question of whether excellence in the exercise of cognitive capacities in one’s practical endeavors invariably yields a configuration of attitudes which precludes that some specific kinds of ends make good sense to the agent, so that having these kinds of ends is a sure sign of irrationality. By way of preliminaries, the chapter also offers a new account of ends and motivates the cognitive excellence conception of practical rationality in preference to conceptions of practical rationality as responsiveness to normative reasons or as coherence of attitudes and actions.

The impact moral judgments have on our deliberations and actions seems to vary a great deal. Moral judgments play a large part in the lives of some people, who are apt not only to make them, but also to be guided by them in the sense that they tend to pursue what they judge to be of moral value, and shun what they judge to be of moral disvalue. But it seems unrealistic to claim that moral judgments play a pervasive role in the lives of all or even most people. There are considerable variations in how strong a tendency people have to think in moral terms, and in how such thoughts affect their decisions and actions. For every moral hero who single- mindedly pursues moral values, there are thousands of less com- mitted people who only do so when it does not cost them too much in material comfort, personal relations, or social standing. And of course, what counts as too much varies from person to person. On top of such variations, there are those who consistently display mor- al indifference-people who concede, for example, that certain investment policies have morally problematic consequences, but who can readily and without compunction ignore that in their busi- ness decisions. There even seem to be moral subversives, people who intentionally and knowingly pursue what they acknourledge to be morally u~ong or bad, and do so for that very reason

This paper focuses on value as ascribed to what can be desired, enjoyed, cherished, admired, loved, and so on: value that putatively serves as ground for evaluating such attitudes and for justifying conduct. The main question of the paper is whether such value ascriptions are property ascriptions as traditional cognitivism claims. The paper makes the case that although the linguistic evidence favors traditional cognitivism over non-cognitivism about evaluative language, the main tenet of cognitivism is best restated as the thesis that evaluative terms are linguistically encoded classificatory devices. This opens up the theoretical possibility, for even inflationists about properties, to embrace cognitivism without inviting any metaphysical worries about the properties ascribed in evaluative language.

This paper explores the relationship between the ascription of value to an object and an assessment of conative attitudes taken towards that object. It argues that this relationship is captured by an a priori necessary truth that falls out of the mastery conditions for the concept of value: what has value is worth valuing, when valuing is understood to be a relatively stable conative attitude distinct from judging valuable. What kind of assessment of attitude is at stake? How are we to understand the worth-relation that holds between an object and the attitude? It is argued that deontological, evaluative and alethic eluciations of the worth-relation are wrongheaded. We should be looking for a mind-world relation that marks a success in how the emotional and motivational energies integral to valuing are directed: a success that does not consist in meeting a deontic requirement, in exemplifying value, or in representing truly

Practical rationality is best regarded as a virtue: an excellence in the exercise of one’s cognitive capacities in one’s practical endeavors. The author develops this idea so as to yield a Humean conception of practical rationality. Nevertheless, one of the crucial features of the approach is not distinctively Humean and sets it apart from the most familiar neo‐Humean approaches: an agent’s practical rationality has to do with the presence and form of his cognitive activity, as well as with how it engages his emotional and motivational states, rather than with the impact that his actions have on his utility or with how his actions relate to his expected utility. The approach also contrasts with full‐information accounts of rationality. The paper ends with a discussion of our interest in operating with the conception of practical rationality that emerges from this approach, even if it is so demanding that it would be humanly impossible to be perfectly practically rational.