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Why Is Instrumental Rationality Rational

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Troy Jollimore
Troy Jollimore*
Affiliation:
California State University, Chico, Chico, CA95929, USA
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Extract

It is relatively common for philosophers to doubt whether we have any reason to act as morality requires. But it is very difficult to find philosophers who are willing to doubt, in a similar way, the idea that we have reason to act as instrumental rationality requires; reason, that is, to take effective steps toward attaining the ends we have accepted as our own. The inference from the fact that a certain action is an effective means of satisfying an agent's ends to the conclusion that that agent has reason to perform that action is held by almost everyone to be, as it is sometimes said, automatic:once it is determined that the action in question bears the specified relation to one's goals, nothing more needs to be shown. But fewer philosophers are willing to grant that morality possesses this sort of automatic reason-giving force. Rather, it is quite commonly held that some additional consideration needs to be cited in order to show that an agent has reason to act as she is morally required. The fact that an action is morally required, claim those who adhere to this type of position, is not enough in itself.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , June 2005 , pp. 289 - 307
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2005

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References

1 The use of the word ‘automatic’ in this context is first found, so far as I am aware, in Foot, Philippa ‘Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives’Phüosophical Review 81 (1972) 305–16.Google Scholar

2 Versions of this argument can be found in Philippa Foot, ‘Hypothetical Imperatives’; Williams, Bernard ‘Internal and External Reasons,’ in his Moral Luck (New York: Cambridge University Press 1981);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Dreier, James ‘Humean Doubts about the Practical Justification of Morality,’ in Ethics and Practical Reason, Cullity, G. and Gaut, B. eds. (New York: Oxford University Press 1997).Google Scholar

3 Note that (IP) is very close, but not equivalent, to the principle Dreier calls M/E, or the ‘means/ends rule.’ According to Dreier, M/E states that ‘if you desire to ψ, and believe that by ϕ-ing you will ψ, then you ought to ϕ.’ (Dreier, ‘Humean Doubts,’ 93) Whereas M/E is stated in terms of desires, (IP) is stated in terms of goals. Given the broad Humean conception of desire, the difference in terminology seems to me insignificant.

4 Dreier, ‘Humean Doubts.’ See also Peter Railton, ‘On the Hypothetical and Non-Hypothetical in Reasoning About Belief and Action,’ also in Cullity & Gaut; and Hubin, Donald C. ‘Whaf s Special About Humeanism,’ Nous 33 (1999) 30–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Dreier calls his version the Tortoise argument, after Lewis Carroll's famous argument in ‘What the Tortoise said to Achilles,’ Mind 4 (1895) 278-80. The Theoretical Regress Argument, which is described in section III, is essentially identical to Carroll's argument.

5 Of course, the commitment need not be explicit. What is necessary is not that Ann must acknowledge (IP), but that she must be motivated to act as it requires.

6 Dreier does not use this terminology in describing M/E (see n. 3). But it seems to me to capture the Status he wants to grant to this principle, on the basis of the argument described.

7 This is, of course, the famous ‘Tortoise’ argument presented by Lewis Carroll. See n. 4.

8 Perhaps (2t) will strike some as implausible. Isn't it, it might be urged, really irrational in some strong sense to refuse to believe what science tells us there is good evidence for? So long, however, as ‘scientific evidence’ is not defined so broadly as to make this a tautology, the answer to this question must be no: it must be possible, at least in principle, rationally to doubt whether the sciences do in fact provide us with compelling evidence. One might, of course, regard the sciences as so convincing, and so well established, that it would be pure foolhardiness to refuse to accept their conclusions. But one might well regard the practical reasons provided by morality in just the same way. In either case, while the refusal to accept reasons of the designated sort might quite reasonably be considered unreasonable, it seems a Stretch to judge such a refusal to be irrational

9 John Broome (‘Are Intentions Reasons?’ in Morris, C. and Ripstein, A. eds., Practical Rationality and Preference: Essays for David Gauthier [New York: Cambridge University Press 2001]CrossRefGoogle Scholar) draws a related distinction; but rather than distinguish between subjective and objective reasons, he distinguishes between reasons and normative requirements. On his view, a person is normatively required to believe those Claims that logically follow from Claims she believes; but this does not necessarily mean that she has any actual reason to believe them (though he acknowledges that there is a misleading sense of the word ‘reason’ in which she may be said to have such reason).

10 Contra Broome (see n. 9).

11 Cf. Williams, ‘Internal and External Reasons,’ 102-3.

12 I would not want my reference to the beliefs ‘with which we start’ to suggest an overly simplistic picture of the process of belief formation. Belief formation is presumably best viewed not as a two-step process, but as one in which beliefs evolve over time, being subjected to successive applications of both deductive and inductive methods. The fundamental point is simply that purely formal methods can only work once they are given something to work on, and that some other sort of method is required to do this. (My thanks to the anonymous commentator who pointed out the need for this note.)

13 ‘At least somewhat’ because the fact that I desire something can itself be relevant to the question of whether I have objective reason to pursue it. An objective desirability view can recognize three types of objects: those that there is reason to pursue whether I desire them or not, those that there is no reason to pursue whether I desire them or not, and those that there is reason to pursue (and thus, to desire) only if I do in fact desire them.

14 For a good discussion of many of the issues connected with moral conflicts and moral pluralism see Stocker, Michael Plural and Conflicting Values (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1990).Google Scholar

15 Some powerful arguments against the traditional Humean view of desires as Providers of reasons can be found in Raz, Joseph ‘Incommensurability and Agency,’ in his Engaging Reason: On the Theory of Value and Action (New York: Oxford University Press 1999).Google Scholar

16 Hubin acknowledges this (‘What' s Special About Humeanism,’ 39). He does not, however, draw from this any skeptical conclusions about the force of the irrationality charge.

17 I would like to thank Talbot Brewer, Christian Coons, Elijah Millgram and three anonymous referees for comments and discussion that helped shape this paper.