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Two Ways of Explaining Actions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Jonathan Dancy
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Extract

In my Practical Reality I argued that the reasons for which we act are not to be conceived of as psychological states of ourselves, but as real (or maybe only supposed) states of the world. The main reason for saying this was that only thus can we make sense of the idea that it is possible to act for a good reason. The good reasons we have for doing this action rather than that one consist mainly of features of the situations in which we find ourselves; they do not consist in our believing certain things about those situations. For instance, the reason for my helping that person is that she is in trouble and I am the only person around. It is not that I believe both that she is in trouble and that I am the only person around. Give that the (good) reason to help is that she is in trouble etc., it must be possible for my reason for helping to be just that, if it is indeed possible for one to act for a good reason. In fact, this sort of thing must be the normal arrangement. The reasons why we act, therefore, that is, our reasons for doing what we do, are not standardly to be conceived as states of ourselves, but as features of our situations.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 55 , September 2004 , pp. 25 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2004

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References

1 Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.Google Scholar

2 I have expressed these in belief/desire terms, but it would have been equally possible to have written them purely cognitively. A could have been: S Φ's because S believes that p and S believes that it would be good to Φ if p.

3 For the contrast I am working with here to be effective, it is important that one should not seek to supplement B with some further clauses that would turn it back into the sort of causal explanation that ‘makes sense’.

4 As a card-carrying particularist, I would not myself accept this idea that norms necessarily rest on principles, but I go along with it here for the sake of argument.

5 A possible answer to this question is suggested in Broome's, John ‘Normative Requirements’, in Dancy, J. ed. Normativity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 78–99.Google Scholar

6 I argue this last point in more detail in Ch. 3 of my Practical Reality.

7 I owe this thought, and the need to respond to it, to Helen Steward.

8 I have here converted the desire to Φ if p into a belief that it would be good to Φ if p. I don't think that this conversion makes any difference to the point at issue (the relation between causal and normative explanations), even though it will seem to some to be an abandonment of Humeanism, properly conceived. I have argued elsewhere that a purely cognitive form of Humeanism in the theory of motivation is better than the familiar mixed belief/desire theory (Dancy, 1993, chs. 1–2; 2000, ch. 4). For this to be the case, we must think of Humeanism simply as the claim that intentional actions are caused by suitable combinations of believings in the agent.

9 Not only might one suggest this; Michael Ridge did suggest it to me, at the conference.

10 Many thanks to Wayne Davis for vigorous discussion of these issues, and to Michael Morris (of Sussex) and Helen Steward for helpful suggestions about a penultimate draft.