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The Non-arbitrariness of Reasons: Reply to Lenman

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

Michael Smith
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Abstract

James Lenman is critical of my claim that moral requirements are requirements of reason. I argue that his criticisms miss their target. More importantly, I argue that the anti-rationalism that informs Lenman's criticisms is itself implausible.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , July 1999 , pp. 178 - 193
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

1 Lenman, James, ‘Michael Smith and the Daleks: Reason, Morality, and Contingency’, Utilitas, xi (1999)Google Scholar. All otherwise unattributed page references are to this article.

2 Gibbard, Alan argues for a non-cognitivist analysis of reason claims in his Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, Oxford, 1990Google Scholar. Korsgaard, Christine seems committed to such an analysis as well in her The Sources of Normativity, Cambridge, 1996CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, Oxford, 1974Google Scholar (1758), Richard Price, himself a cognitivist, takes the view that a consideration is reason-giving in virtue of its possession of a sui generis non-natural property. In The Moral Problem, Oxford, 1994Google Scholar, I argue for a cognitivist analysis of reason claims according to which, by contrast, a consideration is reason-giving in virtue of its possession of a naturalistic property, ultimately a counterfactual psychological property.

3 Smith, Michael, ‘Internal Reasons’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, lv (1995)Google Scholar; The Moral Problem, pp. 151–77.

4 Non-naturalistic versions of rationalism might hold that the perception of a consideration's possession of the non-natural property of being a rationale is a process of reasoning. Naturalistic versions of rationalism would deny that there is any such thing.

5 Speaking somewhat less strictly, we might say that people who are driven by reasons are those who meet the second and third conditions just mentioned, whereas those who are driven by mere arbitrary feelings do not meet these conditions. Speaking more strictly again, this really distinguishes those who are driven by reasons-as-they-appear, from those who are not so driven. The less strict formulation is none the less useful because, it seems to me, we are not always careful in ordinary parlance to use the term ‘reason’ to talk of reasons, as distinct from reasons-as-they-appear.

6 The Moral Problem, pp. 182–4.

7 Blackburn, Simon, ‘Errors and the Phenomenology of Value’, Morality and Objectivity, ed. Honderich, Ted, London, 1985Google Scholar.