7 - Deliberation about value

Summary

My aim has been to understand the kind of practical rationality distinctive of persons so as to be able to solve certain problems of human practical reason. To this end, first, I have given an account of a distinctive kind of rationality governing the interconnections among our felt evaluations and evaluative judgments: a rationality of import, as we might call it. Why is such a rationality of import distinctive? These felt evaluations and evaluative judgments, I have argued, are disclosive commitments to import. By this I mean that they are neither cognitive commitments having mind-to-world direction of fit to an antecedent fact, nor conative commitments that project that import by virtue of their world-to-mind direction of fit. Rather, our commitments to import are simultaneously both responsive to that import and constitutive of it by virtue of their complex rational interconnections. This rationality of import, therefore, is distinctive insofar as it is neither instrumental nor epistemic and so is intelligible neither in terms of specifying how to get the world to fit our conations nor in terms of specifying how to get our cognitions to fit the world.

Second, in articulating an account of human practical reason, I have provided an account of how we can exploit this rationality of import in controlling both our motivations and our felt evaluations, potentially coming to have both freedom of the will and freedom of the heart. For, by identifying in judgment reasons for acting, we thereby exert rational pressure on our felt evaluations and motivations to conform.