Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T09:00:19.752Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Points of View and Practical Reasoning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Robert Brandom
Robert Brandom*
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Problems of practical reasoning often arise as the result of a clash between two different points of view. What do we mean when we say that while from the point of view of prudence there is no reason to rescue one's drowning enemy, from the point of view of morality there is reason to do so? In this essay we examine how the idiom of points of view arises in practical discourse, and offer a clarification of it. We will be particularly concerned with a common argument for assigning a privileged status to the moral point of view, an argument which can be seen to be fallacious once certain features of Judgments made from a point of view are clearly discerned.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , June 1982 , pp. 321 - 333
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1982

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I am grateful for the many helpful comments on previous versions of this paper offered by P. Foot, J. Cooper, L. McFall, and an anonymous referee.

References

1 See Davidson's interesting discussion in ‘How is Weakness of the Will Possible?', inJ. Feinberg, ed., Moral Concepts (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1970).

2 For finer–grained deliberation, such points of view may be subdivided, as when trying to decide what she has reason to do from the point of view of making money, the surgeon reflects that while from the point of view of cash flow there is reason to operate, in view of possible malpractice suits, from the point of view of long–term capital structure there is reason to refuse to operate. It is in this way that one can reconstruct a distinction between reasons-on-balance and prima facie reasons even within some point of view.'

3 The point here is not that there can be reasons for action which do not function as reasons for all agents. The distinction between prima facie reasons and reasons-on-balance is orthogonal to that between reasons as expressing abstract communal norms and reasons as expressing concrete individual motivations.

4 The Moral Point of View (New York: Random House 1965), 38-9

5 See for instance Kurtzman's, D. ‘Ceteris Paribus Clauses: Their Illumination and Elimination,’ American Philosophical Quarterly, 10 (1973) 35–42.Google Scholar

6 ‘Because I have reason on balance to do it,’ is of course never a reason for acting, neither in the prospective context of deliberation nor in the retrospective context of appraisal. Citing reasons is always citing prima facie reasons. But this does not reduce the notion of a reason-on-balance to empty formality. Such citation Justifies an action only when it is further claimed, at least implicitly, that the considerations cited outweigh possibly countervailing ones not mentioned. It is this second claim which secures the connection to action-guidance and gives separate content to the notion of reasons-on-balance.

7 This issue has been addressed in a somewhat different way in the context of conditionalization in deontic logics. See Chellas, B. ‘Conditional Obligation,’ in Stenlund, S. ed. Logical Theory and Semantic Analysis (Dordrecht: Reidel, D. 1974)Google Scholar. For a comprehensive review of related literature, see the bibliography in Bernardo, G. di ed., Logica Deontica e Semantica (Bologna: Societa Editrice il Mulino 1977) 349–447.Google Scholar

8 ‘The Finality of Moral Judgements’ Philosophical Review, 82 (1973) 364-70

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Foot, P. ‘Are Moral Considerations Overriding?', in her Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Blackwell's 1978) 181-8Google Scholar

12 For the best of these, together with a survey of the others, see Anderson, A. and Belnap, N. Entailment, Vol. I (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1975)Google Scholar especially Part I.

13 Of course there is a dual notion of negative relevance corresponding to that stated above, which holds Just in case the background beliefs alone do not entail not-q, but those beliefs together with p do entail not-q.

14 A more sophisticated account would assign probabilities to directly relevant considerations during the first stage and require a maxim stated in terms of the expected return along the dimension defining the perspective. the arguments we are concerned with can all be approached equally well in the simpler interpretation according to truth values, however.

15 See my ‘Freedom and Constraint by Norms,’ American Philosophical Quarterly, 16 (1979) 187-96.

16 The sort of significance captured in such a semantics concerns the appropriateness of inferences and other performances, including assertions about what ought to be done. Perspectival schemes for practical inference are thus more akin to assertibility semantics than truth-conditional semantics (see my 'Truth and Assertibility,’ Journal of Philosophy, 73 [1976) 137-49). So invoking such schemes does not beg the question against a non-cognitivist rendering of action appraisals.

17 This is one of the points of the discussion of duty in the first section of the foun. dations of the Metaphysics of Morals.