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Reply to Terzis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
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George Terzis makes several objections to claims and arguments I advanced in Impartial Reason. I cannot take them all up, but I would like to respond to some, which I shall group into three: (a) whether reasons depend on norms applying to all rational agents; (b) how the unity of agency relates to such norms; and (c) the self-support condition. Since the objections concerning (a) cut most deeply against the central thesis of Impartial Reason, I shall begin with them. Before I do that, however, I should make some preliminary remarks.
Impartial Reason offers an internalist theory of reasons, but one that is, I believe, more sensitive to the normative character of reasons than internalist theories usually are.1 A theory of reasons is internalist if it holds that something's being a reason depends somehow on its capacity to affect motivation. Unlike internalist theories that identify reasons with de facto motives, however, IR insists on the normative character of reasons as tending to justify conduct as rational. It does this by holding that a reason to act is something which motivates when appropriately (or rationally) considered. The normative or justificatory weight of reasons, then, is held to derive from a normative ideal of rational consideration. Reasons inherit as justificatory weight the motivational force they would come to have in an ideally rational process of practical reflection.
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1 I shall henceforth refer to the book as IR, and to the theory of reasons it advances as IR.
2 Unless, of course, one takes their valid application to consist in providing reason to act.
Accepting this point of Foot's does not require acceptance of her further claim that such a norm would give a reason to someone only if complying with it advanced his interests or the satisfaction of his desires. See her ‘Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives,’ Philosophical Review 82 (1972).
3 We may think of this view as advocating a more ultimate principle that does apply to all agents: Act on a principle within the range.
4 As this shows, the distinction between personal and impersonal standpoints is a relative matter. I discuss this (with special attention to Thomas Nagel's views) in ‘How Nowhere Can You Get (And Do Ethics)?’ Ethics 98 (1987), 152-7.
5 For example, on pp. 104: ‘For the moment, however, let us suppose that there is only one normative system to which all agents ought to conform. According to Darwall, all agents ought therefore to choose practical principles from an impartial perspective.’ This may partly explain why Terzis thinks the former claim to be controversial-how else could something so controversial be thought to follow from it?
6 This intuitive sketch of the argument can be found in IR, 235-8.
7 In this way IR is an ‘agency-based’ internalism. I discuss the relation of such a view to other fundamental approaches to rationality in ‘Rational Agent, Rational Act,’ Philosophical Topics 14 (1986), 33-57.
8 This aspect of IR is discussed in ‘Rational Agent, Rational Act,’ Philosophical Topics 14 (1986), 33-57, in ‘How Nowhere Can You Get (And Do Ethics)?’ Ethics 98 (1987), 152-7, and in Impartial Reason, 211-39.
9 There is no circularity here since the notion of instrumental rationality can be specified independently of any substantive principles of practical reason, and hence, any proposition about reasons to act.
10 I did not mean to deny that a unity might simply emerge from the way an agent's ends fit together of their own, only that without the capacity for critically assessing ends an agent would have no motivated way of unifying them himself. Instrumental rationality gives him no way so long as it is relative to individual ends.
11 Gauthier acknowledges that his earlier argument was deficient in this way in the more recent Morals By Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1986), 174n.
12 Only, of course, if the costs of doing so do not exceed whatever increased benefits might be had from free-riding.
13 Not that levels of mutual awareness are simply given and independent of human agency, but they may well be more or less independent of any individual's agency in a given situation.
14 I make this argument in IR on pp. 243f.
15 This condition functions like the assumption that the parties to the original position have a sense of justice in Rawls's justice as fairness; no commitment to any particular principle is assumed, only the willingness, more or less, to be guided by whatever principles would be rationally chosen.
I did not make this explicit in IR and am happy to have the opportunity to do so now.
16 See IR, 229, 238.
17 By, for example, Parfit, Derek in Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1984), Ch. 1Google Scholar.
I am indebted to Norman Dahl for pointing out to me that IR can be presented without any self-support condition.
18 The issue about whether a principle of rational conduct need support its own guidance of reflection and decision is like the issue about whether it is an argument against a proposed principle of morality that the principle itself recommends that it not be realized in agents’ practical reflection and deliberations. I consider these matters in ‘Rational Agent, Rational Act.’
19 I am indebted to the National Endowment for the Humanities for fellowship support during the time this essay was written.