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Explanation, Internalism, and Reasons for Action*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

David Sobel
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Extract

These days, just about every philosophical debate seems to generate a position labeled internalism. The debate I will be joining in this essay concerns reasons for action and their connection, or lack of connection, to motivation. The internalist position in this debate posits a certain essential connection between reasons and motivation, while the externalist position denies such a connection. This debate about internalism overlaps an older debate between Humeans and Kantians about the exclusive reason-giving power of desires. As we will see, however, while these debates overlap, the new debate is importantly different from the old debate.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , Summer 2001 , pp. 218 - 235
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2001

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References

1 Williams, Bernard, “Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame,” in Williams, Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Ibid., 38.

3 Ibid., 39.

4 Ibid., 38–39.

5 Williams, Bernard, “Internal and External Reasons,” in Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Notice that this formulation anticipates a discussion below to the effect that what Williams seems to really be after is not internalism but subjectivism. I conceive of the latter as an account of what makes it true that one has a reason to Φ rather than merely an account of how to determine if one has a reason to Φ.

7 McDowell, John, “Might There Be External Reasons?” in Altham, J. E. J. and Harrison, Ross, eds., World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

8 Williams, , “Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame,” 36–37.Google Scholar

9 Ibid., 37.

10 Rosati, Connie, “Internalism and the Good for a Person,” Ethics 106, no. 2 (1996): 307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Mill, John Stuart, Utilitarianism (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1979), chap. 2Google Scholar; Sidgwick, Henry, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1981), 111–12Google Scholar; Brandt, Richard, A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 10, 113, 329Google Scholar; Hare, R. M., Moral Thinking (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 101–5, 214–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hare, R. M., “Replies,” in Seanor, Douglas and Fotion, N., eds., Hare and Critics: Essays on “Moral Thinking” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 217–18Google Scholar; Griffin, James, Well-Being (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 11–17Google Scholar; Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 407–24Google Scholar; Gauthier, David, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), chap. 2Google Scholar; Darwall, Stephen, Impartial Reason (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), pt. 2Google Scholar; Railton, Peter, “Facts and Values,” Philosophical Topics 14, no. 2 (1986): 5–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lewis, David, “Dispositional Theories of Value,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n.s., 63 (1989): 113–37Google Scholar; Harsanyi, John, “Morality and the Theory of Rational Behavior,” in Sen, Amartya and Williams, Bernard, eds., Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 55.Google Scholar Several important caveats apply to some of the above authors' commitments to subjectivism, and some would decline the label. Robert Shaver raises some of these caveats in the case of Sidgwick. See Shaver, Robert, “Sidgwick's False Friends,” Ethics 107, no. 2 (1997): 314–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Sobel, David, “Reply to Shaver,”Google Scholar published in 1997 in the e-journal BEARS, available at http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/bears/9707sobel.html [posted on July 7, 1997].

12 In Sobel, David, “Well-Being as the Object of Moral Consideration,” Economics and Philosophy 14, no. 2 (1998): 249–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar, I consider ways that such a theory could try to respond to the fact that some of our concerns are moral or quasi-moral and hence not perfectly correlated with our well-being. I conclude that any such method will reveal that well-being is not the appropriate object of moral concern. I defend instead the autonomy principle, which would allow agents to throw the weight they are granted in moral reflection where they informedly see fit. For a different take on similar issues, see Darwall, Stephen's “Self-Interest and Self-Concern,” Social Philosophy and Policy 14, no. 1 (1997): 158–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Sidgwick, , The Methods of Ethics, 111–12.Google Scholar

14 I take this example from Griffin, , Well-Being, 11.Google Scholar

15 I have presented these reasons for moving from a Sidgwickian view (and to a Railtonian view—see below) in Sobel, David, “Full Information Accounts of Well-Being,” Ethics 104, no. 4 (1994): 784–810.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Railton offers this account in “Facts and Values,” 16.Google Scholar But see ibid., 25 and Railton, Peter, “Moral Realism,” Philosophical Review 96, no. 2 (1986): 175–76 n. 17Google Scholar, for the claim that this account merely “tracks” one's good, that is, while the account shows what an agent's good is, it is not the case that an agent's good is her good because it fulfills the account's criterion. (I discuss this distinction in more detail later in this section.) Notice that Railton's compelling claim that it would be “an intolerably alienated conception of someone's good to imagine that it might fail in any way to engage him” (Railton, , “Facts and Values,” 9Google Scholar), is compatible with the claim that the full information account merely tracks one's good. In his more recent work, Railton claims that the subjective reactions from the approved vantage point are indicators of the presence of a fit between an individual and an end. See Railton, Peter, “Aesthetic Value, Moral Value, and the Ambitions of Naturalism,” in Levinson, Jerrold, ed., Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).Google Scholar

17 Railton, , “Facts and Values,” 14.Google Scholar Consider, however, that our idealized self could want our ordinary self to want X because the idealized agent knows that our ordinary self's doing so will be instrumentally effective in bringing about, albeit unintentionally, Y, something that the idealized agent finds to be best for our ordinary self. If we say that what is good for our ordinary self is what our idealized self wants our ordinary self to want, we seem to misdescribe these cases of indirection. Perhaps it would be better to focus on the kind of life that the idealized agent wants the ordinary self to have.

18 Smith, Michael, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), 151.Google Scholar

19 This highlights a rather general problem for conditional theories. See Shope, Robert K., “The Conditional Fallacy in Contemporary Philosophy,” Journal of Philosophy 75, no. 8 (1978): 397–413CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Shope, Robert K., “Rawls, Brandt, and the Definition of Rational Desires,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 8, no. 2 (1978): 329–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar I am grateful to Steve Darwall for these references.

20 I take the useful term “ideal advisor account” from Rosati, Connie, “Persons, Perspectives, and Full Information Accounts of the Good,” Ethics 105, no. 2 (1995): 296–325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Rosati goes on in that paper to critique such accounts. I critique such accounts in “Full Information Accounts of Well-Being.” Although both of these papers are critical of such accounts, both agree that the move from the simpler accounts (we might call them direct motivational accounts) to ideal advisor accounts is a step in the right direction. Although both papers' critiques are offered against full information accounts of well-being, they are equally effective against full information accounts of reasons for action.

21 There will, of course, also be cases in which A lacks a reason to Φ but A+ has one. However, the example of fragile reasons as I define them in the text is sufficient to make my case.

22 I make this case much more fully in Sobel, David, “Subjective Accounts of Reasons for Action,” Ethics 111, no. 3 (2001): 461–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar I also argue in that essay that attention to the distinction between an account of reasons and an account of rationality undermines Christine Korsgaard's case against the instrumentalism of Hume and Williams that she offers in Korsgaard, Christine, “Skepticism About Practical Reason,” in Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Korsgaard, Christine, “The Normativity of Instrumental Reason,” in Cullity, Garret and Gaut, Berys, eds., Ethics and Practical Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).Google Scholar

23 Stephen Darwall's formulations of existence internalism (Darwall, , Impartial Reason, 55Google Scholar) and metaphysical internalism (Darwall, Stephen, “Reasons, Motives, and the Demands of Morality: An Introduction,” in Darwall, Stephen, Gibbard, Allan, and Railton, Peter, eds., Moral Discourse and Practice [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997], 308–9Google Scholar) are both, like Williams's formulation of internalism, put in terms of necessary conditions for being a reason. Thus, these versions of internalism that Darwall describes are also subject to the importantly different interpretations mentioned in the text. Darwall briefly notes this ambiguity in the latter discussion.

24 Michael Smith's account of reasons for action in The Moral Problem is best understood as a version of tracking internalism. He thinks that the desires of all ideally rational agents converging on certain things is necessary and sufficient for our having reasons, and in particular reasons to do what our desires converge on. According to Smith, the best explanation for such a convergence, if it occurred, would be that there are “extremely unobvious a priori moral truths” (Smith, , The Moral Problem, 187).Google Scholar On his view, it is these truths that make it the case that we have reasons to do certain things; our ideally informed deliberations simply get our motivations to track these truths. I critique Smith's arguments for convergence in Sobel, David, “Do the Desires of Rational Agents Converge?” Analysis 59, no. 3 (1999): 137–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Korsgaard, , “Skepticism About Practical Reason,” 11.Google Scholar

26 See Sobel, , “Subjective Accounts of Reasons for Action.”Google Scholar

27 Williams, , “Internal and External Reasons,” 101.Google Scholar This is Williams's casual and “very rough” characterization of internalism in the earlier paper. The formulation of internalism offered in the later “Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame,” which I cite at the beginning of Section II of this essay, is clearly intended to be his official “nonrough” characterization of internalism. This formulation is also the sort Williams invokes in Williams, Bernard, “Replies,” in Altham, and Harrison, , eds., World, Mind, and Ethics, 186–94.Google Scholar Furthermore, the later characterization is the one that has been picked up by subsequent writers on internalism such as Darwall and Korsgaard.

28 Throughout this essay I have been treating the concepts of ‘motivation’ and ‘desire’ as unproblematic so as to focus on other issues. In fact, I find these concepts not yet satisfactorily analyzed. For some initial misgivings, see Sobel, David and Copp, David, “Against Direction of Fit Accounts of Belief and Desire,” Analysis 61, no. 1 (2001): 44–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Unfortunately, I did not read Johnson, Robert's excellent “Internal Reasons and the Conditional Fallacy,” Philosophical Quarterly 49, no. 194 (1999): 53–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar, until it was too late to take it into account here. Johnson offers compelling arguments for some of the central conclusions that I urge in the second half of this essay.