This seminar will be devoted to a survey of basic issues about the nature of practical reason and associated issues about intentional action, persons, the good, moral demands, and the normativity of ethics. We will examine and assess different conceptions of practical reason. It’s hard to elucidate the basic concept of practical reason without privileging or prejudicing some substantive conceptions. On some views, practical reason is the ultimate currency of normative inquiry. If there is a reason to do something, then there is something about it that recommends its pursuit or at least recommends it as an object of concern. To the extent that practical reason endorses a course of action, that is the action that it makes sense to perform. To fail to conform to what one has reason to do is to expose oneself (to that extent) to criticism as irrational or unreasonable. What one aims at in practical deliberation is to discover or decide what one has most reason to do, that is, what it makes most sense to do.
We will examine and assess traditional conceptions of practical reason. Some conceptions are grounded in desire. This is true of purely instrumental conceptions of practical reason of the sort sometimes associated with Hume. It is also true of conceptions that ground practical reason in idealized desire. Other conceptions ground practical reason in objective value. Prudence grounds practical reason in the agent’s own good, but other teleological approaches to practical reason recognize non-prudential reasons grounded in impartial or impersonal goods. Another non-desiderative approach to practical reason, reflected in the Kantian tradition, attempts to ground practical reason in agency itself. We will attempt to map the options, understand their commonalities and differences, and gauge their comparative systematic plausibility.
Among other desiderata, a conception of practical reason must be normatively adequate. Normative adequacy has both motivational and critical dimensions. If practical reason is normative, it must be able to guide conduct. But then we might expect the demands of practical reason to be capable of resonating with agents – engaging them emotionally and motivationally. But if practical reason is to provide critical guidance, then an agent’s actual attitudes and commitments must be fallible. To serve this critical function, a conception of practical reason must not only accommodate our reflective beliefs about what is or could be reasonable but must also provide a rationale for why we should care about conformity with its demands. A central part of assessing rival conceptions of practical reason is determining how well they score along these dimensions of normative adequacy.
In understanding and assessing conceptions of practical reason, it will be useful to distinguish between practical reason in intrapersonal and interpersonal contexts – roughly, contexts that concern only the agent’s own life and contexts that concern both the agent and others. Of course, the theories of practical reason we will examine are in some sense perfectly general, applying to both intrapersonal and interpersonal contexts. And, on some conceptions, it will be hard to draw a sharp line between intrapersonal and interpersonal contexts. But the two contexts raise different issues and pose different challenges for different conceptions of practical reason. In particular, interpersonal practical reason raises questions about the rational authority of other-regarding conduct and concern that are central to issues about the rational authority of morality. So it will be useful to separate, so far as possible, these two contexts. We will focus first on intrapersonal practical reason and turn to interpersonal practical reason later. Where this neat partition of topics is impossible or unprofitable, it may still be useful to recognize and distinguish the significance of these two different dimensions.
We will begin with intrapersonal practical reason. Must reason be the slave of the passions, or can it discriminate between appropriate and inappropriate desires? Does resonance require that reasons for action be grounded in the agent’s desires in some way? Can desiderative conceptions provide normative accommodation or a rationale for normative authority? If not, do non-desiderative conceptions of practical reason fare any better? Within the intrapersonal context, the alternatives to a pure desiderative conception seem to be various conception of prudence. What are the ingredients in a person’s good? We will look at different conceptions of a person’s good – desire-satisfaction, hedonistic, objective list, and perfectionist conceptions – and see what they imply about intrapersonal practical reason. All conceptions of prudence are temporally neutral. Can temporal neutrality be justified? Prudence is temporally neutral but agent biased. Can this hybrid character be justified? Can we reconcile temporal neutrality with apparent asymmetries in our attitudes toward prospective and past goods and bads? Can we reconcile the demands of temporal neutrality with the value of authenticity? Is temporal neutrality undermined if we accept a reductionist conception of personal identity?
We can structure our discussion of interpersonal practical reason by examining a puzzle about the authority of morality. (1) Most modern moral conceptions recognize impartial moral duties that enjoin other-regarding conduct and concern and that apply to agents independently of their aims or desires. (2) Moral requirements seem to be important normative considerations that have rational authority. (3) It is common to conceive practical reason as grounded in the agent’s aims or interests. However, (4) heeding these other-regarding duties seems to constrain the agent’s pursuit of his own aims or interests. We can represent different conceptions of the normativity of ethics as different responses to this tension. Some conceptions relativize moral requirements to the agent’s aims or interests. Some conceptions deny the rationalist assumption that moral requirements are requirements of practical reason. Some conceptions insist that practical reason can be impartial. And some conceptions deny the conflict between other-regarding morality and self-interest. We will try to compare and asses some of these rival conceptions.
FORMAT
I’ll be presenting material that not only imposes structure on the
issues and readings but also suggests ways of assessing the resources and
plausibility of the views under discussion. At this point, I am not
anticipating having student presentations. However, I do expect students
to be more than passive consumers; they need to do the readings on time
and be active participants in seminar discussion. We may not always
use the full three hours; we will take a break approximately halfway through.
REQUIREMENTS
Students taking the seminar for credit have one of two options: write
(a) two modest papers, approximately 6-9 pages in length (the first would
be due around February 12, the second around March 17), or (b) a longer
paper, approximately 15-20 pages, to be written in two drafts (the first
draft would be due around March 4, it would be returned around March 11,
and the revision would be due around March 17).
BOOKS AND READINGS
The required readings will be drawn from the required books and from
materials that will be on reserve in the Philosophy Library. I have
ordered the following books for the course: