Skip to main content
Log in

Abstract

Mark Schroeder has, rather famously, defended a powerful Humean Theory of Reasons. In doing so, he abandons what many take to be the default Humean view of weighting reasons—namely, proportionalism . On Schroeder’s view, the pressure that Humeans feel to adopt proportionalism is illusory, and proportionalism is unable to make sense of the fact that the weight of reasons is a normative matter. He thus offers his own ‘Recursive View’, which directly explains how it is that the weight of reasons is a normative matter. In this paper, I argue against Schroeder that a Humean ought to be a proportionalist. On my view, proportionalism is clearly an intuitive theory of weighting for a Humean, so we should resist it only if Schroeder can demonstrate either that there is a serious problem with the view, or that there is a better alternative. I then further argue that Schroeder fails to deliver on either condition. As a result, I conclude that there are good intuitive reasons for a Humean to be a proportionalist, and no good reason not to be.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. It is interesting to note that virtually everyone who writes on proportionalism seems to believe this—that it is the default view—and yet I have not found a single author who cites past Humeans as evidence for this claim. So, for instance, Schroeder (2007a), Enoch (2011), Sobel (2009) and Dancy (2012) all make the claim (which I believe is true) that proportionalism seems to be the standard theory of weighting for a Humean, but in none of these cases is this claim followed by a citation. Perhaps this is evidence for how obvious the philosophical community finds the marriage between HTR and proportionalism, as it does not even require precedence.

  2. Proportionalist Humeanism is supposed to be implausible because it amounts to the claim that one has most reason to act in whatever way best promotes her desires. However, as Enoch (2011, 438–439) notes, whether it is Schroeder’s motivation or not, the implausibility (if it is implausible) of a proportionalist Humean view cannot be the primary justification for rejecting proportionalism. At a minimum, Schroeder must at least show that proportionalism is not the only plausible candidate theory of weighting from the perspective of a Humean. Otherwise, the argument would be clearly ad hoc, rejecting the most plausible candidate theory of weighting because not doing so is devastating to the overall view. Now, since I am a Humean, and about to argue in favor of proportionalism, obviously I disagree that adopting proportionalism is devastating to the overall Humean project. However, where Enoch and I are aligned against Schroeder is in our agreement concerning the options: We can either adopt a proportionalist version of HTR, or we can abandon HTR, but we are not justified in adopting HTR while rejecting proportionalism. I return to this point briefly in Sect. 7.

  3. The Classical Argument runs as follows:

    1. 1.

      Existence Internalism about Reasons: If there is a reason for a person to do something, it must be possible to motivate her to do it for that reason.

    2. 2.

      The Humean Theory of Motivation: Motivation requires desire.

    3. 3.

      Therefore, HTR: Having a reason requires having a desire.

    Schroeder discusses in (2007a) several reasons for being skeptical of the Classical Argument, but my own view is that the argument requires the defense of contentious theses—premises (1) and (2) and is not necessary; thus, we should avoid it if possible. And avoiding the argument is not only possible, it is independently advisable, since I think the intuitive argument that I give in what follows is a much better, more natural reason to believe HTR.

  4. Although I will, here and elsewhere, use Schroeder’s language of desire, this is only for the sake of simplicity. It may be implausible that desire is actually the relevant psychological state, as Ronnie and Bradley seem to have reasons just in virtue of liking and disliking, having an interest or disinterest, or even having some degree of concern for dancing. Thus, I will use desire as a kind of placeholder, into which one could insert a variety of ‘pro-attitudes’.

  5. In fact, we want to know what we ought to do, or what we are required to do. Schroeder bridges this final gap by analyzing ‘A ought to phi’ as ‘A has most reason to phi’. The equating of ‘most reason’ and ‘ought’ is typical not only of a normative reductionist like the Humean, but also of many others who want to analyze the normative in terms of reasons. Cf. Smith (1994), Parfit (2001, 2011), Scanlon (1998). Since this reduction is a stronger view than I must take, I will avoid it in this paper. Instead, I will assume only what seems fairly uncontroversial, which is that a theory of weighting must explain how a reason to do X can be ‘weightier’ than a reason to do Y such that the result is that agent A has more reason to do X than Y; further, if the reason for A to do X is weightier than the reason to do anything else, then A has most reason to do X.

  6. This is different from the case in which I have a writing deadline in 1 h, and so my reason to get coffee is simply outweighed by my reason to continue writing. In that case, my proportionalist intuitions tell me that I might really want coffee, but also really, really want to make my deadline, and so I may have more reason to continue sitting here despite having a weighty reason to get up and make coffee.

  7. So, for instance, I may have very strong desires to improve the situation of coffee farmers in South America, who provide my fair-trade coffee; and it is, in fact, the case that drinking more coffee right now will increase my need for more coffee, and so increase the business that I give those farmers. However, the extra cup that I could drink right now simply doesn’t promote that desire to a great degree, and so I might still have a weak reason to get coffee, despite this particular, coffee- (and justice-) related desire being quite strong.

  8. Thanks to Mark Murphy for this way of summarizing the intuition.

  9. Where each capital letter represents a reason, each of which can then be represented by an ordered triple. So {S, T, B}, for instance, represents the set of reasons represented by the triples <Sleepy, Travis, Coffee> (read: ‘his sleepiness is a reason for Travis to drink coffee’, and similarly for the other two); <Tasty, Travis, Coffee>; <Break, Travis, Coffee>. While reasons are not, in fact, ordered triples (but are facts that stand in the reason relation with an agent and an action), representing them as triples is helpful, Schroeder thinks, because this can help us to see which sets are ‘addable’ and comparable: namely, those which are invariant with reference to the agent and action (2007a, 127). So S, T, B and L constitute a variety of addable sets, such as {S}, {T} and {B}, which are addable into {S, T, B}. This set is comparable with {L}, which reads ‘that drinking coffee now will make it hard to fall asleep later is a reason for Travis not to brew coffee’.

  10. This is a summary of large parts of Chapter 7 (2007a, esp. 123–139).

  11. For just a small sample of the extensive literature on the Wrong Kind of Reasons Problem, see D’Arms and Jacobson (2000), Olson (2004), Rabinowicz and Rönnow-Rasmussen (2004, 2006), and Schroeder (2007a, 2010, 2012).

  12. See, for instance, the discussion between Evers (2009), Schroeder (2007a, 2010) and Enoch (2011) on Schroeder’s solution to the Wrong Kind of Reasons Problem. Although Schroeder makes some interesting gestures towards solving this problem, he does not provide a complete solution, and yet his position requires that there is one. So one concern for his view is that it requires a solution to a problem that is very difficult, and that one might even be skeptical of solving.

  13. One might already be worried at this point that, since this is a Humean account, this reason to place weight must be grounded in desires, and it must be a reason for everyone. While I do, in fact, find it implausible that a Humean account can generate a universal reason to place weights in this way, such a discussion is a larger one than I can have here. My suspicion at this point is due to the implausibility of generating agent-neutral reasons from desires generally. For the details of Schroeder’s view, see (2007a, ch. 6).

  14. Perhaps Schroeder did not intend for The Bottom Reason to explain what makes Weight Base true; rather, we should take his claim that the disjunctive account is appropriately unified through its prediction of the Attractive Idea to constitute his case for accepting Weight Base. That is: we should believe Weight Base because it forms part of a good theory that explains an Attractive Idea. While I think such a move is intriguing, it seems unlikely to me that it avoids the worry. A less charitable way to put the suggested point is that Weight Base is what Schroeder needs in order for his view to work; but that, of course, is simply to admit that its inclusion is ad hoc. In order to avoid this worry, it seems that Schroeder would need to say something much stronger than that Weight Base forms part of a good explanation of the truism; perhaps he could say that Weight Base is necessary in order to form a very good, or maybe even uniquely good explanation. But as the strength of the claim goes up, its plausibility goes down. Indeed, I take it that my defense of proportionalism in the following section provides an alternative explanation of Schroeder’s truism, demonstrating that Weight Base is not necessary to an explanation. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting that I consider this reading of Schroeder’s argument.

  15. Schroeder notes about Reasons Basicness the following: “Any view that looks attractive to Jonathan Dancy, Jean Hampton, Michael Smith, Derek Parfit, T. M. Scanlon, and Joseph Raz has to be one with some kind of very broad appeal” (2007a, 81).

  16. It is worth pointing out that, even if proportionalism is not the correct account of weight, rejecting Reasons Basicness may help to solve the problems I have raised with Schroeder’s account. Of course, a Humean who would pursue this tact would need her own account of what it is to place weight correctly in deliberation, but there is no reason to assume from the outset that this effort would fail. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

  17. This would not be the only criticism to claim to tie the fate of HTR (or some other, similarly reductionist account of practical reasons) to the details of an account of epistemic reasons. Several philosophers have recently given ‘companions in guilt’ arguments against any antirealist position, invoking reasons for belief as understandable only on a realist metanormative model. See, most notably, Cuneo (2007), but also Jackson (1999), Putnam (1990), Scanlon (1998), and Shafer-Landau (2003).

References

  • Cuneo, T. (2007). The normative web: An argument for moral realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • D’Arms, J., & Jacobson, D. (2000). The moralistic fallacy: On the ‘appropriateness’ of emotions. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 61, 65–90.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dancy, J. (2012). Response to Mark Schroeder’s slaves of the passions. Philosophical Studies, 157, 455–462.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Enoch, D. (2011). On Mark Schroeder’s hypotheticalism: A critical notice of slaves of the passions. Philosophical Review, 120(3), 423–446.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Evers, D. (2009). Humean agent-neutral reasons? Philosophical Explorations, 12(1), 55–67.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jackson, F. (1999). Non-cognitivism, normativity, and belief. Ratio, 12(4), 420–435.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Olson, J. (2004). Buck-passing and the wrong kind of reasons. The Philosophical Quarterly, 54, 295–300.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Parfit, D. (2001). Rationality and reasons. In D. Egonsson, J. Josefsson, B. Petterson, & T. Ronnow-Rasmussen (Eds.), Exploring practical philosophy: From action to values. Aldershot: Ashgate.

    Google Scholar 

  • Parfit, D. (2011). On what matters. Oxford: University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Putnam, H. (1990). Beyond the fact/value dichotemy. In J. Conant (Ed.), Realism with a human face (pp. 135–141). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rabinowicz, W., & Rönnow-Rasmussen, T. (2004). The strike of the demon: On fitting pro-attitudes and value. Ethics, 114, 391–423.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rabinowicz, W., & Rönnow-Rasmussen, T. (2006). Buck-passing and the right kind of reasons. The Philosophical Quarterly, 56, 114–120.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scanlon, T. M. (1998). What we owe to each other. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schroeder, M. (2007a). Slaves of the passions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Schroeder, M. (2007b). The humean theory of reasons. In R. Shafer-Landau (Ed.), Oxford studies in metaethics (Vol. 2, pp. 195–219). Oxford: University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schroeder, M. (2010). Value and the right kind of reason. In R. Shafer-Landau (Ed.), Oxford studies in metaethics (Vol. 5, pp. 25–55). Oxford: University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schroeder, M. (2012). The ubiquity of state-given reasons. Ethics, 122(3), 457–488.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shafer-Landau, R. (2003). Moral realism: A defense. Oxford: University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Smith, M. (1994). The moral problem. Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sobel, D. (2009). Mark Schroeder: Slaves of the passions. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id1/415905

  • Street, S. (2011). Evolution and the normativity of epistemic reasons. Canadian Journal of Philosophy Vol. 35, supplemental volume on Belief and Agency, pp. 213–248 (Ed. D. Hunter).

Download references

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Mark Murphy, who encouraged me to develop this argument, and who provided detailed and insightful commentary on several drafts. My thanks also to Henry Richardson and Steve Kuhn, both of whom provided extensive written feedback on later drafts, and whose attention to detail prevented many errors.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Travis N. Rieder.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Rieder, T.N. Why I’m still a proportionalist. Philos Stud 173, 251–270 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0489-y

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0489-y

Keywords

Navigation