Abstract
This article presents a limited defense of Humeanism about practical reason. Jonathan Dancy and other traditional objective-reasons theorists (e.g., Schueler, Bittner) argue that all practical reasons, what we think about when we deliberate, are facts or states of affairs in the world. On the Humean view, the reasons that motivate us are belief-desire combinations, which are in the mind. Thus, Dancy and others reject Humeanism on the grounds that it cannot allow that anyone acts from a normative reason. I argue, first, that this critique fails. What we deliberate about prior to action in cases of conflict sometimes are our desires: we consider our wants from a “normative” perspective (akin to Hume’s general or common point of view). So normative reasons are also desire-based, but involve appeal to desires of a higher order. These second-order desires can motivate. Second, I argue that objective-reasons theorists have a reverse problem with explanation of behavior. If reasons are considerations in the world, a person has reasons to do any number of actions at any given time. I charge that theories that exclude desire-based reasons cannot explain why an agent does one particular action rather than another. Recent philosophers (Alvarez, Hironymi, Lord, and Mantel) strike a compromise position, allowing for normative reasons in terms of facts and motivating reasons in other terms. However, I suggest that they may be subject to the same difficulty because of the relation between normative and motivating reasons that each has.
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Notes
Gert (2004, pp. 31–33) has argued for an additional distinction between justifying reasons and requiring (obligating) reasons, since we are not obligated to do everything for which there is good reason.
Of course, one problem this view faces is how states of affairs can be reasons when sometimes the content of an agent’s beliefs when she engages in practical reasoning do not represent the way things are. It seems, then, that intentional objects, rather than facts, constitute reasons, which implies that practical reasons are not objective after all. But this is not a point I want to pursue now. I am here interested in the Humean’s reply to the objective-reasons theorist. See, for example, Mele (2007).
On debates over whether Hume’s view is truly the source of the Humean theory of motivation, see Chapter 2 of Radcliffe (2018).
Citations to Hume’s Treatise are by Book, Part, section, and paragraph, rather than by page number. This is the standard citation system.
What are often called “alien desires”—desires that an agent says she does not identify with and that many argue cannot be reason-giving—may be compulsive urges with no intentionality. The difference between the desire to commit premeditated murder by poisoning and a mother’s sudden, strange impulse to drown her infant child seems to involve a difference between goal-oriented behavior that requires means-end reasoning and behavior that is not so oriented. So, it is plausible to think that the Humean view I suggest can exclude alien desires from reason-bestowing desires. However, given what I go on to argue, it would not matter if they cannot be excluded. Hubin (2003, p. 333) is one Humean who thinks they must be, since he thinks that according them reason-giving force undermines autonomy, but I see no problem in admitting that one might have “alien” reasons for an action, since I argue that reasons are prioritized, and these will never rank highly in an ordering of competing reasons for action.
Consistent with Gert (2004).
This section of the paper borrows from my 2012 article.
Of course, not just any second-order attitudes are properly indicative of reasons. If, for instance, I know that someone will reward me for having a desire for end E, and I desire to desire E for the reward, E is not necessarily a valued end of mine. (This illustrates the “wrong reasons” problem, to which I return later.) So, only second-order desires that are derived in the right way determine my most important aims.
Hume likewise famously offers norms for the rationality of trusting testimony (Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748, section 10).
Someone with eccentric dispositions may not come to believe the same things that other people typically do, and so would not be counted among those with good judgment.
This goes some way toward answering the criticism from van Roojen (2002, p. 212) that advice about what we have reason to do cannot motivate action, on a Humean view. Forming desires about our desires is akin to accepting advice from another.
Donald Davidson, believing values depend on desires, also maintains that “… we should expect enlightened values—the reasons we would have for valuing and acting if we had all the (non-evaluative) facts straight—to converge; we should expect people who are enlightened and fully understand one another to agree on their basic values” (Davidson 1995, p. 49).
Neil Sinhababu defends a second-order desire view of Humean reasons, as I have. Sinhababu’s approach unfolds in response to critics who believe that a Humean theory of motivation cannot countenance intentionality and deliberation. For instance, Kieran Setiya maintains that to have an intention requires an agent to have a belief about what she is doing and the ability to choose reasons for her actions (2008, p. 391). (See also Setiya 2007.) For Sinhababu, an agent intends an action when the agent desires a goal that she believes is more likely to obtain in a particular situation if she does that action than if she does not. Then when she believes that situation obtains, she will do the action from that belief and desire with no further reasoning. Thus, intention is an “appropriately situated” desire (2013, pp. 680–682). Tim Scanlon objects that Humeanism regards deliberation as the weighting of competing desires, and it cannot acknowledge the fact that agents prevent desires from moving them to action by putting them aside. A supervisor, say, puts aside personal desires when making a professional decision, such as whom to promote (1998, p. 52). Sinhababu argues in reply that persons can possess second-order desires about how first-order desires will influence them. His account highlights the hedonic aspect of desire, which Scanlon ignores, noting the displeasure we take in ourselves when we imagine ourselves acting on the very desires whose influence we want to undermine (2009, pp. 489–495). Michael Bratman is also concerned with Humeanism’s ability or inability to explain deliberation, as when one reconsiders one’s intentions (1987, pp. 17–19). Sinhababu thinks that if desires are “inputs” to deliberation that prompt us to figure out what is related causally to the object of desire, then, as we deliberate, desires combine with new means-ends beliefs to form new intentions, which involve having an appropriately related desire and belief (2013, p. 693). My own view is consistent with his, but the details of our views differ.
Their Chapter 11 (pp. 274–289) on “Addiction” deals with this issue. Arpaly and Schroeder’s concern is with how an addict’s blameworthiness is mitigated by the addiction, given that they argue earlier that intrinsic desires strong enough to motivate our actions show what sort of persons we are. They argue that addictive behavior is caused by habit rather than by desire; and that furthermore, addiction prompts great expectations of reward that are not appeased. Thus, addicts experience cravings that are out of proportion to the strength of the desire.
The example is mine.
See Radcliffe (1997).
McDowell is a proponent of extreme internalism: “If a situation in which virtue imposes a requirement is genuinely conceived as such…then considerations which, in the absence of the requirement, would have constituted reasons for acting otherwise are silenced altogether—not overridden—by the requirement” (1978, p. 26).
Furthermore, for a Humean, who believes action results from the strongest desire at any time, reasons for the end do not transfer to the means. If I have a reason to exercise daily and know that I need to get off my sofa to do so—but I don’t actually desire to exercise at all—what I have reason to do is to inculcate the desire to exercise. Now, maybe getting off the sofa is part of the means to developing that desire, but maybe it is not. If I do have a reason to get off the sofa, it is not because that reason transferred from the reason I have to adopt daily exercise as an end.
I thank a referee for this journal for raising this point.
Hume himself makes a distinction between strong and violent passions, on the one hand, and weak and calm passions on the other. Calm passions are felt with little internal upheaval, while the violent ones create internal turmoil (Treatise 2.1.1.3). He argues that we can sometimes be moved by calm passions, like benevolence, over violent ones, like malice, when the calm passions are causally stronger than the violent (Treatise 2.3.3.10).
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Tamas Demeter, László Kocsis and Iulian Toader, for conceiving and editing the special collection on Humeanisms. I especially thank Richard R. McCarty for discussion about and his comments on this article. I am also indebted to two anonymous referees for their helpful comments, one of whom took the time to read and respond to two versions of this essay.
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Radcliffe, E.S. A Humean explanation of acting on normative reasons. Synthese 199, 1269–1292 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02788-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02788-9