Abstract
All favoring relations must have a mind as their bearer. The idea of a favoring attitude being borne by something non-mental is incoherent, as is the idea of a favoring attitude that lacks any bearer at all. As all normative reasons are favoring relations, then all normative reasons must have a mind to bear them. This means that all objectivist naturalist and non-naturalist analyses of normative reasons are false, indeed incoherent. They all, by definition, turn out either to be identifying normative reasons with something other than a favoring relation, or to be supposing that favoring relations can be borne by something other than a mind, be it either some objective natural or non-natural feature, or nothing whatsoever.
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- 1.
There are some who deny that epistemic reasons are normative reasons, but an instead be reduced to nonnormative facts about truth indication (for instance, see Chris Heathwood 2009). I have argued against this view elsewhere (see my 2017b). But whether one calls them epistemic reasons or something else, there do seem to be normative reasons to believe what is true due to its truth, and it is those I am interested in analysing.
- 2.
- 3.
I should add that, much to my embarrassment, I (2015) made this very mistake in the first article I wrote in which I expressed the view being defended in this work. Here:
The non-agential natural world cannot bid us do thing. No good trying to pass the normative buck to normative reasons, for exactly the same concerns apply to those. A normative reason is a favouring of doing (or believing) something, and so the same point can be made: normative reasons do things only a person could do: they favour us doing things. (p. 121)
The normative reason starts out as a favouring, but then it starts favouring things.
- 4.
Anderson and Welty (2011) have argued recently that propositions are thoughts. That may be true, but it would not affect my point because thoughts, though borne by minds, do not themselves favour anything.
- 5.
This is mainly for convenience as subjectivist views—or at least, subjectivist views that identify normative reasons with some of our own subjective states—are best dealt with separately, as they are false for quite different reasons. It is also an open question whether subjects—that is minds—are natural objects. So, it is as well to treat subjectivist views separately from naturalist views to avoid any appearance of begging important questions about the nature of minds. On this definition subjectivist metanormative views—so, views that identify normative reasons with the mental states of subjects—do not qualify as forms of naturalism.
References
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Harrison, G.K. (2018). Mentality. In: Normative Reasons and Theism. Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90796-3_3
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