Abstract
Our faculties of reason are not faculties of perception. They are best characterized as kinds of instruction manual on reality that provide us, via rational intuitions, with indirect information about what Reason favours us doing and being. As normative reasons exist indubitably, and as we are indubitably normatively aware, it follows that Reason exists and is the author of our instruction manuals. Given we are almost inescapably bound to consult our faculties of reason, Reason has considerable influence over us and thereby qualifies as some kind of a god or divine mind. To avoid the temptation to bloat my conclusion and attribute to Reason qualities that my arguments have not licensed, I adopt Samuel Johnson’s term and refer to her as a mente divina and the theory as divine psychologism.
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Notes
- 1.
It should be noted that though I think the perceptual faculty view of normative awareness is implausible as an account of how we are actually aware of normative properties, nothing of any significance in my overall case will be affected if I am wrong and we do, in fact, perceive normative properties. For instance, neither the case for the existence of the mind of Reason, or her influential nature, would be in any way undermined.
- 2.
Other philosophers see in the fact that we cannot know whether an act is right or wrong without first acquainting ourselves with its non-normative features as evidence that rightness and wrongness “supervenes” on an act’s non-normative features such that the same non-normative features entail the same normative ones. This is “supervenience thesis” will rear its ugly head again in the next chapter. But hopefully it is now clear that it is in fact just evidence of the instruction-manual nature of our faculty of reason. The other ‘evidence’ offered in support of it are widespread rational intuitions that represent it to be true; but as I will show in the next chapter, once the mental nature of Reason is appreciated, it becomes unreasonable—indeed, it is normatively autistic—to interpret these intuitions literally. They are Reason emphasising just how opposed she is to certain ways of behaving and are not to be taken literally. As I note again in the concluding chapter, what others call the ‘supervenience’ thesis should really be called the ‘super-emphasis’ thesis.
- 3.
The fact my reason gives me this sort of information on any kind of act, no matter how horrendous it may be constitutes—I believe—some evidence that Reason is capable of bidding us do anything. Why else provide us with such information? If there were some activities she was metaphysically incapable of favouring us engaging in, then there would be no point giving us any informational advice on how to do them.
- 4.
I should say that I am not entirely comfortable with the term ‘belief’ as the idea incorporates a degree of assertiveness that is not found to the same extent in the idea of a ‘thought.’ That is, to believe something is to be asserting, mentally, that it is the case with a higher degree of confidence than is contained in the idea that one is merely thinking something is so. Nevertheless, nothing of any great significance turns on these matters, I will continue to talk of beliefs for convenience.
- 5.
With the exception that I am imagining—falsely—that there is causal transaction occurring between the world I am imagining and my mind (something that I would not be falsely imagining if there really was a causal transaction occurring between the world I am imagining and the actual world). But this does not affect the point of the example. For instance, what if my sensory faculties are working, but I imagine I am in fact suffering from locked-in syndrome and am hallucinating everything? Does my possession of this false belief about the nature of my situation prevent it from being true that I am perceiving the world? Intuitively, not.
- 6.
I am not suggesting this is a sufficient condition. There may be ways of acquiring beliefs via causal interaction with their objects that do not qualify as cases of awareness, due to the accidental or wayward nature of the connection.
- 7.
It should be noted that Street and Joyce take these evolutionary accounts of our intuitions and judgements to debunk them, at least insofar as such intuitions might otherwise be taken to support objectivist, realist metaethical positions (such as my own).
- 8.
And Kahane (2011) deems that the diversity of moral beliefs “over time and across and within cultures—a diversity not fully explained by difference in non-evaluative belief—makes the suggestion that all evaluative beliefs can be given a straightforward evolutionary explanation extremely implausible”. But that seems akin to arguing that the diversity of our skin colours over time and across space shows evolutionary explanations of our skin colour are implausible. That is, it does not seem to make the suggestion “extremely implausible” at all.
- 9.
Perhaps I am wrong to find these accounts so persuasive. However, even if there is a better alternative explanation of how we came to have Reason’s book impressed on us, this won’t affect the basic argument I am making in this chapter. And that is that by whatever means we have come to have Reason’s book impressed on us, she—Reason—must be implicated, else our books would give us no awareness of any reasons, something that is inconceivable.
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Harrison, G.K. (2018). Mente Divina. In: Normative Reasons and Theism. Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90796-3_6
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