Abstract
I argue that John Mackie's treatment of practical reason is both attractive and unjustly neglected. In particular, I argue that it is importantly different from, and much more plausible than, the kind of instrumentalist approach famously articulated by Bernard Williams. This matters for the interpretation of the arguments for Mackie's most famous thesis: moral skepticism, the claim that there are no objective values. Richard Joyce has recently defended a version or variant of moral skepticism by invoking an instrumentalist theory like Williams'. I argue that this is a serious strategic mistake.
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Williams' views are developed in four places. “Internal and External Reasons” was first published in 1979 and appeared in his Moral Luck (1981). He returned to the topic in “Internal reasons and the obscurity of blame” (which was first published in 1989 and appears in his collected papers (1995a)) and then in “Replies” (1995b). His final reflections on the topic are to be found in “Postscript: Some further notes on internal and external reasons” (2001).
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Scanlon is quite explicit in interpreting Williams as developing a non-debunking view. In What We Owe to Each Other, he writes: “I will assume that [Williams'] claim that there are only internal reasons does not reflect skepticism about reasons in the standard normative sense” (p. 365). Parfit is equally clear that he sees Williams as developing a reductive, but not a debunking or eliminativist, account of normative practical reasons (Parfit 1997). Korsgaard, however, may take Williams to be developing a debunking view; her celebrated critique of his work comes, after all, in an article entitled “Skepticism about Practical Reason.”
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Carl Feierabend, Bredo Johnsen, Bill Nelson, an audience at the University of Houston, and the editors of this volume for helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter.
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Phillips, D. (2010). Mackie on Practical Reason. In: Joyce, R., Kirchin, S. (eds) A World Without Values. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 114. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3339-0_6
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