Conclusion: The Scope of Relative Externalism

Abstract

The term repression, as it was defined in Chapter 2 and has been used so far, covers a large range of scenarios. An agent is repressed any time some portion of his motivational structure prevents him from properly deliberating about the reason-giving force of one or more of his desires. An agent has a reason to overcome repression precisely because he ought to be able to properly deliberate about his desires, but cannot do so in his repressed state. Such a reason is relative because it concerns an agent’s own desires, but it is external because the agent lacks deliberative access to it. Even though repression does cover a large range of scenarios — so large in fact that it would seem that most people are at least partially repressed for some period of their lives — it might still seem ontologically indulgent to posit a type of reason, the entire set of which is populated by the reasons agents have to overcome it. In order to dispel the appearance of indulgence, one need only show just how many types of deliberative incapacity there are for which agents have reasons to overcome. One could simply construe the term repression to cover all of these types of deliberative incapacity, but to do so too quickly might lead one to miss the variety and range of incapacities that fall within that construal. This final chapter attempts to expand the set of relative external reasons by looking at a few types of deliberative incapacities that are similar enough to repression to give agents relative external reasons to overcome them, but which are nevertheless different enough to resist an easy classification under the banner of repression.