Books
Edited
JOSEPH RAZ, THE ROOTS OF NORMATIVITY edited with an introduction by Ulrike Heuer
Oxford: Oxford University Press 2022
Paperback edition OUP 2024
LUCK, VALUE AND COMMITMENT: THEMES FROM THE ETHICS OF BERNARD WILLIAMS
Co-edited with Gerald Lang. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2012 (contributions by John Broome, Jonathan Dancy, David Enoch, Ulrike Heuer, Brad Hooker, Gerald Lang, Philip Pettit, Joseph Raz, Michael Smith, Jay Wallace, Susan Wolf).
Monograph
GRÜNDE UND MOTIVE. ÜBER HUMESCHE THEORIEN PRAKTISCHER VERNUNFT
mentis Verlag, Paderborn 2001, 260 pages.
Edited journal issue
THE NORMATIVE SIGNIFICANCE OF INTENTIONS
Co-edited with Matthew Smith (with contributions by Luca Ferrero, Richard Holton, Hallie Liberto, Erasmus Mayr, David Owens, Sarah Paul, Joseph Raz, Ralph Wedgwood, Fiona Woollard). Special Issue of Philosophical Explorations (20th Anniversary Issue), 20:2, 2017.
Articles
Forthcoming
VALUE-BASED REASONS for Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Abstract. In this paper I defend the view that the (derivative or non-derivative) value of an action is a paradigm case of a reason for action. I argue that there are two conditions that reasons for actions must satisfy which work in tandem: the Intelligibility Requirement and the Guidance Condition respectively. I show that and how value-based reasons satisfy both. I then argue for the view that it is only the value of actions that explains reasons contrasting the approach with the sometimes held view that practical reasons are provided by the value of the action’s outcomes. I also begin an explanation of the ways in which purported counterexamples to a value-based analysis can be part of the value-based view, if it is understood on the model of paradigm and variation.
THE POINT OF EXCLUSIONARY REASONS forthcoming in Andrei Marmor, Kimberley Brownlee, David Enoch (eds.), Engaging Raz, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Abstract. One of Joseph Raz’s signature contributions to the explanation of normativity is the introduction of the concept of an exclusionary reason (ER). As Raz sees it, ERs play a crucial role in the explanation of legitimate legal authority, but they are also ubiquitous outside of the legal domain. My focus is on their role in explaining the way in which moral, or at any rate, non-legal obligations or duties normatively differ from ordinary first-order reasons. According to Raz, such obligations are best understood as ‘protected reasons’, i.e. first-order reasons which are ‘protected’ by an exclusionary reason, which in turn is a second-order reason: a reason not to act for reasons of a certain kind:
(PR) A protected reason to φ is a first-order reason to φ, combined with an exclusionary reason not to be guided by any of the excluded reasons, R1-Rn.
This proposal has at least three merits: (i) it explains how obligations are normatively different from first-order reasons without appealing to strength or weight, (ii) while allowing that reasons from obligation are, like all reasons, defeasible, since there can be reasons against φ-ing (other than the excluded R1-Rn) which may defeat the obligation. (iii) A third point in its favour is that it makes sense of the common observation that obligations seem to restrict our freedom. The protected-reason account suggests that obligations are reasons that one shouldn’t fail to satisfy for certain kinds of reasons. There is a sense of restriction here which fits the intuitive understanding of having an obligation.
To assess the proposal, I first explain in some detail what it amounts to (sections 2 to 6) and then explore whether it can be made intelligible within Raz’s general approach to the explanation of reasons which I will call ‘the value-based account’. According to the value-based account, a reason to act is the fact that an available action has value (and it is possible for the agent to perform the action for that reason). This statement applies in a straightforward way only to first-order reasons. I show how the value-based account can be extended to protected reasons in sections 7 and 8.
REASONS FROM IDENTITY forthcoming in Simon Kirchin (ed), The Future of Normativity, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Abstract. Identities play a prominent role in many current discussions regarding nationality, gender, ethnicity, and religion. There is little doubt that these identities which are often based on social roles and are subject to social expectations are important for the ways in which people act and lead their lives. They certainly seem to have normative significance. This chapter explores why and when identities provide reasons. It examines Sartre’s well-known comments on bad faith as an objection that any account of reasons from identity must address. There are two roles that practical identities have been assigned in the explanation of normativity which can be seen as marking the ends of a spectrum: Korsgaard’s who regards practical identities as the source of all normativity, and Scanlon’s who doubts that identities have any direct role to play in the explanation of reasons. The chapter argues that between the all-encompassing and the skeptical, there is space for a direct role of identities in determining some practical reasons. It is not an idiosyncratic role but one that draws on a general value-based account of practical reasons, and it is not subject to the bad faith worry.
‘THE VOLUNTARY IS ESSENTIALLY SUPERFICIAL’. BERNARD WILLIAMS ON RESPONSIBILITY AND POLITICAL FREEDOM forthcoming in Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco and Daniel Murata (eds.), Bernard Williams: From Responsibility to Jurisprudence. Bloomsbury/Hart Publishing 2024.
Abstract. In this paper, I try to square three very different contributions to the discussion of responsibility by Bernard Williams in ‘Moral Luck’, ‘Recognizing Responsibility’ (in Shame and Necessity), and in the rarely discussed essay ‘Moral Responsibility and Political Freedom’. The three sources are not obviously compatible, but I believe that there is unifying interpretation. Williams’s argument, in outline, is this: according to a common view of Moral Responsibility, agents are responsible only for their voluntary agency (e.g. according to the Kantian tradition, but also in beyond that). As Williams sees it, voluntariness matters when it comes to criminal responsibility because it secures that the state does not unduly infringe its citizens’ freedom. But relying on voluntariness is of limited use for understanding responsibility outside the criminal law. Far from being a necessary condition of responsibility proper, voluntariness is relevant to criminal responsibility only, and even that is true only if we assume post-industrial liberalism and its commitment to political freedom. The restrictions on responsibility that proponents the Moral Responsibility seek to impose are therefore external and not required by the concept of responsibility itself. Williams’s approach reconciles two horns of an apparent dilemma:
i. A person can be responsible only for what they do intentionally or voluntarily and what is, in that sense, under their control.
ii. Agents are considered to be and consider themselves responsible for the actual results of their agency – for what they actually do, whether or not those results are intended. (Williams develops this claim in ‘Moral Luck’)
The Moral Responsibility view relies on a superficial concept, that of the voluntary. Voluntariness does not establish control. But that does not undermine the concept’s usefulness within the law. It secures political freedom, i.e. the freedom of citizens from undue state interference. It is therefore, if its limitations are observed, a legitimate interpretation of the relation of the four elements of responsibility that Williams claims are universal ingredients of any view of responsibility: causation, intention, state and response. “These really are universal materials. What we must not suppose is that they are always related to one another in the same way or, indeed, that there is one ideal way in which they should be related to one another. There are many ways of relating them, in particular of relating intention and state to response.” (‘Recognising Responsibility’: 56) On a different, and less superficial, understanding of responsibility the four elements needn’t be present when a person is responsible – they can be relevant in different ways. Therefore, it is possible to embrace the second horn of the dilemma as well and allow that there can be responsibility for what one brings about unintentionally or involuntarily. Exploring the ways in which those results of our agency affect us isn’t precluded by allowing Moral Responsibility a limited role.
Published
INTRODUCTION in: J. Raz, The Roots of Normativity, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2022, pp. 1-18
LUCK AND RESPONSIBILITY ACCORDING TO BERNARD WILLIAMS in: Andras Szigeti and Matthew Talbert (eds), Morality and Agency: Themes from Bernard Williams, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2022, chapter 9.
Abstract: In his seminal paper, “Moral Luck,” Bernard Williams begins to develop an account of responsibility for unintentional aspects of our agency. It rests on a crucial distinction of success and failure, internal or external to an agent’s project. I argue that a success which results from conditions that are internal to a project is not a lucky success, nor is a failure which results from something that is internal to the project just unlucky. There is no internal luck. Responsibility-defying luck is always external. An important result of this exploration is that Williams’s view opens a path for understanding responsibility neither as being concerned with reactive attitudes such as indignation or blame, nor in a common rationalist way as being based on an agent’s reason-responsiveness. Instead, responsibility depends on how a person’s actions relate to the exercise of her abilities in the pursuit of her projects and how they are integrated into her life.
MOTIVES AND INTERPRETATIONS: On Friedrich Waismann, Will and Motive, in: Dejan Makovec and Stewart Shapiro (eds.), Friedrich Waismann: The Open Texture of Analytic Philosophy, Palgrave Macmillan 2019, pp. 279-294. (The link is to the penultimate draft)
Abstract. In this paper, I comment on Waismann’s view of ‘motivational explanations’ as he develops it in his unfinished, posthumously published essay ‘Will and Motive’. According to a traditional view, when we act, the motive is an internal psychological state of which we can know through introspection, and it triggers or causes the action. Thus the motive causally explains an independent event which is the action. As Waismann sees it, everything here is false. The motive is (1) not an internal psychological state. (2) We do not know it through introspection. (3) It does not trigger an action, and (4) there is no causal explanation in which the motive is the cause and the action the effect. I analyze Waismann’s arguments for these claims and work out his positive view. Waismann draws our attention to two features: the uncertainty and instability of motives, and the fact that they are often ascribed on the basis of the action even when the agent wasn’t aware of them prior to acting. Might this hold only for certain motives: viz. ‘Triebfedern’ (drives), in particular those that are unconscious, but not for motives in the sense of ‘Beweggrund’ (reason, purpose)? If action explanations in the light of an agent’s purposes or reasons are unaffected by Waismann’s arguments for the instability and uncertainty of motives, then perhaps the traditional view would not be false for this kind of explanation: it is not uncertain, or unstable. However, I understand Waismann as trying to show (in particular through his interpretation of Dostojevki’s Raskolnikov) that even if a reason for which a person acts or a purpose is something that the agent is aware of prior to action, we get the same kind of instability and uncertainty that occurs with unconscious motives. Here is why: agents are normally aware of quite a number of reasons for and against acting in a certain way. But for any one of those reasons, they may deny – as Raskolnikov does – that that is the reason for which they did it. It was a reason, all right, and even one that they considered, but not the one for which they acted. Thus the problems of instability and uncertainty that Waismann points out affects motives not only insofar as they are unconscious and mere drives. They affect motives in the sense of ‘Beweggrund’ as well.
THE RELEVANCE OF THE WRONG KIND OF REASONS in: C. McHugh, J Way, D Whiting, eds, Epistemic and Practical Normativity, Oxford University Press 2018, chapter 3. (The link is to the penultimate draft.)
Abstract. The discussion of the wrong kind of reasons problem (for short: WKR problem) has spread far beyond fitting attitude theory and buck-passing accounts of value: various philosophers hope to provide a unified account of central issues concerning practical and theoretical normativity by giving an explanation of why certain reasons are of the wrong kind for forming an attitude. They perceive what appears to be a unified phenomenon, and suspect that the explanation of why some reasons are of the wrong kind and others of the right kind for having an attitude are relevantly similar across different attitudes, and may reveal constitutive normative constraints that the attitudes in question are subject to. If the explanation of the right kind/wrong kind of reasons distinction is basically the same, or has the same general form, for theoretical attitudes such as belief, and practical attitudes like intention, and both rely on the normative constraints that are constitutive for the attitudes, then we may be able to provide a unified account of theoretical and practical normativity. Thus, explaining why certain reasons are of the wrong kind would furnish a heuristic for discovering important features of practical and theoretical normativity alike. In this paper I show why this ambition is misguided. I argue for two claims: (1) we should sharply distinguish the wrong kind of reasons problem as it arises for fitting attitude theories from any other problem that comes under the same name, and (2) the WKR problem outside of fitting attitude theory doesn’t have a very clear shape (if indeed there is such a problem at all). In particular, there is no similarity between reasons to believe and reasons to intend in this regard, and therefore no hope for a unified explanation of the alleged phenomenon. text goes here
REASONS TO INTEND in: Daniel Star (ed), The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity, Oxford University Press 2018, chapter 37, pp. 865-890. (The link is to the penultimate draft.)
Abstract: Donald Davidson writes that “[r]easons for intending to do something are very much like reasons for action, indeed one might hold that they are exactly the same except for time.” That the reasons for forming an intention and the reasons for acting as intended are in some way related is a widely accepted claim. But it can take different forms: (1) the reasons may mirror each other so that there is a (derivative) reason to intend whenever there is a reason to act; or (2) they may reduce to just one kind: perhaps all reasons for action are really reasons for forming intentions.3 Or the other way around: (3) all reasons for intentions are really reasons to act. The three versions are not equally strong contenders though. The third - that reasons to intend could reduce to reasons to act - seems unlikely. After all, there may be reasons to form future-directed intentions, in particular, independently of the reason to act as intended. The second suggestion falls prey to different considerations: reasons to act can, at least sometimes, be reasons to produce a certain outcome, quite independently of the intention with which the action is done, or whether it is done intentionally at all. In these cases, the reason to act is not (or not obviously) a reason to intend. Therefore, I don’t pursue the possibility of a reduction in this paper. My focus is on the first, non-reductive proposal. I will discuss various versions of it in some detail, but ultimately reject it.
COMMENT ON T. M. SCANLON, 'IDEAS OF IDENTITY AND THEIR NORMATIVE STATUS' King’s College London, Yeoh Tiong Lay Centre for Politics, Philosophy and Law, annual lecture, 28 March 2018, published online here.
MORALISCHER ZUFALL UND KONTROLLE DURCH FÄHIGKEITEN Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung, Vol. 70 (2016), pp. 5-27. Link is to the penultimate draft.
Abstract: The problem of moral luck arises from the apparent conflict of two commonly accepted claims: it seems, on the one hand, that we are responsible only for those actions that are under our control; on the other hand, we seem to be responsible for the results of our actions, even if those depend on the cooperation of factors that we do not control directly. The opponents of moral luck side with the so-called control principle. In this paper, I argue, first, that their understanding of control leads into absurdities, and is in many ways inadequate. It makes it near impossible to explain responsibility for failed or negligent actions, for instance. Secondly, I develop a different understanding of control – control through skills - , and show that having control in this sense is compatible with moral luck, and also allows us to explain when and why we are responsible for failed and negligent actions.
Das Problem des moralischen Zufalls ergibt sich aus dem vermeintlich Konflikt zweier tief in unserem Alltagsverständnis von Verantwortung verankerter Annahmen: einerseits scheint es, dass wir nur für das verantwortlich sind, was unter unserer Kontrolle ist; andererseits sind wir aber verantwortlich für das, wir tun – für die Ergebnisse unseres Handeln - und die sind gewöhnlich nicht unter unserer Kontrolle, sondern hängen von vielen Umständen ab, auf die wir als Handelnde keinen direkten Einfluss haben. Die Gegner des moralischen Zufalls verteidigen das sogenannte Kontrollprinzip. In diesem Aufsatz argumentiere ich zum einen dafür, dass der Kontrollbegriff, der diesem Ansatzes unterliegt, zu Absurditäten führt und in verschiedenen Hinsichten unzureichend ist. Insbesondere gelingt es seinen Vertretern nicht, zu erklären, wann und warum wir für verfehlte und nachlässige Handlungen verantwortlich sind. Zum anderen entwickele ich einen anderen Kontrollbegriff – Kontrolle durch Fertigkeiten – und zeige, dass die Kontrolle über unser Handeln in diesem Sinn mit moralischem Zufall vereinbar ist. Darüberhinaus erlaubt uns dieser Kontrollbegriff zu erklären, wann und in welchem Umfang wir für missglückte und nachlässige Handlungen verantwortlich sind.
INTENTIONS, PERMISSIBILITY, AND THE REASONS FOR WHICH WE ACT in: Pavlakos, G. & V. Rodriguez-Blanco (eds), Practical Normativity. Essays on Reasons and Intentions in Law and Practical Reason, Cambridge University Press 2015, pp. 11-30. (The link is to the penultimate draft.)
Abstract. If you injure me, it matters morally whether it was an accident or you did it intentionally, and whether you did it because you thought it would be fun. I take it that any ethical theory will have to include some explanation of why this is. There are two dominant views in the current debate about the moral significance of an agent’s intentions: The one is that the intention with which someone acts at least sometimes determines whether what she does is right or wrong (permissible or impermissible). Proponents of the so-called doctrine of double-effect (DDE) hold that an action which has certain bad outcomes may be permissible if the bad consequences are only foreseen, even if the same action would be morally wrong if they were intended as a means. This is not the only way in which intentions could make a difference to an action’s permissibility, but it is the best-known defense that they do. According to the second view, intentions don’t matter in this way: they do not determine the permissibility of an action. They do matter, but in a different dimension of normative assessment: They determine whether the agent is a good or a bad person; or alternatively: they determine the “moral worth” of an action or its “meaning”, including its praiseworthiness or blameworthiness , or the severity of a wrong-doing. The main thesis is what Thomson called “The Irrelevance-of-Intentions-to-Permissibility Thesis” (for short: IIP)
[IIP] “It is irrelevant to the question whether X may do alpha what intention X would do alpha with if he or she did it.”
IIP is driven in part by skepticism about DDE: since – according to proponents of IIP - DDE is false, we must explain the relevance of intentions and reasons in a different way. Proponents of IIP tend not to consider the possibility that intentions might matter to permissibility in ways that are different from DDE. In this paper I do not focus on the arguments for or against DDE, but investigate IIP itself more closely, and look at some of the arguments for and against it.
INTENTIONS AND THE REASONS FOR WHICH WE ACT Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 114:3 (2014), pp. 291-316. (The link is to the penultimate draft.)
Abstract. Many of the things we do in the course of a day we don’t do intentionally: blushing, sneezing, breathing, blinking, smiling —to name but a few. But we also do act intentionally, and often when we do we act for reasons. Whether we always act for reasons when we act intentionally is controversial. But at least the converse is generally accepted: when we act for reasons we always act intentionally. Necessarily, it seems. In this paper, I argue that acting intentionally is not in all cases acting for a reason. Instead, intentional agency involves a specific kind of control. Having this kind of control makes it possible to modify one’s action in the light of reasons. Intentional agency opens the possibility of acting in the light of reasons. I also explain why when we act with an intention (and not just intentionally in a broader sense) we act for reasons. In the second part of the paper, I draw on these results to show that the dominant view of reasons to intend and the rationality of intentions should be rejected.
THE REASONS THAT CAN’T BE FOLLOWED. Comment on J. Raz, From Normativity to Responsibility in: The Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies 2013, vol. 8: 1-14 (with a reply by Joseph Raz).
PROMISING - PART 1 in: Philosophy Compass 7 (12): 832-841, 2012
Abstract. The explanation of promising is fraught with problems. In particular the problem that promises can be valid even when nothing good comes of keeping the promise (the problem of ‘bare wrongings’), and the bootstrapping problem with explaining how the mere intention to put oneself under an obligation can create such an obligation have been recognized since Hume’s famous discussion of the topic. There are two influential accounts of promising, and promissory obligation, which attempt to solve the problems: The expectation account and the practice account. While those accounts solve both the bootstrapping problem and the problem of bare wrongings, it turns out that they encounter numerous problems of their own.
PROMISING - PART 2 in: Philosophy Compass 7 (12): 842-851, 2012
Abstract. The explanation of promising is fraught with problems. In particular the problem that promises can be valid even when nothing good comes of keeping the promise (the problem of ‘bare wrongings’), and the bootstrapping problem with explaining how the mere intention to put oneself under an obligation can create such an obligation have been recognized since Hume’s famous discussion of the topic. In part 1, I showed that two main views of promising which attempt to solve these problems fall short of explaining the promissory obligation nonetheless. In this second part, I will explain what it takes to show that there is such an obligation (rather than just a reason of a different kind) to keep one’s promises, and discuss a further account of promissory obligation – the normative powers account – which perhaps stands a chance to solve both the bootstrapping and the bare wrongings problem (or rather, to show why we needn’t be worried about those problems after all), and to successfully explain promissory obligation. It comes in at least two different forms: one which regards the normative power to promise as based on our ability to form special relationships, and another which regards the promisee’s ‘authority interest’ as the basis.
THICK CONCEPTS AND INTERNAL REASONS in: U. Heuer & G. Lang (eds), Luck, Value and Commitment, OUP 2012, pp. 219-246 (The link is to the penultimate draft)
Abstract. It has become common to distinguish between two kinds of ethical concepts: thick and thin ones. Bernard Williams, who coined the terms, explains that thick concepts such as “coward, lie, brutality, gratitude and so forth” are marked by having greater empirical content than thin ones. They are both action-guiding and world-guided:
If a concept of this kind applies, this often provides someone with a reason for action… At the same time, their application is guided by the world. A concept of this sort may be rightly or wrongly applied, and people who have acquired it can agree that it applies or fails to apply to some new situation.
Thin concepts are concepts such as good and bad, right and wrong, obligation and duty. Judgments applying thick concepts have been seen as lending support to the possibility of explaining moral knowledge, and objectivity in ethics. It appears that due to their empirical content – their world-guidedness – judgments employing thick concepts can be true or false, depending on whether they get the worldly facts right. In addition they provide reasons for action – they are action-guiding – and thus may provide the starting point of a realist account of practical reasons: the view that reasons are facts and whether or not a person has a reason to act does not (normally) depend on her attitudes. The cruelty of an action is a reason not to perform it or to prevent it; that an action is kind is a reason in its favour. Of course these remarks aren’t conclusive – far from it. But even so, some non-cognitivists may regard them as completely wrongheaded, and so does Bernard Williams even though he is not a non-cognitivist. However, he believes that having a practical reason does depend on a person’s attitudes and motives. A certain worry about thick concepts will make clear what the problem is. It has most expressly been raised by Simon Blackburn, who sees it as undermining even the most superficial plausibility of moral cognitivism, as well as the claim that the properties picked out by thick concepts provide reasons. While we may readily accept that the kindness of an action or the fact that it is required by justice is a reason to perform it, there are many thick concepts whose action-guiding role we would reject. Some derogatory – e.g., racist or sexist - words express thick concepts too, Blackburn notes. And surely there are no racist or sexist truths. Furthermore there are concepts that some people use evaluatively (like chaste or obscene), but many of us do not regard the propositions in which those concepts feature as even prima facie reason giving. In raising these points, Blackburn claims that it is morally objectionable to regard the facts asserted in propositions which employ thick concepts as action-guiding because it leads to “a conservative and ultimately self-serving complacency.” As he sees it, the problem is that if we believe that the correct application of thick concepts yields evaluative truths and that evaluative truths state reasons for actions, we seem to be committed to accepting that some people are, say, fat, derog., and therefore to be ridiculed, and that there is at least a pro tanto reason to lead a chaste life, or feel affection towards cute women. Therefore, the view that all evaluative properties provide reasons for action or for attitudes such as admiration, affection or (dis)approval must be rejected. I will call this worry henceforth Blackburn’s challenge. The challenge is that understanding judgments employing thick concepts as expressing evaluative truths and providing reasons for actions or for attitudes leads to a morally unacceptable view. Blackburn suggests instead that we should separate the conditions for applying thick concepts and the reasons that we have in virtue of the concept applying. She may be cute, yes, but that is not a reason for “admiration and arousal.”
…it is morally vital that we proceed by splitting the input from the output in such a case. By refusing to split we fail to open an essential specifically normative dimension of criticism.
According to Blackburn, the meaning of thick concepts is made up of two distinct and in principle separable components: a descriptive one and the expression of an attitude. The truth-aptness and cognitive appearance of judgments employing thick concepts is explained by the descriptive component alone. Blackburn writes “[w]e get nothing but detachable and flexible attitudes, coupled with delineations of traits of character or action”. I will call this reply to Blackburn’s challenge the separability thesis. I agree with Blackburn that any account of thick concepts has to face and answer the challenge that he poses. In this paper, I will focus on one reply to the challenge which denies separability, namely Bernard Williams’s. Williams answers Blackburn’s challenge, while holding on to a cognitivist understanding of thick concepts. But his particular brand of cognitivism is peculiar: Williams rejects the separability thesis, and claims that correct applications of thick concepts yield evaluative (and not just descriptive) knowledge. But this is a special kind of knowledge. It is confined to a local community. The members of a community which uses certain thick concepts may have reasons to act accordingly, but the non-members do not. And even the reasons of members remain a little fragile: they may not want to continue using their concepts upon thorough reflection. The local knowledge view allows Williams to answer Blackburn’s challenge, because even though thick concepts are evaluative concepts and their application can yield evaluative knowledge, no one who isn’t a member of the relevant community has reason to be guided by the concept. Complementing a cognitivist view of thick concepts with reasons internalism allows Williams to answer the challenge. My aim in this paper is to show that Williams’s position is, despite its initial attraction, untenable. In particular, I am going to show why the internal reasons view is incompatible with Williams’s own understanding of thick concepts. My modest result is that the internalist view of reasons does not help to answer Blackburn’s challenge. My aim in this paper is not to answer the challenge but, rather, to explore the possibility of developing Williams’s attenuated version of cognitivism, and the possibility of combining it with reasons internalism.
INTRODUCTION (with Gerald Lang) in: U. Heuer & G. Lang (eds) Luck, Value and Commitment, Oxford University Press 2012, pp. 1-16
GUIDED BY REASONS: RAZ ON THE NORMATIVE-EXPLANATORY NEXUS in: Jurisprudence 2 (2), 2011, 353-365 (The link is to the penultimate draft)
THE PARADOX OF DEONTOLOGY, REVISITED in: Mark Timmons (ed), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2011, pp. 236-67.
Abstract. It appears to be a feature of our ordinary understanding of morality that we ought not to act in certain ways at all. We ought not to kill, torture, deceive, break our promises (say)—exceptional circumstances apart. Many moral duties are thought of in this way. Killing another person would be wrong even if it achieved a great good, and even if it led to preventing the deaths of several others. This feature of moral thinking is at the core of deontological ethics. But while it is also part and parcel of ordinary moral thought, it seems puzzling, because it requires an agent to act (or to abstain from acting) in certain ways, even if by violating the duty she could achieve a better outcome in terms of the very restriction that she is required to heed. If the explanation of the duty not to kill were that it preserves human life it would be hard to understand why killing is not morally permitted when it leads to preserving a greater number of lives. Moreover, why should we not violate a restriction if doing so leads to fewer violations of that very restriction? There are two questions here. (1) Why not violate a restriction whose point it is to preserve lives, if doing so leads to preserving a greater number of lives? (2) Why not violate a restriction if doing so minimizes the violation of that very restriction? The latter question concerns what is sometimes called ‘the paradox of deontology’ or the problem of ‘minimizing violations’. The former may concern the so-called trolley cases, for instance. After all, a trolley hurtling towards a number of innocent people is not about to violate the moral restriction on killing innocent people, as it is not the kind of thing that can be subject to such a restriction. In this paper I am concerned only with (2): the paradox of deontology. To put it in Nozick’s terms: ‘How can a concern for the nonviolation of C [i.e. some deontological constraint] lead to refusal to violate C even when this would prevent other more extensive violations of C?
Samuel Scheffler, puzzled by the same idea, put it in terms of ‘agent-centred restrictions’ (ACR), because the restriction requires an agent (not) to act in certain ways, contrasting thereby with a requirement that certain actions not be done. The restriction is thus an agent-relative rather than an agent-neutral one. Scheffler ended up rejecting the idea of agent-centred restrictions, as even on close investigation the puzzle would not dissolve. Scheffler maintains that ACRs have ‘an air of paradox’ to them, as they violate what he calls maximizing rationality. ACRs appear to clash with the idea of maximizing rationality, because they require an agent to choose the option that worse achieves her goal of not harming people. I call this, following common parlance, the paradox of deontology, even though it is not strictly speaking a paradox. Exploring whether there is really a problem here, and how it might be solved, is the main objective of this paper. I begin by explaining the puzzlement about agent-centred restrictions in more detail. I then discuss promising as an example of a kind of action which is thought to be subject to agent-centred restrictions. It turns out that they are surprisingly easy to explain. The difficult case is killing—and that should put us on guard. I argue that the problem is not with the very idea of deontological restrictions, but with puzzling aspects of the ethics of killing.
BEYOND WRONG REASONS: THE BUCK-PASSING ACCOUNT OF VALUE in: Michael Brady (ed.), New Waves in Metaethics, Palgrave: 2010, pp. 166-184 (The link is to the penultimate draft)
Abstract. The buck-passing account of value (BPA) is very fertile ground that has given rise to a number of interpretations and controversies. It has originally been proposed by T.M. Scanlon as an analysis of value: according to it, being good ‘is not a property that itself provides a reason to respond to a thing in certain ways. Rather, to be good or valuable is to have other properties that constitute such reasons’. Buck-passing stands in a complicated relation to the fitting-attitude analysis of normativity that reaches back to the work of Brentano and Ewing. Proponents of FA-analysis hold that, as a matter of the conceptual analysis of ‘good’, something is good if it is fitting to have pro-attitudes of a certain kind towards it. The ambition of FA-analysis is to explain all practical normativity in terms of the fittingness of attitudes, which – while being itself a normative concept – is the only normative concept which grounds all others. Wlodek Rabinowicz and Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen welcomed BPA as a contemporary version of FA-analysis, and others have followed this suggestion. But whether BPA should be regarded as a version of FA-analysis is a moot point. In section I, I show that BPA is not as obviously a successor of the fitting-attitude analysis of value as some have thought. The much discussed wrong-kind-of-reasons (for short: WKR) problem afflicts buck-passing only in so far as it incorporates a version of FA analysis, or at any rate is expressed in terms of reasons for attitudes. There can be a buck-passing account of value which is not affected by the problem: one that limits the account to reasons for actions (rather than attitudes). However, insofar as BPA does inherit elements of FA analysis, it also has a WKR problem. In section II, I discuss this problem and its solution. I show that it has been misidentified in the current literature, and that – once we understand the problem correctly – its solution is likely to be unavailable to the buck-passer. Hence we should reject any account of BPA that incorporates FA analysis. That leaves us with versions which do not: versions that formulate BPA in terms of reasons for actions only, rather than reasons for attitudes. Finally, in section III, I discuss why buck-passing seemed to be appealing to begin with, and whether a version of BPA that does not incorporate FA analysis is a viable contender of the account – beyond the WKR problem.
WRONGNESS AND REASONS Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Vol 13:2 (April 2010), 137-152 (The link is to the penultimate draft)
Abstract. Is the wrongness of an action a reason not to perform it? Of course it is, you may answer. That an action is wrong both explains and justifies not doing it. Yet, there are doubts. Thinking that wrongness is a reason is confused, so an argument by Jonathan Dancy. There can’t be such a reason if ‘ϕ-ing is wrong’ is verdictive, and an all things considered judgment about what (not) to do in a certain situation. Such judgments are based on all the relevant reasons for and against ϕ-ing. If that ϕ-ing is wrong, while being an all things considered verdict, would itself be a reason, it would upset the balance of reasons: it would be a further reason which has not yet been considered in reaching the verdict. Hence, the judgment wasn’t ‘all things considered' after all. I show that the argument against wrongness being a reason is unsuccessful, because its main assumption is false. Its main assumption is that a consideration which necessarily does not affect the balance of reasons is not a reason. I also argue that there can be no deontic buck-passing account.
REASONS AND IMPOSSIBILITY, Philosophical Studies, Vol 147, No 2, 2010, 235-246, 2010.
Abstract. In this paper, I argue that a person can have a reason to do what she cannot do. In a nutshell, the argument is that a person can have derivate reasons relating to an action that she has a non-derivative reason to perform. There are clear examples of derivative reasons that a person has in cases where she cannot do what she (non-derivatively) has reason to do. She couldn’t have those derivative reasons, unless she also had the non-derivative reason to do what she cannot do. I discuss a number of objections to this view, in particular two: (1) The objection that if there were reasons to do what one cannot do, many of those would be ‘crazy reasons’, and (2) the worry that if there were such reasons, then agents would have reasons to engage in futile deliberations and tryings. I develop an explanation of ‘crazy reasons’ that shows that not all reasons to do the impossible are crazy and only those that are need to be filtered out, and, regarding the second objecting, I show that the reasons for trying as well as for taking the means to doing something—instrumental reasons in a broad sense—are different from the reasons for performing the action in the first place. They are affected by impossibility, and we can explain why that is so. The view I argue for is that a person may have a reason to do what she cannot do, but she does not have a reason to try to do so or to take means to realizing the impossible.
MORALISCHE MOTIVATION in: S. Gosepath, W. Hinsch, B. Roessler (eds), Handbuch der politischen Philosophie und Sozialphilosophie, Berlin: deGruyter 2008
EXPLAINING REASONS: WHERE DOES THE BUCK STOP? Journal for Ethics and Social Philosophy, Vol 1:3, 2006.
Abstract. The buck-passing account of values offers an explanation of the close relation of values and reasons for action: of why it is that the question whether something that is of value provides reasons is not ”open.” Being of value simply is, its defenders claim, a property that something has in virtue of its having other reason-providing properties. The generic idea of buck-passing is that the property of being good or being of value does not provide reasons. It is other properties that do. There are, however, at least three versions of the account which differ in their understanding of those “other properties.” The first two versions both assume that non-normative properties provide reasons, the difference being that the second allows that normative properties also provide reasons. Both run into difficulties, which I explain, in trying to defend the claim that non-normative properties provide reasons for action. The third version of the buck-passing account which explains being of value in terms of more specific evaluative properties that are reason-providing remains unpersuasive as well. Once we understand the relation between general and specific properties as a difference in degree, there is no space for a reduction of the one kind of properties to the other. In section II I sketch an alternative account of the relation between reasons and values, which is based on a thesis that I call the Conceptual Link and the claim that values are not just co-extensive with reasons, but explain them.
INTERNALISM AND EXTERNALISM IN ETHICS Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2nd edition, New York: Macmillan 2005.
REASONS FOR ACTIONS AND DESIRES Philosophical Studies 121, 2004, 43-63.
Abstract. It is an assumption common to many theories of rationality that all practical reasons are based on a person's given desires. I shall call any approach to practical reasons which accepts this assumption a "Humean approach". In spite of many criticisms, the Humean approach has numerous followers who take it to be the natural and inevitable view of practical reason. I will develop an argument against the Humean view aiming to explain its appeal, as well as to expose its mistake. I focus on just one argument in favour of the Humean approach, which I believe can be constructed as the background idea of many Humean accounts: the argument from motivation.
RAZ ON REASONS AND VALUES in: P. Pettit, S. Scheffler, M. Smith, R.J. Wallace (eds), Reason and Value. Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2004, 129-52.
Abstract.Explaining the relation of values and reasons is a major focus of Joseph Raz’s work. I examine his account of the relation of values and reasons, focusing in particular on practical reasons. As a preliminary way of delineating two basic alternatives for mapping the relation of values and reasons, let me pose the Euthyphro-style question: (1) Is something valuable because we have reasons to behave in some way with respect to it? Or: (2) Do we have reasons to behave in some way with respect to it because it is valuable? Though helpful for contrasting different approaches, this question is still multiply ambiguous. It may be interpreted as a question concerning the metaphysical primacy of values and reasons respectively - that is, whether there have to be things of value for there to be reasons, or vice versa. There is also a question of conceptual primacy: Can ‘value’ be defined in terms of reasons, or can ‘reason’ be defined in terms of value? A related, but different question is epistemological: Does a person have to be able to master the concept of value in order to understand the concept of a reason (or, again, vice versa)? I use these three questions as guidelines for investigating Raz’s view of the relation of values and reasons. Are values (1) metaphysically, (2) conceptually, and/or (3) epistemologically prior to reasons? Or are reasons in all or any of these respects prior to value? My strategy in the paper is as follows: In section 1, I locate Raz’s position with respect to these three questions by contrasting his views with those of Thomas Scanlon. In section 2, I work out Raz’s account of reasons and values in some greater detail. And then, in section 3, I discuss what I take to be the remaining major problem with Raz’s approach.
SIND WÜNSCHE HANDLUNGSGRÜNDE? Analyse und Kritik Vol 21, 1999, 1-24.
Abstract.Desires are often taken to be the basis for all practical reasons. I introduce one of the most powerful arguments to sustain this view: the argument from motivation . In section 2, however, I develop an equally powerful objection to desire-based approaches showing that desires are not suited to accommodate the justificatory role of reasons. The objection suggests that at least one of the premises of the argument from motivation must presuppose that only desires can explain actions. This move is, however, fatal for desire-based views of practical reason. [The paper is in German.]
HABEN MEINE GRÜNDE ETWAS MIT MIR ZU TUN? BERNARD WILLIAMS ERWIDERUNG AUF JOHN MCDOWELL in: J. Nida-Rümelin (ed), Analyomen 3, 606-614. Walter deGruyter Berlin 1999.
ZUM BEGRIFF DER MORALISCHEN MOTIVATION in: G. Meggle (ed.) Analyomen 2, Perspectives in Analytical Philosophy, 243-250. Walter deGruyter, Berlin 1997.
UNMORALISCHE MORALPHILOSOPHEN? Ethik und Sozialwissenschaften 5 (3):383 (1994)
Misc.
VERANTWORTUNG, WENN ALLES SCHIEF GEHT Invited Blog post on: philosophy.ch, Swiss Portal for Philosophy, Politische Philosophie 30/12/2015,
INTERVIEW Philosophy of Action (August 2018)
