Abstract
In “Vindicating the Normativity of Rationality,” Nicholas Southwood proposes that rational requirements are best understood as demands of one’s “first-personal standpoint.” Southwood argues that this view can “explain the normativity or reason-giving force” of rationality by showing that they “are the kinds of thing that are, by their very nature, normative.” We argue that the proposal fails on three counts: First, we explain why demands of one’s first-personal standpoint cannot be both reason-giving and resemble requirements of rationality. Second, the proposal runs headlong into the now familiar “bootstrapping” objection that helped illuminate the need to vindicate the normativity of rationality in the first place. Lastly, even if Southwood is right—the demands of rationality just are the demands or our first-personal standpoints—the explanation as to why our standpoints generate reasons will entail that we sometimes have no reason at all to be rational.
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Notes
Southwood (2008).
Southwood (2008), 19. In his 2008 reply to Southwood, Broome himself finds much of value in Southwood’s account: “I agree that we can consider most requirements of rationality as being relative to a standpoint.” (98) And he agrees, further, that standpoints have first-personal authority: “We can consider the authority first-personal, since it comes from nowhere else but your own standpoint.” (99).
Ibid., 26, emphasis added.
Ibid., 27.
Ibid., 28.
See Southwood, 14–15.
Southwood, 25.
See Williams (1981).
We include “absent a change in his antecedent attitudes” in recognition of the possibility that this rational requirement has wide scope. In the next section, we argue that on Southwood’s model, this and many requirements of rationality have narrow scope.
Southwood, 29. For arguments in favor of the subjective reasons account, see Kolodny (2005).
Broome (2008), 98.
We talk about coherence amongst mental states rather than attitudes because sometimes failures of rationality involve failure to adopt an attitude, and thus there can be conflicts between two mental states, one of which is the lack of an attitude; such conflicts are not conflicts between attitudes.
Alan’s requirement to drink the liquid in front of him—stemming from his fine-gin-drinking end and his belief that the glass is a glass of fine gin—matches this schema, and therefore, on Southwood’s view, also has narrow scope.
Southwood, 11, n.5.
For a particularly perspicuous example, see Regan (2002).
For related discussion, see Enoch (2006).
For a similar point, see Velleman, “A Right to Self-Termination.”
There is one possible out: One could claim instead that we have learned, surprisingly, that rationality requires us not to adopt ends that are incompatible with self-respect. Such requirements, however, would look suspiciously unlike traditional requirements of rationality.
References
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Enoch, D. (2006). Agency, Shmagency: Why normativity won’t come from what is constitutive of action. Philosophical Review, 115(2), 169–198.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Elizabeth Guthrie for her helpful comments. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewer for his or her feedback.
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Coons, C., Faraci, D. First-Personal Authority and the Normativity of Rationality. Philosophia 38, 733–740 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-010-9250-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-010-9250-0