Abstract
Agents sometimes act for normative reasons—for reasons that objectively favor their actions. Jill, for instance, calls a doctor for the normative reason that Kate is injured. In this article I explore a dispositional approach to acting for a normative reason. I argue for the need of epistemic, motivational, and executional dispositional elements of a theory of acting for a normative reason. Dispositions play a mediating role between, on the one hand, the normative reason and its normative force, and the action on the other hand. Thereby, they help to deal with problem cases such as cases of deviant causal chains and improper instrumental motivation.
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Notes
There are exceptions, of course, which will be compared to my own account throughout the paper—for instance Unger (1975), Hornsby (2008), Markovits (2010), Arpaly and Schroeder (2014), esp. section 3.8, where the focus is on objective moral reasons.
Moreover, it is often assumed that acting for a normative reason is, or at least requires, acting for a motivating reason that is identical with a normative reason (where ‘motivating reason’ is taken to stand for ‘explanatory reason’ or ‘deliberative reason’ and thus for something slightly more substantial than ‘normative reason for which someone acts’). This view is rather a dogma than a theory, however, for there are comparatively little explicit arguments for it and it has hardly received criticism (but see, e.g., Mantel 2014 for questioning this view, and Lord and Sylvan (forthcoming) for questioning the view that acting for a motivating reason that corresponds to a normative reason is sufficient for acting for a normative reason. The view is obviously at odds with the idea that normative reasons are non-psychological whereas (all) motivating reasons are belief-desire pairs (Mantel 2016).
How exactly normative reasons favor actions, and in virtue of what they do so, are interesting questions, but questions that I am not concerned with here. Furthermore, the reader might disagree about certain examples of normative reasons. A hedonistic act-utilitarian, for instance, might say: That the child is drowning is, per se, no normative reason to save him or her—only together with the fact that if the child is saved it will live a happy life (and not a life full of agony) it is a normative reason to perform this action. The reader may then substitute my examples of normative reasons with examples that he or she finds more plausible.
These thoughts can be extended to non-moral normative reasons.
Most of these authors explicitly refer to dispositions. However, some of them do not speak of dispositions but of the exercise of rational capacities (e.g., Smith), or of the causal efficacy of rationalization (e.g., Arpaly and Schroeder) but these notions have, I believe, a promising dispositional interpretation. Some (e.g., Hyman and Stoecker) take the relevant mental states to be the dispositions at issue, whereas I will be focusing on dispositional accounts that postulate rational dispositions in addition to mental states such as beliefs and desires. I take it, though, that it makes sense to group all these accounts together since there are striking similarities between the explicitly dispositionalist accounts I will focus on of, e.g., Turri, Wedgwood, and Broome, and all the other accounts.
Wedgwood (2006) allows only dispositions to make rational transitions. For the view that this restriction is excluding too much, see Broome (2013) and McHugh and Way (MS). I agree that such a restriction may be too narrow for the basing relation in general, but some restriction on these transitions will at least be necessary for the account of acting for a normative reason, see the next section.
For simplicity, I concentrate on the formation of beliefs or motivations. More precisely, also the disposition to sustain existing beliefs or motivations could figure in these statements. Furthermore, there may be irrational content-specific dispositions, too, by which people irrationally, though content-sensitively, base mental states on other mental states they have. Note also that an agent may have a disposition to be motivated as instrumental rationality requires, for instance, even if this disposition is not manifested in all circumstances in which he is under an instrumental requirement—dispositions may sometimes be masked, for instance.
Demons can play some role in the dispositional story, too: They can create the relevant dispositions (or their bases) in the agent. Dispositions can thus be weirdly caused. However, when they are manifested, the causal chain between the stimulus and the manifestation is not deviant, no matter how the disposition came about. Weirdly caused dispositions may give rise to troubles that need to be solved somehow, but they do not lead to deviant causal chains between the mental states involved in the basing relations by which these dispositions are manifested.
The fact that Kim is injured is not even a prudential reason for Jack to call the ambulance (in fact, he will not profit from doing so, and would not even profit from it if Kim was the gang leader’s friend). Suppose also that there is no reason of etiquette (if these were normative) for Jack to call an ambulance (suppose Kim belongs to a social group which the rules of etiquette of Jack’s society require to ignore). The most plausible verdict about this example is thus that Jack does not act for the moral reason that Kim is injured, and thereby not for the normative reason that Kim is injured at all, since there is no other, non-moral sense in which this might be a normative reason to call an ambulance in these circumstances.
What about a different case in which there is another, non-moral sense in which the fact that Kim is injured speaks in favor of calling an ambulance? Such cases highlight that, strictly speaking, we must distinguish acting for the normative reason that p in its role as a moral reason from acting for the normative reason that p in other roles, e.g., in its role as a prudential reason. Strictly speaking, people act for the normative reason that p only with respect to p’s role within a specific normative system, and p might in principle belong to various normative systems and might thus favor the action in different ways. If Jack called the ambulance because he knows that Kim will later reward him for this, and if this reason of prudence is normative, we might say that Kim does not act for the normative reason that Kim is injured in its role as a moral reason, but that he does act for the normative reason that Kim is injured in its role as a prudential reason. For simplicity, I prefer to speak of acting for a normative reason without specification of the normative system to which the reason belongs, since I believe that usually the context specifies quite clearly which is the most relevant normative system according to which the fact favors the action, and it is thus usually clear from the context how to evaluate the claim that an agent acted for a certain normative reason under its most salient interpretation.
Ambulance is structurally similar to Kant’s example of the merchant (see Kant 1785/6, B 397–400) with regard to the instrumental motivation to perform an action. How-ever, Ambulance can be described more clearly and is therefore better for an examination of the mental states involved. This is why I prefer to use my own example instead of the merchant example for making this point.
This seems to be noted also by Arpaly and Schroeder (2014), e.g., p. 179. They accommodate this idea by reference to non-instrumental desires, whereby their account is too restrictive, as I will argue below. Markovits (2010) seems to be aware of the problem, too (e.g., p. 211), but it is not clear how her Coincident Reasons Thesis that an agent’s motivating reasons must coincide with the reasons justifying the action can evade it. Under one interpretation, it suffices for the normative and the motivating reason to coincide if the action is based on the belief representing the normative reason (as in Ambulance). It is an improvement that Markovits restates the Thesis by appeal to non-instrumental motivating reasons on p. 230, but I think that full understanding of the relation between the normative reason and the action (or of what it means that the rightness of the action is a “non-accidental result of acting with that motive” (Markovits 2010, 211) can only be achieved by a more overtly dispositional approach (since non-instrumental desires allow for accidental, deviant causation).
If a single normative reason favors the action in different ways, according to different normative systems, we must ask, more precisely, whether the agent acts for the normative reason that p in its role as a reason of system A or in its role as a reason of system B, etc. Accordingly, we must refer to more specific dispositions. The agent needs to manifest the disposition to be motivated to do what normative reasons of system A favor in order to act for the normative reason in its role as a reason from system A, etc.
Focusing on dispositions with respect to certain kinds of normative reasons solves one of the most important worries raised by Bridges (2011, 200–201): that there are countless reasons to do almost anything and that nobody seems to be disposed to do everything that is favored by these—even if he or she represents these by respective beliefs.
Furthermore, having this disposition with respect to reasons of kind K does not require that one would under all circumstances be motivated to do X if one represented a reason of the kind K that favors doing X, since the disposition cannot simply be reduced to a counterfactual conditional—for instance, a disposition is not manifested if it is “masked” by external circumstances (e.g., Johnston 1992). However, in usual circumstances, at least, the disposition would be manifested if the agent represented a reason of the kind K.
Correct conceptualization is helpfully explicated as a descriptive characterization of the right or the good according to the correct normative theory (Arpaly and Schroeder 2014, 164).
Although one might classify it as an action from virtue if one takes enkrasia to be a higher order virtue, for instance.
The interaction of different dispositions of one and the same object is described by Mumford and Anjum (2011, 27–46) by a vector model. A stronger disposition to give a response may thus conceal a weaker disposition not to give that response, for instance.
A nice example is the Sweaty Chameleon which is disposed to look green, although this disposition is masked by its intuitive ability to foresee situations of being observed and producing red sweat such that it will look red when it is being observed (Ashwell 2010).
Secondary deviance, i.e., deviance of the causal chain between the bodily movement and an intended effect, might be excluded similarly. If a normative reason favors an action in virtue of its effects, acting for this normative reason arguably requires manifesting also the disposition to move one’s body such as to produce the appropriate effects. However, a discussion of secondary deviance would go beyond the scope of this paper and is not essential to my argument.
Therefore, my argument does not imply that Linda is flying home for no reason at all (she may be flying for a belief-desire reason, as well as for a motivating consideration, see below), though it does imply that she is not flying home for the normative reason that her house has been damaged.
Notably, there is no implication from “The agent acts for the reason that the house is damaged” (in the premise-sense) and “That the house is damaged is a normative reason for the action” to “The agent acts for the normative reason that the house is damaged.” It’s not a bug; it’s a feature: acting on a premise that refers to a normative reason does not imply that the agent is responsive to the actual normative reason in the world (rather than confabulating a supposed reason when that turns out to coincide with an actual normative reason as in Linda’s case).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the participants of the colloquium of Holmer Steinfath for insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Special thanks is due to Benjamin Kiesewetter and Ralf Stoecker, who provided me with valuable feedback concerning the dispositional approach on a symposium on my book manuscript “Acting for a normative reason: A competence account” in Berlin in 2015. Further thanks goes to Christoph Fehige, Frank Hofmann, and Eva Schmidt, as well as to two anonymous referees for Erkenntnis.
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Mantel, S. Three Cheers for Dispositions: A Dispositional Approach to Acting for a Normative Reason. Erkenn 82, 561–582 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9832-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9832-8