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Might Intentions be the Only Source of Practical Imperatives?

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Abstract

I focus on the broadly instrumentalist view that all genuine practical imperatives are hypothetical imperatives and all genuine practical deliberation is deliberation from existing motivations. After indicating why I see instrumentalism as highly plausible, I argue that the most popular version of instrumentalism, according to which genuine practical imperatives can take desires as their starting point, is problematic. I then provide a limited defense of what I see as a more radical but also more compelling version of instrumentalism. According to the position I defend, genuine practical deliberation and genuine practical imperatives take as their starting point the agent's intentions and only the agent's intentions.

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  1. Dept. of Philosophy, University of Utah, 260 Central Campus Drive, Room 345, Salt Lake City, 84112, U.S.A.

    Chrisoula Andreou

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  1. Chrisoula Andreou
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Correspondence to Chrisoula Andreou.

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Given my loose usage, the Humean position Bernard Williams defends in his seminal article “Internal and External Reasons” (1981) counts as a version of instrumentalism about practical reason, since it incorporates the idea that every genuine practical imperative takes as its starting point some existing motivation(s) of the agent. It deviates from strict instrumentalism in that it leaves room for specificationist reasoning (reasoning aimed at moving from general ends to specific ends) in addition to means-end reasoning. For example, it leaves room for practical reasoning that is focused on “finding constitutive solutions, such as deciding what would make for an entertaining evening, granted that one wants entertainment” or on “thinking how the satisfaction of elements in [one's subjective motivational set] can be combined, e.g. by time-ordering” (Williams, 1981, p. 104).

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Andreou, C. Might Intentions be the Only Source of Practical Imperatives?. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 9, 311–325 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-005-9008-0

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