Abstract
I argue that John Mackie’s treatment of practical reason is both attractive and unjustly neglected. In particular, I argue that it is importantly different from, and much more plausible than, the kind of instrumentalist approach famously articulated by Bernard Williams. This matters for the interpretation of the arguments for Mackie’s most famous thesis: moral scepticism, the claim that there are no objective values. Richard Joyce has recently defended a version or variant of moral scepticism by invoking an instrumentalist theory like Williams’. I argue that this is a serious strategic mistake.
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Notes
Williams’ views are developed in four places. “Internal and External Reasons” first appeared in Moral Luck. I shall give page references to the reprint in Darwall et al. 1997. Williams returned to the topic in Williams 1989 and Williams 1995. His final reflections on the topic are to be found in Williams 2001.
Scanlon is quite explicit in interpreting Williams as developing a non-debunking view. At p. 365 of What We Owe to Each Other, he writes: “I will assume that [Williams’] claim that there are only internal reasons does not reflect skepticism about reasons in the standard normative sense.” Parfit (1997) is equally clear, in “Reasons and Motivation,” that he sees Williams as developing a reductive, but not a debunking or eliminativist, account of normative practical reasons. Korsgaard, however, may take Williams to be developing a debunking view; her celebrated critique of his work comes, after all, in an article entitled “Scepticism about Practical Reason.” Page reference to Korsgaard are to the reprint in Darwall et al. 1997.
On this issue see Garner 1990.
Many thanks to Carl Feierabend, Bredo Johnsen, Bill Nelson, an audience at the University of Houston, and the editors of this special issue for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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Phillips, D. Mackie on Practical Reason. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 10, 457–468 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-007-9096-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-007-9096-0