Abstract
In this paper I grant the Humean premise that some reasons for action are grounded in the desires of the agents whose reasons they are. I then consider the question of the relation between the reasons and the desires that ground them. According to promotionalism, a desire that p grounds a reason to φ insofar as A’s φing helps promote p. According to motivationalism a desire that p grounds a reason to φ insofar as it explains why, in certain circumstances, A would be motivated to φ. I then give an argument favouring motivationalism, namely that promotionalism entails that agents have reasons to perform physically impossible actions, whereas motivationalism entails that there are no such reasons. Although this is a version of the ‘Too Many Reasons’ objection to promotionalism, I show that existing responses to that problem do not transfer to the case of reasons to perform physically impossible actions. In the penultimate section I consider and reject some objections to motivationalism made by promotionalists. The conclusion is that Humeans about reasons for action should prefer motivationalism.
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Notes
I will follow Williams (1981) and Schroeder (2007) in construing ‘desire’ broadly to cover any suitable motivational state. All that the following discussion requires is that such states are understandable as embodying a goal expressible in propositional form and that they can explain agents’ motivations. For the sake of readability, I will sometimes express the contents of desires using the ‘desire to…’ locution rather than the propositional ‘desire that…’ form. On the issue of Hume’s views, see Setiya 2004.
A third option, a popular characterisation of Humean views by opponents, is that desires ground reasons insofar as desires themselves are parts of reasons (or, more precisely, reason-giving facts). Schroeder calls this the ‘no background conditions’ view. See Schroeder (2007: 23–40) for critical discussion.
Schroeder (2007) labels his view ‘Hypotheticalism’, but includes under that label particular views of the nature of desires and the weight of reasons. As I understand it, promotionalism is purely a view about how desires ground reasons.
For a discussion and rejection of alternative views of the promotion relation see Schroeder (2007: 111–12).
What I am calling motivationalism is close to the view sometimes referred to as reasons internalism, expressed by Shafer-Landau (2003: 165) as the view that ‘Necessarily if A has reason to φ at t then she can be motivated to φ at t’. There are two reasons why I introduce the new terminology. First because reasons internalism is expressed by a conditional whereas motivationalism employs a biconditional. Second because there is an existing debate concerning whether reasons internalism is compatible with non-desire-based views of reasons (see, for example, Korsgaard 1986) whereas, as I understand it, motivationalism is a view about how reasons are grounded in desires.
Here and elsewhere I distinguish between the reason-relation expressed by the complex predicate ‘r is a reason for A to φ’ and the reason-giving fact (or true proposition) r. Actual usage of the term ‘reason’ is unfortunately ambiguous on this and many other scores.
Some might object that even if capable of unaided human flight, Bob’s chances of reaching the moon remain at (more or less) zero—given the problems of surviving in deep space with no technology, for example. (Thanks to David McNaughton for this point.) My own intuition is that Bob’s chances of reaching the moon unaided are increased once he has mastered unaided human flight. But intuitions are variable. For those who do not share this intuition, other examples, including that of Caterina (below Section 4.1) don’t suffer this defect (in Caterina’s case, this is because were Caterina capable of advanced telepathy, her chances of becoming President would be increased).
Other views of the ‘promotion’ relation may not have this consequence, but the resulting promotionalist views are implausible for other reasons—see note 4.
Note that, in any case, this strong view of motivation generates further problems for motivationalism when considering conflicting reasons.
It is a difficult question when a particular action, say A’s Ψing, counts as A attempting to φ. An intuitive view is that A’s Ψing is an attempt to φ just in case A performs Ψ because she thinks that by Ψing she will raise the (objective) chances of her φing. I do not know whether this view is ultimately defensible, but the point doesn’t affect the current argument.
It may also be a rational requirement that agents do not have desires for physically unobtainable ends in the first place—rational desires aim at the obtainable, perhaps. However, this is not a problem for motivationalism. If rational agents do not have desires for physically unobtainable ends, then no reasons can be based on these desires, so again Bob will have no reason to leave the Earth’s atmosphere unaided.
A third reason is that Schroeder, the leading proponent of promotionalism, explicitly rejects Humean views that restrict the class of actual desires that ground reasons. See Schroeder 2007: 84–87.
What does motivationalism say about Caterina? That depends on what Caterina can be motivated to do (if rational) which in turn depends on one’s view of what it is to be motivated to φ (see Section 3). On moderate views of motivation, Caterina can only be motivated to φ if she would φ absent conflicting or confounding motivations. On such views Caterina can have reason to walk the streets distributing leaflets, or to put out a campaign advertisement, but cannot have reason to become President (since conflicting and confounding motivations are not the only barrier to becoming President). On weak views of motivation, Caterina can have reason to become President, insofar as she will (absent conflicting and confounding motivations) attempt to do so. If one finds it obvious that Caterina has a reason to become President and wants to maintain motivationalism, then this mitigates in favour of an account of motivation weaker than Goldman’s.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for BSET for suggesting this reply.
Streumer actually gives three arguments for thinking that there are no reasons to perform physically impossible actions, but since his first argument is entirely based on intuitions about what reasons there are, it provides no dialectical weight here.
Schroeder agrees that an account of the weight of reasons needs to capture the significant weight of suffering-based reasons such as this one, see Schroeder 2007: 141–43.
Bullet-biting.
For present purposes the motivationalist need only accept the conditional version of this claim, although a biconditional might also be defensible. Also, for isomorphism to Schroeder’s view, the view could be stated as: r is a good-for-A-making feature of A’s φ ing if (and only if) there is some p such that A desires that p and the truth of r is part of what explains why A’s doing φ promotes p.
One might worry that the motivationalist account of Nate is ad hoc. But this would be premature. It is the intuitive connection between reasons and reasoning that motivates the denial of reasons in Nate’s case. The further point is that the intuitions about the case are not fine-grained enough to overturn this motivation, and can be captured in normative claims that do not involve the notion of a reason.
Schroeder’s own promotionalist account can accept that amoralists have moral reasons so long as they have some desire that is promoted by acting morally. Given that Schroder defends a very ‘weak’ (i.e. easily satisfied) view of the promotion relation (2007: 110–113) this condition is easily met.
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Acknowledgements
My thanks to audiences at the University of Nottingham Philosophy Graduate Seminar, the British Society for Ethical Theory Annual Conference 2011 and to two referees for BSET, for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Special thanks also to Edward Harcourt for all his help in getting the paper to publication.
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Sinclair, N. Promotionalism, Motivationalism and Reasons to Perform Physically Impossible Actions. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 15, 647–659 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-012-9360-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-012-9360-9