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How Not to Solve the Wrong Kind of Reasons Problem

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Notes

  1. See Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobsen, ‘Sentiment and Value,’ Ethics, Vol. 110, pp. 722–748 (2000); Wlodek Rabinowicz and Toni Ronnow-Rasmussen, ‘The Strike of the Demon: On Fitting Pro-Attitudes and Value,’ Ethics ,Vol. 114, pp. 391–423 (2004); Jonas Olson, ‘Buckpassing and the Wrong Kind of Reasons,’ The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 215, pp. 295–300 (2004); Pamela Hieronymi, ‘The Wrong Kind of Reason,’ The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 102, No. 9, pp. 437–457 (2005); Mark Schroeder, ‘Value and the Right Kind of Reason,’ in R. Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics 5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Ulrike Heuer, ‘Beyond Wrong Reasons: The Buck-Passing Account of Value,’ in M. Brady (ed.), New Waves in Metaethic (Palgrave Macmillan, Hampshire, 2011), pp. 166–184.

  2. See Timothy Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); D’Arms and Jacobsen, 2000, op. cit.; Rabinowicz and Ronnow-Rasmussen, 2004, op. cit.

  3. See Olson, 2004, op. cit.; Hieronymi, 2005, op. cit.; Schroeder, 2010, op. cit., for proposed solutions to the problem that try to spell out the right kind of justification.

  4. See Pascal’s famous wager and Gregory Kavka, ‘The Toxin Puzzle,’ Analysis, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 33–36 (1983).

  5. See A.C. Ewing. The Definition of Good (London: Macmillan, 1949); Franz Brentano, 1969, op.cit.; Rabinowicz and Ronnow-Rasmussen (2004: 394–400), op. cit.

  6. See Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (London: Penguin Books, 2003).

  7. See Scanlon 1998:78–94, op. cit.; John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971); Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontanapress, 1985) for some criticism of consequentialism.

  8. I forgo discussion of Heuer’s account in relation to final value as discussion of instrumental value has already shown that the theory is problematic and this suffices for our purposes here.

  9. See Stephen Laurence and Eric Margolis, ‘Concepts and Conceptual Analysis,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 67, No. 2, pp. 253–282 (2003); Michael DePaul, ‘Intuitions in Moral Inquiry,’ in David Copp (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Moral Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 595–623.

  10. G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903/2000) combined nonnaturalist metaethics with utilitarian normative ethics. Richard Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952) and Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963) advocated metaethical expressivism coupled with utilitarian normative theory. John Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (London: Penguin Books, 1977) was an error theorist about metaethics and a contractualist about normative ethics.

  11. See for example Ralph Wedgwood, The Nature of Normativity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  12. See Moore, 1903/2000, op. cit.

  13. Nonnaturalists like Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005) and Wedgwood, 2007, op. cit., expressivists like Simon Blackburn, Ruling Passions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) and error theorists like Mackie, 1977, op. cit. accept some form or other of the argument.

  14. See William Frankena, ‘The Naturalistic Fallacy,’ Mind XLVIII, 465–477 (1939); David Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), Richard Boyd, ‘How to be a Moral Realist,’ in Russ Shafer Landau and Terence Cuneo (eds.), Foundations of Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 163–185; Andrew Cullison, ‘Three Millian Ways To Resolve Open Questions,’ Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy Vol. 3 (2009).

  15. I quote from Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard and Peter Railton, ‘Toward Fin de siècle Ethics: Some Trends,’ The Philosophical Review, Vol. 101, No. 1, pp. 115–189 (1992:116). For discussion of how to exactly understand the argument see Nicholas Sturgeon, ‘Moore on Ethical Naturalism,’ Ethics, Vol. 113, pp. 528–556 (2003); Connie Rosati, ‘Agency and the Open Question Argument,’ Ethics, Vol. 113, pp. 490–527 (2003); Mark Kalderon, ‘Open Questions and the Manifest Image,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 68, pp. 251–289 (2004); Fred Feldman, ‘The Open Question Argument: What It Isn’t; And What It Is,’ Philosophical Issues 15, Normativity, pp. 22–43 (2005).

  16. See Rabinowicz and Ronnow-Rasmussen, 2004, op. cit. pp. 402–403, 419 for the classic statement of such ‘evil demons.’ Of importance is that stating the problem in terms of evil demons cases is not necessary. As Rabinowicz and Ronnow-Rasmussen, 2004, op. cit., p. 403 rightly stress, we can state it, for example, in terms of ‘the hedonism paradox.’ That is, the paradox that arises because, although hedonism takes only pleasure to be of final value, it would be self-defeating to seek only pleasure as such a single-minded pursuit would undercut maximization of pleasure itself. In such a case, by the theory’s lights, one may have a (wrong) kind of reason to pursue things that lack final value, exercise, let us say, but still be beneficial to have such a reason because it would be conducive to the maximization of pleasure. If this is still too theoretic, then think of everyday examples like having wrong reasons to admire someone, or to find something laudable or comic etc. ( D’Arms and Jacobsen, 2000, op. cit.). At any event, people sceptical of the value of thought experiments are not yet off the hook just by dismissing such thought experiments for methodological reasons (though, like most philosophers, I find this scepticism unfounded).

  17. See Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error (New York: Putnam Book, 1994); Dylan Evans, Emotion: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) for discussion of how the affective psychological component is essential for human rationality.

  18. This idea can be found in Plato’s tripartition of the soul in the Republic and in Aristotle’s distinction between the virtuous and the continent in Nicomachean Ethics. Contemporary virtue ethicists still employ the idea. See John McDowell, ‘Virtue and Reason,’ in Mind, Value and Reality (London: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 50–73; Rosalind Hursthouse, ‘Are Virtues the Right Starting Place for Morality?,’ in James Dreier (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), pp. 99–112.

  19. See Pekka Vayrynen, ‘A Wrong Turn to Reasons?,’ M. Brady (ed.), New Waves in Metaethics (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 185–207, for a questioning of this recent turn to ‘reasons first.’ Vayrynen questions whether this methodological ‘turn to reasons’ can offer any dialectical advantages in explaining normativity. If the above hypothesis of the source of the WKR problem is to the right direction, then not only the turn to reasons does not offer any dialectical advantages, but in addition it incurs a dialectical disadvantage as such approaches are bound to run into WKR problems.

  20. See for example how Scanclon, 1998, op. cit. thinks that his buckpassing account can account for the ‘open feel’ semantic intuitions in Moore’s ‘open question argument’ but without going nonnaturalist. For discussion of Scanlon’s buckpassing account in this respect see Brad Hooker and Philip Stratton-Lake, ‘Scanlon Versus Moore on Goodness,’ in T. Horgan and M. Timmons (eds.), Metaethics After Moore (2006), pp. 149–168. This is also how Rabinowicz and Ronnow-Rasmussen, 2004, op. cit., understand the motivation behind the buckpassing project. But also see how D’Arms and Jacobsen, 2000, op. cit., use Moore-style arguments to bring to the surface the WKR problem and defeat ‘neo-sentimentalist’ approaches that assume the ‘reasons first’ methodological starting point.

  21. For some more theoretical virtues of the buckpassing project see Olson, 2004, op. cit.

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  1. University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus

    Christos Kyriacou

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Kyriacou, C. How Not to Solve the Wrong Kind of Reasons Problem. J Value Inquiry 47, 101–110 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-013-9368-y

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