Abstract
You are irrational when you are akratic. On this point most agree. Despite this agreement, there is a tremendous amount of disagreement about what the correct explanation of this data is. Narrow-scopers think that the correct explanation is that you are violating a narrow-scope conditional requirement. You lack an intention to x that you are required to have given the fact that you believe you ought to x. Wide-scopers disagree. They think that a conditional you are required to make true is false. You aren’t required to have any particular attitudes. You’re just required to intend to x or not believe you ought to x. Wide-scope accounts are symmetrical insofar as they predict that you are complying with the relevant requirement just so long as the relevant conditional is true. Some narrow-scopers object to this symmetry. However, there is disagreement about why the symmetry is objectionable. This has led wide-scopers to defend their view against a number of different symmetry objections. I think their defenses in the face of these objections are, on the whole, plausible. Unfortunately for them, they aren’t defending their view against the best version of the objection. In this paper I will show that there is a symmetry objection to wide-scope accounts that both hasn’t been responded to and is a serious problem for wide-scope accounts. Moreover, my version of the objection will allow us to see that there is at least one narrow-scope view that has been seriously underappreciated in the literature.
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Notes
I only mean to use the conditionals as a way to model the issues at stake. I do not want to say that the debate is about the right semantics of certain conditionals in English. The debate I’m concerned with is not about English. It’s about the structure of rationality. There is a separate debate in the philosohy of language/linguistics about the correct semantics for conditional ’ought’ claims in English. This debate is often confused with the one I’m interested in. Also, for what it’s worth, the wide-scope view looks quite hopeless if we’re talking about the semantics of English conditional ’ought’ claims. For more on that, see Dreier (2009) and Silk (FC).
Unfortunately, most participants in the literature neglect to mention whether they are synchronists or diachronists. This has no doubt hampered progress. I myself am guilty of this (see Lord (2011)). I was convinced that this was a serious mistake by Richard Yetter Chappell. I thank him for setting me straight.
Just to be clear: This is why it is important to make the distinction between the diachronic and synchronic versions of the views. The synchronic versions only differ along one dimension of symmetry—viz., application. The diachronic versions differ along another dimension, which is what I call compliance.
Schroeder also objects to the application symmetry of the wide-scope requirements in Schroeder (2004).
Cf. Broome (2013).
Kolodny (2005) and Bedke (2009) also offer versions of the objection. I think Way (2011) adequately responds to Kolodny’s version, and I think Bedke’s topic is different from ours; his topic is the semantics of conditional requirements in English. Our topic is not this–our topic is the nature of rational requirements (Cf. note 1).
For the synchronic requirements, t = t. For the diachronic requirements, let t 2 ≥ t 1.
Obviously the conditional that ’rationally required’ scopes over in Means-End WD is different than the conditional relevant to Means-End ND. This is because if you formulate Means-End WD by having ’rationally required’ scope over the conditional relevant to Means-End ND, Means-End WD will (ostensibly) collapse into Means-End ND. This is because once t 1 passes, the only way to comply would be to have the intention at t 2. You cannot backward cause yourself to not have the end or means-end belief at t 1. So that requirement is, at the very least, not in the spirit of the traditional wide-scope view. Since this isn’t important for my purposes below, I inserted the most natural fix for the wide-scoper in the text without comment. For more, see Way (2011).
This particular requirement is obviously problematic. I will explain why in the next section. And I’ll offer a replacement that is not problematic. However, this is the most natural place to start and I’ll thus use this requirement for illustration.
See especially Setiya (2007).
See especially Brunero (2012).
Again, Brunero (2012) is a prime example.
I put it this way because Brunero (2012) actually pushes the objection against Way (2010)’s hybrid view, which holds that if you believe that in order to ϕ you must ψ, then you are rationally required to [intend to ψ or not intend to ϕ]. This requirement is compliance asymmetrical when it comes to the belief, but not the end. So Brunero’s objection applies to Means-End ND as well as Way’s requirement. I skip over this in the text because it’s not germane to the dialectic I’m interested in. And he explicitly makes this objection against the full narrow-scope account in Brunero (2010). I provide a response to Brunero (2010) similar to the one offered in Sect. 3 in Lord (2011). While my view that paper is similar to the view defended here, I think that the move made in the older paper will not work. This is precisely because it ignored the differences between the synchronic and diachronic requirements.
For what it’s worth, Brunero confirmed this interpretation in personal communication.
For the exact same reasons mentioned in n. 11, the conditional that ’rationally required’ scopes over in Ought WD is not the conditional relevant to Ought ND.
Again, just like with the initial formulation of the diacrhonic instrumental principle, this one is obviously problematic. I’ll explain why in the next section and offer a better alternative. But since this is the most natural place to start I’ll use it for illustration.
See, e.g., Way (2011) and Broome (2013). Broome, to his credit, recognizes the difference between compliance and escaping that I highlight below. So while he responds to this particular passage from Schroeder in a way similar to Way, he is not thinking of the dialectic in the way that Way is, at least in Broome (2013).
I owe this point to John Broome.
I think that this point should make us very suspicious that the objection actually turns on basing. It’s uncharitable to assume your opponent is objecting to some feature of your view that her view shares (and somewhat obviously shares). (It cannot be doubted, however, that Schroeder does invite this interpreation in the passage quoted at the beginning of this subsection. Whether Schroeder intended this interpretation is not an issue I wish to take up in this paper. I’ll leave that question to future historians of philosophy.)
Indeed, his terminology is inspired by Brunero’s version of this objection in Brunero (2010).
Way goes on to say that the wide-scope requirements don’t have this problem because they are symmetrical. Thus, narrow-scope requirements must have the problem because they are asymmetrical.
What’s the cousin? Some find that it’s an implausible consequence of, for example, Ought NS that in the case above I would, at some static time on Tuesday, both be required to give up my belief and have the intention (Way actually first puts the objection this way, but then he makes the point in diachronic terms). I myself don’t find this too worrying. I think the diachronic version is much more troubling.
One might worry at this point that Ought ND has been a straw man from the beginning. I think that Ought ND is clearly implausible. However, given the nature of the debate, I think it is the most obvious way to make the narrow-scope requirements diachronic. I think that despite the fact that it’s obviously false, the way in which it fails is instructive. Part of the contribution of this paper is to provide a more sophisticated model about how to think about diachronicity.
This was inspired by related remarks made in Horty (2012) as he develops a theory of requirements based on default logic. (Broome, 2013, ch. 10) appeals to a similar idea. He calls them canceling events. An earlier version of this paper also appealed to canceling events. However, it is clear that events aren’t the right kind of thing to appeal to (for my purposes). This is because it’s possible for the relevant conditions to be states (and perhaps other things too). For example, one might to hold that merely holding other attitudes of particular sorts is itself a canceling condition. So, for example, you might think the belief that you ought not believe you ought to ϕ itself cancels a requirement to ϕ if you believe you ought to ϕ. But, of course, one could believe one ought not believe one ought to ϕ before one believes one ought to ϕ. In that case, it doesn’t seem like an event is what does the canceling. It would be the belief, which is a state. For reasons I articulate in note 28 below, I don’t think the narrow-scoper should think that particular belief is a canceling condition. However, I think it’s one way a narrow-scoper can go using the machinery articulated here. Thus, I want the things which cancel to be broad enough to accommodate this kind of view. I thank an anonymous referee for convincing me this change was needed.
Dropping one’s belief is not the only option. There are at least two other options germane to the anti-akrasia requirement. First, one might think that obtaining sufficient evidence that you yourself ought not ϕ is a canceling condition. Second, one might think believing that you ought not believe you ought to ϕ is a canceling condition. I don’t think the narrow-scoper should think these are canceling conditions. This is because these conditions would force the narrow-scoper to give up the localness of these requirements. That is, they would have to give up the thought that, no matter what other atitudes one holds, one is irrational if one believes one ought to ϕ and one fails to intend to ϕ. If you accept one of the two conditions above, you will think that sometimes one is not irrational for believing one ought to ϕ but failing to intend to ϕ (if one has sufficient evidence one ought not ϕ or believes that they ought not believe they ought to ϕ). If you hold that dropping the belief is a canceling condition, you can hold on to the localness of the requirement and still explain our datum. Thanks to an anonymous referee for prompting me to say more about this.
The t 1 − t 2 instantiation is just the instance of the requirement that has t 1 as the earlier time and t 2 as the later time.
Obviously analogous things can be said for the diachronic narrow-scope means-end requirement. I won’t go through all the details.
Of course, they disagree about the explanations of these claims. The narrow-scoper thinks you comply because you intend and you were required to intend, whereas the wide-scoper thinks that you comply because you make the conditional true, and you were required to make the conditional true. On the flip side, the narrow-scoper thinks you violate because you fail to intend, whereas the wide-scoper thinks you violate because the conditional is false. Be that as it may, this difference isn’t important at this stage of the dialectic.
This is one of the main reasons Broome (2013) gives for preferring the wide-scope requirements over the narrow-scope requirements.
I’m not particularly beholden to either view of the relationship between jurisdiction and application. But I think that either way we go we get counterintuitive results for the wide-scoper.
All of the points about jurisdiction made above can be made mutatis mutandis here. I omit this tedium.
Here’s some initial inspiration from Broome (1999): "Notice first that it is not very plausible. Suppose you ought not to r, and you ought not to believe you ought to r, but you do in fact believe you ought to r. Then it is not very plausible that you have any reason to r, just because of a false belief you ought not to have" (404). This obviously runs rough shod over some distinctions that theorists in the literature have become fond of making. For example, the distinction between what it’s rational to do and what there is most reason to do. Nevertheless, this passage envokes the spirit of the more nuanced versions of the compliance asymmetry objection that, in 1999, hadn’t yet been offered. More sophisticated versions of this objection appear in, among many other places, Wallace (2001), Kolodny (2005), Setiya (2007), Way (2010), Way (2012), Bratman (2009), Darwall (1983), Brunero (2010).
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to John Brunero, Gideon Rosen, Sarah McGrath, Delia Graff Fara, Gil Harman, Alida Liberman, Shyam Nair, Mark Schroeder, Michael Smith, Daniel Fogal, Kurt Sylvan, Jack Woods, Sam Shpall, and Richard Yetter Chappell for comments and discussion. Ancestors of this paper were presented at SLACRR, the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress, and the NIP/IP Graduate Conference in Aberdeen. Thanks to those audiences, especially Justin Snedegar for providing formal comments at RoME and Jonathan Way for providing formal comments at the other two. My largest debt is to Jonathan for many sets of excellent written comments and numerous conversations.
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Lord, E. The real symmetry problem(s) for wide-scope accounts of rationality. Philos Stud 170, 443–464 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0258-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0258-8