Abstract
I argue that given standard deontic logic, wide-scope rational requirements entail narrow-scope rational requirements. In particular, the widely-embraced Enkratic Principle entails that if a particular combination of attitudes is rationally forbidden, it is also rationally forbidden to believe that that combination of attitudes is required.
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Notes
A few interpretive points: First, Brunero distinguishes between local and global rational requirements, then maintains that all local rational requirements are wide-scope. Since my discussion will be confined to local norms, Brunero will count as a rationality purist for our purposes and the entailments I point out will yield counterexamples to his view. Second, I am not arguing that the narrow-scope requirements I will derive solve all the asymmetry problems that drive Shpall to posit rational commitments. I am simply suggesting that the purism about rational requirements that gets his argument going is incompatible with standard deontic logic.
Third, rationality purism might be motivated by the idea that rational requirements are structural rather than substantive, and structural requirements are wide-scope. The structural/substantive distinction comes from Scanlon (1998), in which Scanlon holds that charges of irrationality must always concern structural norms. (Scanlon invokes the distinction again in his (2003) and offers arguments that no longer rely on the claim that all rational requirements are structural—but he never explicitly disavows that claim, even in his later work.)
Note that I use the term “norm” for a statement when I’m trying to remain agnostic about whether what it says is true—in other words, when I don’t want to commit on whether rationality genuinely requires what that statement says rationality requires.
Coates (2013, Section 1), for instance, affirms “That rationality requires you to be enkratic is uncontroversial.” Scanlon (1998, p. 23) writes, “When a rational creature does make a conscious reflective judgment that a certain attitude is warranted, she generally comes to have this attitude.” Within this broad agreement there are debates over how precisely to formulate the Enkratic Principle [see, for instance, (Broome 2008) and (Brunero 2012)]; I’ll discuss some variations in notes 5 and 7 below.
When Broome formulates the Enkratic Requirement he tends to make the attitudes in its consequent intentions, so we can stick to examples in which \(A_1\) and \(A_2\) are intentions if we like. \(A_1\) and/or \(A_2\) may be a combination of attitudes as well.
This is a particular instance of my general thesis in (Titelbaum ms) that false beliefs about what’s rationally required are rationally forbidden. In the same vein, (Brunero 2013, Section 3) begins with two wide-scope requirements (both Enkratic instances) and derives a narrow-scope rational prohibition on having a particular false belief about what rationality requires. (Brunero and I independently discovered the possibility of deriving narrow-scope norms from wide; I learned of his manuscript by sending him this one. Brunero’s work focuses on a single instance of the phenomenon, does not investigate the general pattern of entailments into which that instance fits, and does not examine how far one can get without relying on standard deontic logic.)
The way the proof is put together, the specific content of the belief in the antecedent of the Enkratic Requirement is irrelevant. As long as we can find an affirmative rational requirement in which the antecedent is some belief and the consequent is the combination of \(A_1\) and \(A_2\) (for some \(A_1\) and \(A_2\) whose combination is rationally forbidden), we can conclude that possessing that belief is rationally forbidden. This is important because Broome and others sometimes express the belief content in the Enkratic antecedent as something about what the agent ought to do, or has most reason to do (instead of what the agent is rationally required to do, as I’ve put it). Framing the Enkratic Requirement in their way would not impede our derivation of a narrow-scope rational requirement proscribing a single belief; it would just change which particular belief was proscribed.
Which is not to say that no one, or even no one within the wide-scoping literature, is willing to employ it. Brunero (2013), for instance, explicitly applies standard deontic logic to work out consequences of the Enkratic Principle.
For an overview of standard deontic logic and objections to it, see McNamara (2010).
Besides Brunero’s proof mentioned in note 6 above, Selim Berker suggested the following wide-to-narrow entailment to me: take the negative wide-scope requirement equivalent to \( R{\sim }(Bp \mathbin { \& }B{\sim }p)\), combine it with the affirmative requirement \( R[B(p \mathbin { \& }q) \supset Bp]\) (and its twin \( R[B(p \mathbin { \& }q) \supset Bq]\)), and standard deontic logic derives \( R{\sim }B(p \mathbin { \& }{\sim }p)\).
This works for synchronic requirements; diachronic rational requirements can be thought of as targeting sequences of such overall states.
Informal proof: Suppose for reductio that there’s an overall attitudinal state which violates no rational requirements yet contains the belief that the combination of attitudes in question is rationally required. That state either contains the combination of attitudes itself, or it doesn’t. If the state contains the combination of attitudes, it violates the negative wide-scope requirement, contradicting our supposition. If the state doesn’t contain the combination of attitudes, it violates an instance of the Enkratic Principle, contradicting the supposition again.
See (Titelbaum ms) for discussion.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Selim Berker, Sarah Paul, Peter Vranas, and John Brunero for discussion of this article.
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Titelbaum, M.G. How to derive a narrow-scope requirement from wide-scope requirements. Philos Stud 172, 535–542 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0317-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0317-9