Abstract
Some irrational states can be avoided in more than one way. For example, if you believe that you ought to A you can avoid akrasia by intending to A or by dropping the belief that you ought to A. This supports the claim that some rational requirements are wide-scope. For instance, the requirement against akrasia is a requirement to intend to A or not believe that you ought to A. But some writers object that this Wide-Scope view ignores asymmetries between the different ways of avoiding irrationality. In this paper I defend the Wide-Scope view against recent objections of this sort from Mark Schroeder and Niko Kolodny. I argue that once we are clear about what the Wide-Scope view is committed to—and, importantly, what it is not—we can see that Schroeder and Kolodny’s objections fail.
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Notes
These statements are first approximations. For some of the required modifications, see Broome (2005). Following Broome, I state these requirements as if ‘rationally required’ is a propositional operator. However, the debate between the Wide- and Narrow-Scope views does not turn on this.
For this way of putting the problem, see Brunero (2010, p. 35). Broome (1999) offers this sort of objection to the claim that you ought or have reason to comply with Narrow-Scope requirements. But the objection seems to me to have force against the requirements simply as stated. For argument to this effect, see Brunero (2010, pp. 34–44), Hussain (ms, Sect. 4.1), and Reisner (2009, pp. 247–248).
Schroeder’s version of the objection is endorsed by Finlay (forthcoming, Sect. 2). Korsgaard 2009 also offers a version of the objection, which is closer to Kolodny’s.
Brunero (2010) takes a similar line. Some Wide-Scopers are more ambitious. For example, Broome (2005, p. 323) claims that there are only ‘rare exceptions’ to the claim that ‘rational requirements generally have wide-scope’. The only example he gives is of the requirement not to believe contradictory propositions.
John Broome independently offers a similar response to Schroeder in a draft book manuscript.
For the most part, Schroeder and Kolodny focus on Enkrasia-W, and I will follow them in this respect. Since the sense of asymmetry is most striking in this case, we can expect objections from asymmetry to succeed here if anywhere.
Schroeder says ‘moral beliefs’, but the heart of the worry applies more generally.
Note though that not all versions of the Wide-Scope view offer this option in the means-end case (Way 2010).
Talk of ‘conscience-following’ is most natural if the beliefs in question are moral. But since the problem is more general, I shall adopt an artificially broad use of this expression.
Thus, rationalization is problematic even in cases in which you ought to give up the relevant belief. Even if you ought to stop believing that you ought to A, something will be going wrong if you stop believing that you ought to A because you are not going to A.
For something like this, see Wedgwood (2007, Chap. 4).
Of course, the Narrow-Scope view also tells us that the akratic agent is irrational. The advantage of the Wide-Scope view is then just that it does not have the implausible consequences of the Narrow-Scope view. This, of course, is just the standard argument for the Wide-Scope view, rehearsed at the start of this paper.
Kolodny’s statement of the test requires that you are able to reason ‘from the content of A to dropping B’ (2005, p. 521, my italics). As Hussain ms, Sect. 4.2 observes, Kolodny’s notion of reasoning ‘from the content’ raises certain difficulties. For present purposes, these difficulties are not crucial: all Kolodny’s argument requires is that reasoning must begin from an attitude, and not the lack of an attitude.
As formulated, the Reasoning Test only applies to requirements governing a single antecedent attitude. But a variant of the test seems to rule out requirements involving more antecedent attitudes, such as Means-End-W and Closure-W.
It might be thought that this response gives rise to another version of the Collapse problem (2.1). For if your antecedent attitude is rational, and you have no way of dropping this attitude by reasoning, then the only way forward is to form the consequent attitude. This may be thought to imply that the consequent attitude is rationally required. However, this would only show that Narrow-Scope requirements apply when the antecedent attitudes are rational (and cannot be rationally dropped). But this is not implausible in the way that unqualified Narrow-Scope requirements are.
Kolodny does briefly consider requirements along the lines of Enkrasia-WP2. He objects that these would be requirements to ‘avoid or escape [an irrational state] in any way one likes’ (2005, p. 517. cf. 2007a, p. 372). But this seems to me a mistake. As we saw in Sect. 2, independent basing principles may constrain the rational ways to escape a local irrationality.
Some might worry that there is no significant distinction between Enkrasia-WP2 and Enkrasia-W. After all, since Enkrasia-W applies at all times, it implies that: if at time t you believe that you ought to A but do not intend to A, then at t1 you are rationally required to either intend to A or not believe that you ought to A. We might think that there is little difference between this and Enkrasia-WP2 (cf. Reisner 2009). However, if there is no significant distinction between Enkrasia-W and Enkrasia-WP2, the Wide-Scoper can reject Kolodny’s claim that Enkrasia-W is not response-guiding, since Enkrasia-WP2 is clearly response-guiding.
I discuss other objections to the Wide-Scope view in Way (2010).
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Acknowledgements
This paper has benefited greatly from comments I have received from John Broome, Niko Kolodny, Errol Lord, Josh May, Alan Millar, Ian Nance, Andrew Reisner, Mark Schroeder and an anonymous referee. Many thanks to all.
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Way, J. The symmetry of rational requirements. Philos Stud 155, 227–239 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9563-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9563-7