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Notes
In other work I argue that hybrid voluntarism is needed to explain two puzzles of rational choice (Chang 2009), to make sense of the phenomenon of commitment in personal relationships (Chang 2013a), and to explain some special subclass of reasons we have to pursue personal projects [Chang (Manuscript)]. It also underwrites, I argue, the phenomenon of hard choices more generally (Chang 2012).
Of course ‘Nowhere’ and ‘From itself’ are not in fact equivalent, but for the purposes of the present discussion, they can be treated as such. Externalists who baulk at the description of their views as ones in which certain normative facts are self-grounded can substitute ‘ungrounded’ for ‘self-grounded’ without any substantive loss in the subsequent argument of the paper. It is, I suspect, the externalist’s insistence that there are no metaphysical grounds of normative facts that has helped to obscure the importance and legitimacy of the source question in the debate about practical reasons.
To my knowledge, metaphysicians have not countenanced the possibility of metaphysical creation, and it may not be a genuine third way one fact can ground another but instead reduce to constitution. I don’t believe it does but can offer no more than dogmatic assertion here. Nothing in what I says here turns on metaphysical creation being a distinct, third kind of grounding relation. Obviously, more needs to be said about each of these grounding relations, but my aim is simply to catalog those that are, I believe, relevant to understanding practical normativity.
I mean to include here those source externalists like Raz (and implicitly Parfit and Scanlon), who constrain the fact that something is a reason by facts about rational agents so that something doesn’t count as a reason unless it is the kind of thing that a rational agent could recognize and respond to. For an explicit discussion of this constraint, see Raz (2011, ch. 5).
Some source externalists are pluralists, holding that sometimes the fact that something is a reason is self-grounded and sometimes it is constituted by an evaluative fact. See e.g., Raz (1999). What sort of externalist view one holds depends on one’s views about the logical priority between values and reasons. If both are primitive normative phenomena one is likely to be a pluralist source externalist.
Source voluntarist views should be distinguished from the many normative views according to which an act of will—such as making a promise—can result in having reasons. This is the standard view about what role willing can play in practical normativity: there is some normative principle or value in virtue of which an act of will, such as promising, results in having a reason, such as to do what you promised to do. The idea that the normativity of willing is grounded in value in more or less direct or indirect ways traces back to Neil MacCormick (1972) and Joseph Raz (1972) (see also Raz 1975: Sect. 3.2). For some recent examples see e.g. Enoch 2011; Verbeek (Manuscript); Koch (2012). Christine Korsgaard, and perhaps Mary Clayton Coleman (Manuscript), are the only non-theistic contemporary philosophers I am aware of (besides myself) who think that willing can be a metaphysical ground of normativity.
See Schneewind (1998).
Those who are attracted to source voluntarism but are skeptical of Korsgaard’s claim that guidance by the Categorical Imperative is constitutive of action itself might find a defense of source voluntarism that takes the grounding relation to be one of metaphysical creation, not constitution. I try to offer such a defense in other work. See n.1.
See Korsgaard (1996, pp 9–10, 38).
Strictly speaking, there are forms of source externalism for which this problem does not arise, but they are all ones in which hard cases never arise. For example, source externalist theories that think all values or reasons can be represented by some function over the reals that is easy to manipulate (e.g. involving only addition or multiplication) would always deliver a determinate answer as to what one has most reason to do and would preclude hard cases. But since it is clear that there are hard cases, such theories are substantively implausible. I assume such views should be rejected on other grounds and do not discuss them here.
Parfit has many arguments against the source internalist, but I present what I take to be the strongest argument in its strongest form. See Parfit (2011).
See Parfit (2011) for an argumentative tour de force against internalist accounts. The most impressive and detailed reply on behalf of source internalism, I believe, is found in forthcoming work by Peter Railton, who attempts to extract normativity from a psychologically nuanced account of desire that is tied to affect and reward. Railton’s view arguably avoids falling prey to the most powerful arguments against internalism and succeeds in wringing from purely naturalistic materials a kind of normativity from a complex but psychologically plausible account of our desires. If Railton’s view is viable, then the real issue may lie in whether the normativity the internalist can deliver is the normativity of reasons.
See most recently, e.g., Street (2009). Another putative attraction of source internalism is its easy ability to account for the necessary link between having a reason and being motivated to do what one has a reason to do and between believing one has a reason and being motivated to do what one believes one has a reason to do. But as we have seen the source externalist can also secure this link.
Attempts to debunk the intuition that no one has such reasons have not had unqualified success. Marcello Antosh (Rutgers, Ph.D. dissertation) is developing an interesting debunking line of argument on behalf of source internalists which draws on a range of empirical data.
Some Kantians make a similar maneuver, claiming that putative counterexamples to their theory involve outliers who are so different from us that we cannot confidently judge whether they are rational (see, for example, Hill 1991, chapter 4). The challenge to them is the same: why think such creatures are so different from us that we are unable to judge whether they have reasons to pursue agony for its own sake?
I offer a diagnosis of why source internalists find the Right Reasons Objection untroubling in Chang 2013b.
Notice that the objection is not that the voluntarist cannot block the Mafioso from willing a reason to harm his enemy. As I will suggest below, it is plausible to think that the Mafioso who wills a reason to harm his enemy has more reason to harm him than the Mafioso who doesn’t, even though both have all-things-considered most reason not to do so.
Some have argued that there are no reasons to obey rational requirements (Kolodny 2005) or that there are no rational requirements as distinct from ordinary reasons (Raz 2005). But the Regress Problem turns on the intelligibility of asking for reasons to be prima facie structurally rational, whether or not at the end of the day there are any reasons to be or whether there are any structural requirements of rationality.
Korsgaard (2003).
Fitzpatrick (2005).
Korsgaard (2009); see also Mary Clayton Coleman (Manuscript) who argues that guidance by prudential principles is constitutive of action.
No hay need to be made over the claim that given and voluntarist reasons are of different ‘kinds’. Implicit in the view is a principle of the individuation of reasons according to which reasons are individuated not only by their contents but also by their normative source, and whether we want to classify reasons with different sources as different kinds of reasons is unimportant. This principle of individuation should not be too controversial. Consider a rough-and-ready analogy from physics. Just as a single object can exert different physical forces that are distinguished by the ‘source’ of that force—for example, gravitational or electromagnetic—a single consideration can count in favor of action in different ways—be the contents of different reasons—in virtue of having different normative sources. Compare Scanlon (2004), who rightly worries about a “puzzling duality” that may arise if a single reason can have two sources.
As Raz might say, reasons render options “eligible” (Raz 1999, p. 65). My claims are that (1) eligibility should be understood as leaving open the possibility of there being further will-based reasons, and (2) there are very specific ways in which the options can relate to one another in order to be “eligible” in Raz’ sense, none of which are the ways Raz himself suggests, i.e., that the options are “incommensurable”. This paper is part of a series of papers that attempt to defend (1), and I have tried to defend (2) in Chang 2002 and 2012.
See Chang 2002.
It may seem odd to say that reasons ‘run out’ when they determine what one has most reason to do but to an indeterminate degree, after all, they determine what one has most reason to do. But they ‘run out’ in the sense of interest—the normative criteria at stake do not admit of fully determinate measurement of degrees of difference. See Parfit (Manuscript) for further thoughts along these lines. Some normative criteria—such as number of lives saved—arguably allow fully determinate measurement of degrees of difference—e.g., saving two lives may be twice as good as saving one—and where such normative criteria, if there are any, are at stake, voluntarist reasons have no place. My own view is that there are few, if any normative considerations that admit of either ratio or interval cardinal measurement, but if it turns out that all do—if standard expected utility models of value are true to the facts and not mere idealizations—then hybrid voluntarism has no application.
There are, I believe, good reasons to think that voluntarist reasons can be created in the case of equipoise only when items are ‘on a par’ and not when they are incomparable, but defending that claim would take us too far afield. Some thoughts along these lines are in Chang 2012.
Some might find the idea that the Mafioso has more reason to harm his enemy simply by willing problematic, but having ‘a reason’ is a relatively cheap matter, especially if that reason can never make it the case that he has all-things-considered reasons to harm his enemy. As those who have pressed the Right Reasons problem most forcefully have noted, the real problem arises when a view leads to the result that he has most all-things-considered reasons to harm his enemy.
If I’m choosing between two desserts and what matters in the choice is tastiness, the fact that I’m wearing red shoes does not, as a logical matter in most normal circumstances, count in favor of one dessert or the other.
This gap in externalist reasons is not, strictly speaking, only in hard cases or ones in which the given reasons are in equipoise. For even easy cases might involve voluntarist reasons. It might be obviously true that I have most indeterminate reason to save 5 lives at the cost of my new shoes. But there might be a difference in the relations among the reasons in the case in which I have willed the importance of those lives to be reasons for me and the case in which I have not. Nor should willing reasons be thought to be something that happens only after we are stymied by our given reasons. We are willing reasons—putting our agency behind certain considerations—all the time and succeed in giving ourselves voluntarist reasons when the given reasons have run out. The priority of given over voluntarist reasons is metaphysical and normative but not temporal.
The phenomenology of choice lends some support to the hybrid voluntarist view. Empirical psychologists have suggested that in hard choices decision-makers often ‘construct’ reasons in order to resolve conflict. See Shafir et al. (1993).
I doubt there are many such cases because of the arguments mooted in Chang 2002—hard cases are more often than not cases of parity.
Here I assume that the view of value as ‘precise’—admitting of cardinal representation by the reals (or utility functions mapping value onto the reals) is a nonstarter and so the second condition for the existence of voluntarist reasons is very broadly satisfied. See also n. 12.
There are two more possibilities that I should mention for completeness. In some hard cases, it may not be true that one has most reason to do one thing rather than another. This can be either because one’s given reasons are in equipoise and the agent has failed to exercise her normative power to put her agency behind certain considerations and not others, or because she has and her all-things-considered reasons—voluntarist and given—are in equipoise. The former raises no challenge of explanatory shortfall because all normative resources have not yet been expended; the latter depends on a substantive theory of how given and voluntarist reasons interact such that all-things-considered equipoise is more prevalent than a reasonable theory would allow. Even if such radical underdetermination of one’s given and voluntarist reasons were rife, that would not detract from the interest of voluntarist reasons, assuming that there are some.
Note that the explanation that hybrid voluntarism makes possible is normative. The Problem of Explanatory Shortfall is a problem of shortfall in normative explanation—we run out of reasons too soon if source externalism is true. Hybrid voluntarism provides additional normative resources—voluntarist reasons—in the normative explanation of why you have most reason to x rather than y.
The importance of voluntarist reasons in cases where there is indeterminate most reason to do one thing rather than another is a complicated matter that I cannot go into here. In brief: they have little significance within a choice situation but great significance for what they suggest for the agent’s ‘rational identity’ over time.
I broach some in Chang 2009.
Strictly speaking, there are three qualifications to this claim that require further discussion beyond the scope of this paper. First, the question the activity of willing this rather than that is open to third-party assessment by reasons. When you will a voluntarist reason in favor of x instead of y, your willing is not guided by given reasons. But a third party observing you can sensibly say, “She had more reason to will a reason in favor of y than one in favor of x”. The interpretation of these third-party statements turns on substantive claims about what makes for a unified agent and about which “rational identities” are better than others from a third-person’s particular deliberative point of view. Second, there could be given instrumental reasons to will one way rather than another that may ‘guide’ my willing. If you offer me a hundred dollars to will a reason in favor of x, I have a given instrumental reason to so will. (I owe this point to Daniel Nolan). But, again, these instrumental reasons do not ‘guide’ the activity of wiling on the merits and so do not impugn the claim that taking something to be a reason is not guided by given reasons in the sense that threatens a regress. Finally, there may be constraints derived from what it is to be a unified agent that further constrain whether one can, as a rational agent, will this rather than that. So for example the unity of agency may block the rationality of willing this 1 min and that the next minute, and so on, until one’s death. But this last constraint will not take the form of reasons that guide one’s willing one thing rather than another; rather it is a formal constraint on what it is to be an agent in the first place—to be an agent you have to be capable of getting at least some things done—and so the sense in which the question is open is different.
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Kate Manne and Julia Markovitz for excellent commentary at the Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference where this paper was presented, and to the audience at the conference for a hybrid of entertaining and probing questions. Thanks are also due to Mary Clayton Coleman, Adam Elga, Kit Fine, Zachary Irving, Andrew Israelsen, Patrick Kain, Karin Nisenbaum, Derek Parfit, Juan Pineros, Luke Roelofs, Tina Rulli, and Jessica Wilson for useful discussion and more generally to audiences at the University of Toronto, the Murphy Institute at Tulane, and Purdue for useful feedback.
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Chang, R. Grounding practical normativity: going hybrid. Philos Stud 164, 163–187 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0092-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0092-z