Harman's hardness arguments

ManuscriptIn "Change in View" Gilbert Harman produces arguments of the following pattern: Of two competing methods of belief revision, one is too hard; the other must therefore be the rational method. I will call arguments of this form hardness arguments. Hardness arguments are not, of course, peculiar to Harman; and considerations of this kind have recently become more popular in the philosophical literature. But Harman's hardness arguments provide an object lesson in the pitfalls of deploying such considerations

Was Hume a Humean?

Journal ArticleWhen it comes to talking about practical reasoning, "Humean" is a synonym for "instrumentalist." That is, a "Humean" view of practical reasoning is one on which only means-end reasoning directed toward satisfying antecedently given desires counts as practical reasoning at all. Witness, for instance, Michael Smith's fairly recent paper, "The Humean Theory of Motivation," which advances just this view; Smith, who does not discuss Hume himself, simply takes it for granted that the label "Humean" fits.1 It wasn't always this way: when Aurel Kolnai, some years back, wished to criticize instrumentalism, he described the view as Aristotle's, an attribution that would be unlikely now.

Practical reason and the structure of actions

Journal ArticleA wave of recent philosophical work on practical rationality is organized by the following implicit argument: Practical reasoning is figuring out what to do; to do is to act; so the forms of practical inference can be derived from the structure or features of action. Now it is not as though earlier work, in analytic Philosophy;, had failed to register the connection between action and practical rationality; in fact, practical reasoning was usually picked out as, roughly, reasoning directed toward action. But for much of the twentieth century, attention moved quickly away from this initial delineation of the subject area, to the interplay of beliefs and desires within the mind (Humean theories, including their Davidsonian and Williamsian variants), or to procedures for checking that a plan of action was supported by sufficient yet consistent reasons (Kantian theories), or to the ultrarefined sensibilities of the practically intelligent reasoner (Aristotelian theories). The hallmark of the emerging family of treatments to be surveyed here is, first, the sustained attention paid to answering the question, "What does it take to be an action (at all)?", and second, the use made of a distinction between full-fledged action and its lesser relatives. (Characterizations and terminology vary, but often the less robust alternative is called "mere activity" or "mere behavior".) Very schematically, these arguments for a theory of practical reasoning try to show that reasons brought to bear on choice must have some particular logical form, if action is not to lapse into something less than that

Murdoch, practical reasoning, and particularism

Journal ArticleParticularism is a contemporary movement in moral Philosophy; that it is hard to know what to do with. On the one hand, it's hard to dismiss. Its ranks include respectable - even prominent - authors such as Jonathan Dancy, Margaret Little, John McDowell, David McNaughton and Richard Norman.1 It purports to occupy one of the two extreme positions on the spectrum of views about the generality of reasons for action, and is worth a close look just for that

Does the categorical imperative give rise to a contradiction in the will?

Journal ArticleThe Brave New World-style utilitarian dystopia is a familiar feature of the cultural landscape; Kantian dystopias are harder to come by, perhaps because, until Rawls, Kantian morality presented itself as a primarily personal rather than political program. This asymmetry is peculiar for formal reasons, because one phase of the deliberative process on which Kant insists is to ask what the world at large would be like if everyone did whatever it is one is thinking of doing. I do not propose to write a Kantian Brave New World myself, but I am going to ask, of what these days is called "the CI-procedure," what would happen if everybody followed it. I will argue that if the CI-procedure works as advertised, it exposes a practical incoherence in the commitment to having it govern one's actions: in the Kantian vocabulary that goes with the territory, that the Categorical Imperative gives rise to a contradiction in the will. (Less formally, that it is self-refuting.) My target will be a recently influential interpretation of Kant, due primarily to John Rawls and a number of his students, most prominently Onora O'Neill, Christine Korsgaard, and Barbara Herman, a group I will for convenience refer to as the New Kantians.1 Although it does draw on earlier interpretative work, this body of writing is relatively self-contained, and manageable in a way that the Kant literature as a whole no longer is. I don't myself wish to take a stand on whether the New Kantian reading is exegetically correct; it suffices for present purposes that it has proven itself interesting, plausible, and powerful enough to have moved Kantian moral Philosophy; back from the marginalized position it occupied a little over a quarter-century ago to the center of contemporary ethics

Hume on practical reasoning (Treatise 463-469)

Journal ArticleThe claim that " 'is' does not entail 'ought'" is so closely associated with Hume that it has been called 'Hume's Law'.1 The interpretation of the passage in Hume's Treatise of Human Nature that is the locus classicus of the claim is controversial. But the passage is preceded by three main bodies of argument, and, on the working assumption that the passage in question is closely connected to the argumentation that leads up to it, I will here examine the third of these, running from T 463:7 to 469:18.2 While interpretations have differed from one another, they have agreed in attributing to Hume uncharacteristically weak arguments

Mill's proof of the principle of utility

Journal ArticleMill's utilitarianism is very closely tied to his instrumentalism; that his argument for the Principle of Utility, while tight, is deeply incoherent; that the incoherence stems from an incoherence in instrumentalism; and that Mill's instrumentalism turns out to have been an island of apriorism in an otherwise empiricist project. It is tempting to think that if Mill had been willing to look to experience at this point also, his theory of practical reasoning, and consequently his moral theory, would have turned out quite differenty"and perhaps less incoherently. So the final moral is that if you're going to be empiricist, be empiricist all the way: about practical reasoning, and about observation

Thick ethical concepts and the fact-value distinction

Journal ArticleOver the last few years, the ‘fact-value distinction' (FVD) has become increasingly unfashionable, due in part to a number of arguments adduced against it. I myself do not believe the FVD can be maintained, and I think there are good arguments against it. But I have my doubts about the cogency of one of the arguments often invoked against it. This argument turns on ‘thick ethical concepts' (TECs); I will refer to it as the ‘TEC-argument'. The TEC-argument is attractive because it proceeds from an uncontroversial premise-that we grasp and use TECs-to a substantive and controversial conclusion-that something is wrong with the FVD.2 This sounds too good to be true; and it is. I intend to show that although the TEC-argument is frequently invoked, it has never actually been made

Liberty, the higher pleasures, and Mill's missing science of ethnic jokes

Journal ArticleThe intended contribution to his moral theory of John Stuart Mill's famous distinction between higher and lower pleasures has occasioned long-standing puzzlement on the part of his more alert interpreters. I am going to explain how the distinction was meant, among other things, to allow Mill to demonstrate that liberty really is required by the Principle of Utility, but I will also suggest that the argument made possible by the notion of higher pleasures was not the one that Mill in the end wanted. My objective here is to distinguish two problems which-viewed at a suitable level of abstraction-we share with Mill: one is that of determining whether a society hoping to promote the happiness of its members should allow them liberty, and the other, that of accounting for the importance, both for happiness and for liberty, of genuinely original personalities. The general drift of my discussion will be that the former problem is relatively tractable, and Mill's understanding of the higher and lower pleasures contains the resources for a straightforward solution to his version of it; the latter problem, however, is a great deal more difficult, both for him and for us

Who was Nietzsche's genealogist?

ManuscriptNietzsche's Genealogy of Morals is deservedly part of the ethical canon, but it is also enormously and insistently absent-minded. I'm going to first present, as a textual puzzle, a handful of forgetful moments in the first two essays of the Genealogy. To address the puzzle, I will take up a familiar idea, that the Genealogy is both a subversive account of ethics and of what it is to be an intellectual. I will describe a strategy for reading the text that makes these out to be differently and more closely connected than they are usually taken to be