PEA Soup

Frankfurt and Moral Requirements

I greatly admire the work of Harry Frankfurt. More recently, he has argued that love and caring, in the form of volitional necessities, are the sole source of our practical reasons. One corollary of this is that moral requirements are not important independently of our attitudes of love and caring. The argument to this conclusion is interesting. I have constructed it below from quotes from his 2006 book Taking Ourselves Seriously and Getting it Right (pp. 22-3). I have some idea about where the argument goes wrong but this time I'm more interested in what others make of the argument.

Setiya’s “Reasons”: The Diagnosis

Why is Setiya’s principle vulnerable to the problems that I listed in my previous post? What exactly is the diagnosis?

I suggest that the diagnosis is that there are in fact two sorts of reasons. These two sorts of reasons do not always coincide; and Setiya is implicitly conflating these two sorts of reasons here.

Problems for Setiya’s “Reasons”

I’m supposed to be writing a review of Kieran Setiya’s  book, Reasons without Rationalism (Harvard UP, 2007). Even though I disagreed with a lot of what he says (well, I'm an opinionated philosopher, so I would, wouldn't I?), I found it a wonderful and fascinating book.

In this post, I want to raise some problems for a central principle that lies behind much of Setiya’s argument. (I’m sure that PEA Soupers’ comments will help me with my review.) This is the principle that he calls Reasons (p. 12):

Reasons: The fact that p is a reason for A to φ just in case A has a collection of psychological states, C, such that the disposition to be moved to φ by C-and-the-belief-that-p is a good disposition of practical thought, and C contains no false beliefs.

I think this principle has the following problems:

Why maximize the expected value? (II)

Suppose that what ultimately matters is the objective goodness of what you do – where the objective goodness of an action is determined by the action’s actual outcome, not merely by the expected outcome. But suppose that you usually don’t know for certain what degree of objective goodness any of the available options will have. You must make your choices by following a rule that determines which options are eligible purely on the basis of the probabilities that you assign to various hypotheses about the degree of objective goodness that each of these available options will have. What reason could there be for you to have a policy of always choosing an option that has a maximal expected degree of objective goodness?

Why maximize the expected value? (I)

Classical decision theory is built around a central "representation theorem": so long as an agent's preferences meet certain basic conditions of coherence, we can construct a function that represents the agent's preferences -- in the sense that the agent prefers one prospect X over a second prospect Y if and only if the value that this function assigns to X is greater than the value that the function assigns to Y; and moreover, this function has a fundamentally expectational structure, in the sense that the value that this function assigns to an uncertain prospect is the weighted sum of the values that the function assigns to all the possible outcomes of that prospect -- where the value of each of these possible outcomes is weighted by the probability that that prospect will have that outcome.

So for classical decision theory, everything flows from these basic conditions on coherent preferences. In turn, these coherence conditions are typically defended by means of "Dutch book" arguments, which seek to show that someone whose preferences violate these conditions of coherence would be willing to take out a set of bets that would guarantee a certain loss, no matter what happened.

My problem is, I like the general idea that when we're not certain what situation we're in, we should be guided by probabilities. (As Joseph Butler, one of my philosophical heroes, put it, "To us, probability is the very guide of life.") And intuitively, the most rational way of being guided by probabilities in making our choices or decisions is by making choices that  have maximal expected value (using probabilities to define the concept of the "expected" value of a function in the normal way).  But for various reasons, I can't accept the classical decision theorist's explanation of why we should maximize expected value.

Practical Conditionals

Practical conditionals are a problem.  We all use conditionals like, “If you want a great steak, you ought to go to Manny’s Steak House.”  But suppose I do want a great steak; does it follow that I ought to go to Manny’s?  No—maybe my doctor has told me to lay off the red meat.  Then is the conditional false?  That doesn’t seem right either, if Manny’s really is the best place for a great steak.

We can put a sharper point on this problem.  Suppose your best friend’s wife is very attractive, attractive enough to put ideas in your head.  (Readers of other persuasions will have to generate their own example.)  But suppose also that you think sleeping with one’s best friend’s wife is morally repugnant.  Consider the two claims, both plausible in their own way:

(A) If you want to seduce your best friend’s wife, you ought to spend a lot of time alone with her.

(B) If you want to seduce your best friend’s wife, you ought not spend a lot of time alone with her.*

Add the premise that you want to seduce your best friend’s wife, and we have two parallel modus ponens arguments, one of which concludes that you ought, and the other that you ought not, spend a lot of time alone with her.

Hawthorne and Stanley on Knowledge and Action

Currently, epistemologists seem to be very interested in practical reasons and practical rationality. One good example of this is an interesting new paper entitled ‘Knowledge and Action’ by John Hawthorne and Jason Stanley (here) forthcoming in the Journal of Philosophy. Usually, when I read epistemologists writing about reasons I feel like entering a strange new world where things look slightly peculiar.

No State-Given Reasons

Reasons are facts that count in favor of some intentional attitude, such as a belief, a desire, or an intention to act. And reasons to A (where 'A' stands for some intentional attitude) can be divided into two subcategories. First, there are those reasons to A that are provided by facts about the  intentional object of A. For instance, the fact that some state of affairs is one in which many people experience pleasure is an object-given reason to desire that that state of affairs obtains. Second, there are those reasons to A that are provided by facts about the state of A-ing. The fact that an evil demon will cause me to suffer if I don’t desire that P is a state-given reason to desire that P.  In this post, I hope to provide a simple argument for the conclusion that so-called state-given “reasons” are not genuine reasons. The argument will be stated mainly in terms of reasons to believe, but I think that it applies mutatis mutandis to reasons for other intentional attitudes.

What is a reason for action?

The following is conceivable:  the features that make an action right are not the features which one ought to attend to when reasoning about whether to perform the action.  In consequentialist lingo (I think I’m getting this correct), what’s right-making is not necessarily a blueprint for a decision procedure.  For example, it might be best, on utilitarian grounds, if everyone was a Commonsense Moralist and never even attempted to maximize general utility.  This divergence is possible whenever one’s theory of right-making is consequentialist of whatever stripe, and maybe even more often than that.

With that as background, I am wondering what a “reason for acting” is.  Most definitions of reasons that I know of say they are something like “considerations counting in favor,” so a reason for acting in a certain way (a reason for the action) is a consideration which counts in favor of acting in a certain way (the action).  My question is this:  are these “considerations” the considerations that figure in the right-making theory, or the considerations that figure in the decision procedure?

Too Much Information

Many philosophers want to use desires to account for rationality, reasons, well-being, and so on. Few of them use actual desires in this project. This is because actual desires are often ill-informed. In some cases, had we known better we would not have desired to do what we did. As a result, many philosophers, at least since Sidgwick, have used hypothetical, informed desires in their accounts. I wonder how this part of the desire-based views should be best formulated.