Introduction

It seems hard to believe that Williams's “Internal and External Reasons” was ever “insufficiently discussed” (McDowell 1995: 68). Indeed, this “agenda-setting” paper, as Elijah Millgram (1996: 197) rightly calls it, lays fair claim to having elicited more responses, by more distinguished philosophers, than any other article or book by Williams in his long and illustrious publishing career. Why this should be so is the subject of this chapter.

“Internal and External Reasons” presents Williams's account of practical reasoning, or, more specifically, his account of reasons for action, or, more specifically still, his account of statements about reasons for action. As Williams puts the issue in “Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame”, the first of three follow-up attempts to clarify his initial discussion: “What are the truth conditions for statements of the form ‘A has a reason to ϕ’, where A is a person and ‘ϕ’ is some verb of action? What are we saying when we say someone has a reason to do something?” (Williams 1995c: 35). Williams's most recent, as well as his preferred, answer to these questions takes the following form: “A has a reason to ϕ only if there is a sound deliberative route from A's subjective motivational set … to A's ϕ-ing” (Williams 2001: 91). This answer goes to the heart of Williams's internalism about reasons for action; that is, it captures the connection Williams deems necessary between an agent's reason to ϕ and a “motive which will be served or furthered by his ϕ-ing” (Williams 1981b: 101).