Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and acknowledgements
- 1 What would an adequate theory of rationality be like?
- 2 Practical rationality, morality, and purely justificatory reasons
- 3 The criticism from internalism about practical reasons
- 4 A functional role analysis of reasons
- 5 Accounting for our actual normative judgments
- 6 Fitting the view into the contemporary debate
- 7 Two concepts of rationality
- 8 Internalism and different kinds of reasons
- 9 Brute rationality
- References
- Index
7 - Two concepts of rationality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and acknowledgements
- 1 What would an adequate theory of rationality be like?
- 2 Practical rationality, morality, and purely justificatory reasons
- 3 The criticism from internalism about practical reasons
- 4 A functional role analysis of reasons
- 5 Accounting for our actual normative judgments
- 6 Fitting the view into the contemporary debate
- 7 Two concepts of rationality
- 8 Internalism and different kinds of reasons
- 9 Brute rationality
- References
- Index
Summary
This book has so far been primarily dedicated to arguing for and explaining a distinction between two normative roles for practical reasons: justifying and requiring. One reason for this is that this distinction is the most controversial aspect of the theory of rationality advocated here. Acceptance of the distinction entails the falsity of a number of extremely widespread assumptions that philosophers make when talking about rationality. But the distinction between these two normative roles cannot be the end of the story. For, as was argued in chapter 4, we should take the notion of wholesale rational status as prior to the notion of a reason for action, and thus as prior to the justifying/requiring distinction as well. The functional role analysis of reasons offered in that chapter took it for granted that we had some way of determining which actions were rational, and which not. So this book would be seriously incomplete without an account of wholesale rational status. Moreover, chapter 4 also claimed that reasons are directly relevant only to objective rationality, and not to subjective rationality. Much more remains to be said about these two concepts of rationality. It is the purpose of the current chapter to address these issues, yielding the final account of practical rationality. The two final chapters of the book will then draw out some implications, and explain how the psychology of a rational agent is related to the reasons available to her.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Brute RationalityNormativity and Human Action, pp. 136 - 166Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004