21 results
Reply to Tenenbaum
- Joshua Gert
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- Canadian Journal of Philosophy / Volume 37 / Issue 3 / September 2007
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 01 January 2020, pp. 463-476
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Neo-pragmatism, morality, and the specification problem
- Joshua Gert
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- Canadian Journal of Philosophy / Volume 48 / Issue 3-4 / 2018
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- 01 January 2020, pp. 447-467
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A defender of any view of moral language must explain how people with different moral views can be be talking to each other, rather than past each other. For expressivists this problem drastically constrains the search for the specific attitude expressed by, say, ‘immoral’. But cognitivists face a similar difficulty; they need to find a specific meaning for ‘immoral’ that underwrites genuine disagreement while accommodating the fact that different speakers have very different criteria for the use of that term. This paper explains how neo-pragmatism deals with this issue while avoiding problems that arise with existing expressivist and cognitivist solutions.
Mistaken Expressions
- Joshua Gert
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- Canadian Journal of Philosophy / Volume 36 / Issue 4 / December 2006
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 01 January 2020, pp. 459-479
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It is a suggestive feature of English and other languages that an indicative sentence such as ‘Premarital sex is wrong’ can be described not only as an expression of the belief that premarital sex is wrong, but also as an expression of disapproval of premarital sex. Disapproval is plausibly regarded as an attitude that is distinct from belief, in that it does not have truth conditions. What sort of attitude, then, should we take ‘Premarital sex is wrong’ to express: disapproval, belief, or perhaps both? One group of contemporary philosophers advocates the first Option. They hold that evaluative claims serve essentially to express positive and negative attitudes that are more like desires than beliefs, and that cannot be said to be true or false — at least in the robust way in which claims about the ages of trees (for example) can be true or false. Call these philosophers ‘expressivists.’ Seemingly opposed to expressivists are those who hold that evaluative claims express beliefs, and can be true or false.
Contributors
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- By Mitchell Aboulafia, Frederick Adams, Marilyn McCord Adams, Robert M. Adams, Laird Addis, James W. Allard, David Allison, William P. Alston, Karl Ameriks, C. Anthony Anderson, David Leech Anderson, Lanier Anderson, Roger Ariew, David Armstrong, Denis G. Arnold, E. J. Ashworth, Margaret Atherton, Robin Attfield, Bruce Aune, Edward Wilson Averill, Jody Azzouni, Kent Bach, Andrew Bailey, Lynne Rudder Baker, Thomas R. Baldwin, Jon Barwise, George Bealer, William Bechtel, Lawrence C. Becker, Mark A. Bedau, Ernst Behler, José A. Benardete, Ermanno Bencivenga, Jan Berg, Michael Bergmann, Robert L. Bernasconi, Sven Bernecker, Bernard Berofsky, Rod Bertolet, Charles J. Beyer, Christian Beyer, Joseph Bien, Joseph Bien, Peg Birmingham, Ivan Boh, James Bohman, Daniel Bonevac, Laurence BonJour, William J. Bouwsma, Raymond D. Bradley, Myles Brand, Richard B. Brandt, Michael E. Bratman, Stephen E. Braude, Daniel Breazeale, Angela Breitenbach, Jason Bridges, David O. Brink, Gordon G. Brittan, Justin Broackes, Dan W. Brock, Aaron Bronfman, Jeffrey E. Brower, Bartosz Brozek, Anthony Brueckner, Jeffrey Bub, Lara Buchak, Otavio Bueno, Ann E. Bumpus, Robert W. Burch, John Burgess, Arthur W. Burks, Panayot Butchvarov, Robert E. Butts, Marina Bykova, Patrick Byrne, David Carr, Noël Carroll, Edward S. Casey, Victor Caston, Victor Caston, Albert Casullo, Robert L. Causey, Alan K. L. Chan, Ruth Chang, Deen K. Chatterjee, Andrew Chignell, Roderick M. Chisholm, Kelly J. Clark, E. J. Coffman, Robin Collins, Brian P. Copenhaver, John Corcoran, John Cottingham, Roger Crisp, Frederick J. Crosson, Antonio S. Cua, Phillip D. Cummins, Martin Curd, Adam Cureton, Andrew Cutrofello, Stephen Darwall, Paul Sheldon Davies, Wayne A. Davis, Timothy Joseph Day, Claudio de Almeida, Mario De Caro, Mario De Caro, John Deigh, C. F. Delaney, Daniel C. Dennett, Michael R. DePaul, Michael Detlefsen, Daniel Trent Devereux, Philip E. Devine, John M. Dillon, Martin C. Dillon, Robert DiSalle, Mary Domski, Alan Donagan, Paul Draper, Fred Dretske, Mircea Dumitru, Wilhelm Dupré, Gerald Dworkin, John Earman, Ellery Eells, Catherine Z. Elgin, Berent Enç, Ronald P. Endicott, Edward Erwin, John Etchemendy, C. Stephen Evans, Susan L. Feagin, Solomon Feferman, Richard Feldman, Arthur Fine, Maurice A. Finocchiaro, William FitzPatrick, Richard E. Flathman, Gvozden Flego, Richard Foley, Graeme Forbes, Rainer Forst, Malcolm R. Forster, Daniel Fouke, Patrick Francken, Samuel Freeman, Elizabeth Fricker, Miranda Fricker, Michael Friedman, Michael Fuerstein, Richard A. Fumerton, Alan Gabbey, Pieranna Garavaso, Daniel Garber, Jorge L. A. Garcia, Robert K. Garcia, Don Garrett, Philip Gasper, Gerald Gaus, Berys Gaut, Bernard Gert, Roger F. Gibson, Cody Gilmore, Carl Ginet, Alan H. Goldman, Alvin I. Goldman, Alfonso Gömez-Lobo, Lenn E. Goodman, Robert M. Gordon, Stefan Gosepath, Jorge J. E. Gracia, Daniel W. Graham, George A. Graham, Peter J. Graham, Richard E. Grandy, I. Grattan-Guinness, John Greco, Philip T. Grier, Nicholas Griffin, Nicholas Griffin, David A. Griffiths, Paul J. Griffiths, Stephen R. Grimm, Charles L. Griswold, Charles B. Guignon, Pete A. Y. Gunter, Dimitri Gutas, Gary Gutting, Paul Guyer, Kwame Gyekye, Oscar A. Haac, Raul Hakli, Raul Hakli, Michael Hallett, Edward C. Halper, Jean Hampton, R. James Hankinson, K. R. Hanley, Russell Hardin, Robert M. Harnish, William Harper, David Harrah, Kevin Hart, Ali Hasan, William Hasker, John Haugeland, Roger Hausheer, William Heald, Peter Heath, Richard Heck, John F. Heil, Vincent F. Hendricks, Stephen Hetherington, Francis Heylighen, Kathleen Marie Higgins, Risto Hilpinen, Harold T. Hodes, Joshua Hoffman, Alan Holland, Robert L. Holmes, Richard Holton, Brad W. Hooker, Terence E. Horgan, Tamara Horowitz, Paul Horwich, Vittorio Hösle, Paul Hoβfeld, Daniel Howard-Snyder, Frances Howard-Snyder, Anne Hudson, Deal W. Hudson, Carl A. Huffman, David L. Hull, Patricia Huntington, Thomas Hurka, Paul Hurley, Rosalind Hursthouse, Guillermo Hurtado, Ronald E. Hustwit, Sarah Hutton, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, Harry A. Ide, David Ingram, Philip J. Ivanhoe, Alfred L. Ivry, Frank Jackson, Dale Jacquette, Joseph Jedwab, Richard Jeffrey, David Alan Johnson, Edward Johnson, Mark D. Jordan, Richard Joyce, Hwa Yol Jung, Robert Hillary Kane, Tomis Kapitan, Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley, James A. Keller, Ralph Kennedy, Sergei Khoruzhii, Jaegwon Kim, Yersu Kim, Nathan L. King, Patricia Kitcher, Peter D. Klein, E. D. Klemke, Virginia Klenk, George L. Kline, Christian Klotz, Simo Knuuttila, Joseph J. Kockelmans, Konstantin Kolenda, Sebastian Tomasz Kołodziejczyk, Isaac Kramnick, Richard Kraut, Fred Kroon, Manfred Kuehn, Steven T. Kuhn, Henry E. Kyburg, John Lachs, Jennifer Lackey, Stephen E. Lahey, Andrea Lavazza, Thomas H. Leahey, Joo Heung Lee, Keith Lehrer, Dorothy Leland, Noah M. Lemos, Ernest LePore, Sarah-Jane Leslie, Isaac Levi, Andrew Levine, Alan E. Lewis, Daniel E. Little, Shu-hsien Liu, Shu-hsien Liu, Alan K. L. Chan, Brian Loar, Lawrence B. Lombard, John Longeway, Dominic McIver Lopes, Michael J. Loux, E. J. Lowe, Steven Luper, Eugene C. Luschei, William G. Lycan, David Lyons, David Macarthur, Danielle Macbeth, Scott MacDonald, Jacob L. Mackey, Louis H. Mackey, Penelope Mackie, Edward H. Madden, Penelope Maddy, G. B. Madison, Bernd Magnus, Pekka Mäkelä, Rudolf A. Makkreel, David Manley, William E. Mann (W.E.M.), Vladimir Marchenkov, Peter Markie, Jean-Pierre Marquis, Ausonio Marras, Mike W. Martin, A. P. Martinich, William L. McBride, David McCabe, Storrs McCall, Hugh J. McCann, Robert N. McCauley, John J. McDermott, Sarah McGrath, Ralph McInerny, Daniel J. McKaughan, Thomas McKay, Michael McKinsey, Brian P. McLaughlin, Ernan McMullin, Anthonie Meijers, Jack W. Meiland, William Jason Melanson, Alfred R. Mele, Joseph R. Mendola, Christopher Menzel, Michael J. Meyer, Christian B. Miller, David W. Miller, Peter Millican, Robert N. Minor, Phillip Mitsis, James A. Montmarquet, Michael S. Moore, Tim Moore, Benjamin Morison, Donald R. Morrison, Stephen J. Morse, Paul K. Moser, Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, Ian Mueller, James Bernard Murphy, Mark C. Murphy, Steven Nadler, Jan Narveson, Alan Nelson, Jerome Neu, Samuel Newlands, Kai Nielsen, Ilkka Niiniluoto, Carlos G. Noreña, Calvin G. Normore, David Fate Norton, Nikolaj Nottelmann, Donald Nute, David S. Oderberg, Steve Odin, Michael O’Rourke, Willard G. Oxtoby, Heinz Paetzold, George S. Pappas, Anthony J. Parel, Lydia Patton, R. P. Peerenboom, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Adriaan T. Peperzak, Derk Pereboom, Jaroslav Peregrin, Glen Pettigrove, Philip Pettit, Edmund L. Pincoffs, Andrew Pinsent, Robert B. Pippin, Alvin Plantinga, Louis P. Pojman, Richard H. Popkin, John F. Post, Carl J. Posy, William J. Prior, Richard Purtill, Michael Quante, Philip L. Quinn, Philip L. Quinn, Elizabeth S. Radcliffe, Diana Raffman, Gerard Raulet, Stephen L. Read, Andrews Reath, Andrew Reisner, Nicholas Rescher, Henry S. Richardson, Robert C. Richardson, Thomas Ricketts, Wayne D. Riggs, Mark Roberts, Robert C. Roberts, Luke Robinson, Alexander Rosenberg, Gary Rosenkranz, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Adina L. Roskies, William L. Rowe, T. M. Rudavsky, Michael Ruse, Bruce Russell, Lilly-Marlene Russow, Dan Ryder, R. M. Sainsbury, Joseph Salerno, Nathan Salmon, Wesley C. Salmon, Constantine Sandis, David H. Sanford, Marco Santambrogio, David Sapire, Ruth A. Saunders, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Charles Sayward, James P. Scanlan, Richard Schacht, Tamar Schapiro, Frederick F. Schmitt, Jerome B. Schneewind, Calvin O. Schrag, Alan D. Schrift, George F. Schumm, Jean-Loup Seban, David N. Sedley, Kenneth Seeskin, Krister Segerberg, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Dennis M. Senchuk, James F. Sennett, William Lad Sessions, Stewart Shapiro, Tommie Shelby, Donald W. Sherburne, Christopher Shields, Roger A. Shiner, Sydney Shoemaker, Robert K. Shope, Kwong-loi Shun, Wilfried Sieg, A. John Simmons, Robert L. Simon, Marcus G. Singer, Georgette Sinkler, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Matti T. Sintonen, Lawrence Sklar, Brian Skyrms, Robert C. Sleigh, Michael Anthony Slote, Hans Sluga, Barry Smith, Michael Smith, Robin Smith, Robert Sokolowski, Robert C. Solomon, Marta Soniewicka, Philip Soper, Ernest Sosa, Nicholas Southwood, Paul Vincent Spade, T. L. S. Sprigge, Eric O. Springsted, George J. Stack, Rebecca Stangl, Jason Stanley, Florian Steinberger, Sören Stenlund, Christopher Stephens, James P. Sterba, Josef Stern, Matthias Steup, M. A. Stewart, Leopold Stubenberg, Edith Dudley Sulla, Frederick Suppe, Jere Paul Surber, David George Sussman, Sigrún Svavarsdóttir, Zeno G. Swijtink, Richard Swinburne, Charles C. Taliaferro, Robert B. Talisse, John Tasioulas, Paul Teller, Larry S. Temkin, Mark Textor, H. S. Thayer, Peter Thielke, Alan Thomas, Amie L. Thomasson, Katherine Thomson-Jones, Joshua C. Thurow, Vzalerie Tiberius, Terrence N. Tice, Paul Tidman, Mark C. Timmons, William Tolhurst, James E. Tomberlin, Rosemarie Tong, Lawrence Torcello, Kelly Trogdon, J. D. Trout, Robert E. Tully, Raimo Tuomela, John Turri, Martin M. Tweedale, Thomas Uebel, Jennifer Uleman, James Van Cleve, Harry van der Linden, Peter van Inwagen, Bryan W. Van Norden, René van Woudenberg, Donald Phillip Verene, Samantha Vice, Thomas Vinci, Donald Wayne Viney, Barbara Von Eckardt, Peter B. M. Vranas, Steven J. Wagner, William J. Wainwright, Paul E. Walker, Robert E. Wall, Craig Walton, Douglas Walton, Eric Watkins, Richard A. Watson, Michael V. Wedin, Rudolph H. Weingartner, Paul Weirich, Paul J. Weithman, Carl Wellman, Howard Wettstein, Samuel C. Wheeler, Stephen A. White, Jennifer Whiting, Edward R. Wierenga, Michael Williams, Fred Wilson, W. Kent Wilson, Kenneth P. Winkler, John F. Wippel, Jan Woleński, Allan B. Wolter, Nicholas P. Wolterstorff, Rega Wood, W. Jay Wood, Paul Woodruff, Alison Wylie, Gideon Yaffe, Takashi Yagisawa, Yutaka Yamamoto, Keith E. Yandell, Xiaomei Yang, Dean Zimmerman, Günter Zoller, Catherine Zuckert, Michael Zuckert, Jack A. Zupko (J.A.Z.)
- Edited by Robert Audi, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
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- The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
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- 05 August 2015
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- 27 April 2015, pp ix-xxx
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Perform a Justified Option
- JOSHUA GERT
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In a number of recent publications, Douglas Portmore has defended consequentialism, largely on the basis of a maximizing view of practical rationality. I have criticized such maximizing views, arguing that we need to distinguish two independent dimensions of normative strength: justifying strength and requiring strength. I have also argued that this distinction helps to explain why we typically have so many rational options. Engaging with these arguments, Portmore has (a) developed his own novel maximization-friendly method of explaining the ubiquity of rational options, and (b) criticized one argument in favour of a substantive justifying/requiring distinction in the domain of practical rationality. The present article defends the justifying/requiring distinction, and criticizes Portmore's maximization-friendly strategy for explaining the ubiquity of rational options.
Moral Reasons and Rational Status1*
- Joshua Gert
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- Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume / Volume 33 / 2007
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- 01 January 2020, pp. 171-196
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- 2007
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The question “Why be moral?” is open to at least three extremely different interpretations. One way to distinguish these interpretations is by picturing the question as being asked by, respectively, Allan, who is going to act immorally unless he can be convinced to act otherwise, Beth, who is perfectly happy to do what is morally required on a certain occasion but who wants to know what is it about the act that makes it morally required, and Charles, who is trying to understand why rational people act morally. An answer to the question as understood by Allan is, for some, the holy grail of moral philosophy, and it is also perhaps the default understanding of the question. The question as asked by Beth is what David Copp, in his contribution to this volume, calls the “why-think-morality-requires-this” question. The question as asked by Charles can be called the “what-rationally-justifies-moral-behaviour” question. Charles’ question, importantly, is about rational permissibility, and it is most pointed when moral behaviour requires sacrifice.
Index
- Joshua Gert, Florida State University
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- Brute Rationality
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- 22 September 2009
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- 19 August 2004, pp 226-230
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8 - Internalism and different kinds of reasons
- Joshua Gert, Florida State University
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- Brute Rationality
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- 22 September 2009
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- 19 August 2004, pp 167-185
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Summary
The purpose of the present chapter is to bring the requiring/justifying distinction to bear on a central controversy in contemporary ethical theory: the internalism/externalism debate. This debate concerns the nature of the relation between practical reasons and the desires of the agents who have those reasons. Crudely put, internalists hold that there is a very strong relation between the desires of a (rational) agent, and the reasons that such an agent has, while externalists hold that the reasons that an agent has are given by features of her situation in the world, and are independent of her attitudes towards those features. The nature of the relation between practical reasons and desire is of obvious relevance to a large number of central philosophical and practical questions, including the rational status of morally required behavior, and the reasonableness of punishing people who act in significantly immoral ways.
Parties to the internalism/externalism debate have typically assumed that, with regard to practical reasons, either internalism or externalism is correct. And they have assumed that if, for example, internalism should turn out to be the correct account, then there will be a single correct interpretation of internalism that holds for all practical reasons. In bringing the requiring/justifying distinction to bear on the internalism/externalism debate, one major point of this chapter is that these assumptions are almost certainly false, and that a failure to see this has hamstrung the discussion from the beginning.
Frontmatter
- Joshua Gert, Florida State University
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- Brute Rationality
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- 22 September 2009
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- 19 August 2004, pp i-viii
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6 - Fitting the view into the contemporary debate
- Joshua Gert, Florida State University
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- Brute Rationality
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- 22 September 2009
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- 19 August 2004, pp 111-135
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The claim that some reasons have greater justificatory strength than requiring strength entails a number of further claims that are at odds with a good deal of current philosophical dogma. For example, it entails that one need not, rationally, always act on the stronger of two opposed reasons, even in the absence of other relevant considerations. And it holds that this is true whether one takes ‘stronger’ to mean ‘stronger in the requiring role’ or ‘stronger in the justifying role.’ The official view advocated in this book also denies the internalism requirement on practical reasons, for it holds that it is not irrational to be completely unmoved by altruistic reasons. Given these conflicts with contemporary views, and given also what appears to be a significant structural difference between the view advocated here and other views – two strength values, as opposed to only one – some readers may have begun to suspect that the notions of practical rationality and reasons for action that form the subject of this book, while interesting and significant, are simply different notions than those of concern to other contemporary philosophers who use the same lexicographical terms. At the very beginning of chapter 1 I explained why this suspicion is unfounded: we are all engaged in the same project of trying to produce an account of the fundamental normative notion relevant to action.
1 - What would an adequate theory of rationality be like?
- Joshua Gert, Florida State University
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- Brute Rationality
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- 22 September 2009
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- 19 August 2004, pp 1-18
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THE FUNDAMENTAL NORMATIVE NOTION
When we argue with other people about what to do, very often we appeal to principles. Certainly when philosophers offer moral theories, and argue that we should be moral, they appeal to principles. And even when we, or they, offer reasons in place of principles, it is reasonable to think of such arguments as shorthand for appeals to principles. For no one would advocate an action simply because there was some reason in its favor, if it were clear that there were compelling reasons against performing it. Thus when reasons are cited in arguments, there is some idea that all the relevant reasons, taken together, support the action. This implies that there is some principle in the background that produces overall verdicts based on all those reasons: perhaps it is the simple principle ‘perform the action supported by the most reasons’, or perhaps it is some more complicated principle. One cites particular reasons in order to suggest that those reasons are sufficient to determine the outcome of the application of such a principle. The very plausible idea that two actions to which the same reasons are relevant must have the same rational status also suggests that reason-based arguments are backed by a unique principle: a principle that takes those reasons as input and yields the status of the action as output.
Preface and acknowledgements
- Joshua Gert, Florida State University
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- Brute Rationality
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- 22 September 2009
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- 19 August 2004, pp xi-xiv
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I would guess that the first time I read any real philosophy was when I was about ten years old. Sitting and reading aloud on the living room couch with my father, I took the part of Hylas in Berkeley's Three Dialogues. It is a happy memory for me, despite the fact that I turned out, as those familiar with that dialogue will know, not to have very many lines, and always to be wrong. I also have a very distinct visual memory, from roughly the same period, of the moment my father presented the open question argument to me. He didn't explain the problems with the argument, and if he had, I doubt I would have understood what he was saying. I was just sophisticated enough that the argument seemed to me to show exactly what Moore thought it showed. I didn't like having to believe in non-natural properties. I didn't even have any clear idea what they were. But I had to do it. Twenty-seven years later, I think I might have gotten out of the problem.
Those two memories may be the oldest ones I have of doing any philosophy with my father, but they are by no means the only ones. Later memories are less distinct, probably because philosophical discussion became as common as eating dinner.
3 - The criticism from internalism about practical reasons
- Joshua Gert, Florida State University
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- Brute Rationality
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- 22 September 2009
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- 19 August 2004, pp 40-61
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The previous chapter argued for the existence of a class of practical reasons – purely justificatory practical reasons – that have no power to make actions rationally required. It also suggested that altruistic reasons form a significant part of this class. The strategy of that chapter was to point out that a wide range of moral views grant, either explicitly or implicitly, the existence of moral considerations that function in the same way. That is, they grant the existence of considerations, the presence of which can change an otherwise immoral action into a morally permissible one, and yet that do not seem to be the sort of considerations that must weigh, in a positive way, in the motivational economy of a virtuous person. On the strength of some examples, and of further points of analogy between morality and practical rationality, it was then suggested that practical rationality also includes considerations that play a similar normative role. But if practical rationality does include reasons that function in this purely justificatory way, then it seems that there could be actions, favored by such reasons, that even a rational agent might not be motivated to perform – and this could be true even when the agent knows that there are no countervailing reasons.
Contents
- Joshua Gert, Florida State University
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- Brute Rationality
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- 22 September 2009
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- 19 August 2004, pp ix-x
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7 - Two concepts of rationality
- Joshua Gert, Florida State University
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- Brute Rationality
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- 22 September 2009
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- 19 August 2004, pp 136-166
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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.
9 - Brute rationality
- Joshua Gert, Florida State University
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- 22 September 2009
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- 19 August 2004, pp 186-220
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One significant implication of the view of rationality offered in chapter 7 is that as long as an action does not stem from the kind of mental malfunction that would put the agent at increased risk of suffering harms without compensating benefits for anyone else, that person's action is subjectively rational. However, many contemporary philosophers hold that for an action to be rational in this sense, or even intelligible, it must somehow involve the judgment, by the agent, that the ends of the action are good. For example, Jonathan Dancy, Warren Quinn, Joseph Raz, and Thomas Scanlon have recently and independently presented theories according to which intentional action is action undertaken for a reason, and undertaking an action for a reason requires that one see something in the action as being of value, or as being a reason-giving feature. Not surprisingly these philosophers also hold that we have desires for reasons, at least when these desires are not simply urges that seize us. Having a desire for a reason involves, for Scanlon and for Raz, the judgment that the object of the desire is good in some way, while Quinn holds that the same sort of judgment is required in order for an action to be rational. And Dancy holds that the reasons for which an agent acts, whether good or bad, must at least be regarded by the agent as favoring the action.
2 - Practical rationality, morality, and purely justificatory reasons
- Joshua Gert, Florida State University
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- Brute Rationality
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- 22 September 2009
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- 19 August 2004, pp 19-39
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Because the normative notions of practical and theoretical rationality seem, due to their respective names, to be species of one genus, it is often assumed that there should be a very strong parallel between the two notions. In particular, it is often assumed that for practical rationality, the business of normative reasons is to count in favor of (or against) doing something, and that for theoretical rationality, the business of normative reasons is to count in favor of (or against) believing something. And in both cases it is assumed that reasons do this by providing justification which either is requirement, or which would tend, if the reasons became stronger or more numerous, to mount in strength and become requirement. A closely related position holds that if a belief is held for no reason, or if an action is done for no reason, then the respective belief or action is unjustified and irrational. As more theoretical reasons are found for the belief, or as more practical reasons are found for the action, or as existing reasons become stronger, the belief or the action becomes increasingly justified. If the justification becomes strong enough, then the belief or the action is required.
The above position, that sufficient justifying reasons will always yield requirement, is consistent with two interpretations. The first interpretation, (a), allows some actions and beliefs to be justified but not required.
Brute Rationality
- Normativity and Human Action
- Joshua Gert
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- Published online:
- 22 September 2009
- Print publication:
- 19 August 2004
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This book presents an account of normative practical reasons and the way in which they contribute to the rationality of action. Rather than simply 'counting in favour of' actions, normative reasons play two logically distinct roles: requiring action and justifying action. The distinction between these two roles explains why some reasons do not seem relevant to the rational status of an action unless the agent cares about them, while other reasons retain all their force regardless of the agent's attitude. It also explains why the class of rationally permissible action is wide enough to contain not only all morally required action, but also much selfish and immoral action. The book will appeal to a range of readers interested in practical reason in particular, and moral theory more generally.
4 - A functional role analysis of reasons
- Joshua Gert, Florida State University
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- Brute Rationality
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- 22 September 2009
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- 19 August 2004, pp 62-84
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In the previous two chapters a great deal of attention was paid to the notion of a practical reason. In chapter 2, the justifying and requiring roles of these sorts of reasons were distinguished, and in chapter 3 this distinction was further developed. But even in chapter 2, one might have noticed that the roles of justifying and requiring were explained in terms of an antecedent notion of rationality. For example, the justifying role is the role of making an action rational, when otherwise it would be irrational. Unless we have some idea what ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ mean, this claim will make little sense. What emerged more or less explicitly in chapter 3 was that the need to distinguish between these two roles for practical reasons depends in an important way on what principles of rationality we are willing to recognize. Principles that have the form of P imply that some reasons can play a justifying role without being able to play a requiring role at all. And principles similar to Q allow that some reasons might be able play a very significant justifying role without being able to play much of a requiring role. So, perhaps despite appearances, the basic normative notion that has been used so far in this book has not been the notion of a reason for action.
References
- Joshua Gert, Florida State University
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- Brute Rationality
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- 22 September 2009
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- 19 August 2004, pp 221-225
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