End-Relational Theory

This paper advances a reductive semantics for ‘ought’ and a naturalistic theory of normativity. It gives a unified analysis of predictive, instrumental, and categorical uses of ‘ought’: the predictive ‘ought’ is basic, and is interpreted in terms of probability. Instrumental ‘oughts’ are analyzed as predictive ‘oughts’ occurring under an ‘in order that’ modifer (the end-relational theory). The theory is then extended to categorical uses of ‘ought’: it is argued that they are special rhetorical uses of the instrumental ‘ought’. Plausible conversational principles explain how this end-relational ‘ought’ can perform the expressive functions of the moral ‘ought’. The notion of an ‘ought-simpliciter’ is also discussed.

Some intuitive normative principles raise vexing ‘detaching problems’ by their failure to license modus ponens.  I examine three such principles (a self-reliance principle and two different instrumental principles) and recent stategies employed to resolve their detaching problems.  I show that solving these problems necessitates postulating an indefinitely large number of senses for ‘ought’.  The semantics for ‘ought’ that is standard in linguistics offers a unifying strategy for solving these problems, but I argue that an alternative approach combining an end-relational theory of normativity with a comparative probabilistic semantics for ‘ought’ provides a more satisfactory solution.

What does it mean to call something a “reason”?  This paper offers a unifying semantics for the word ‘reason’, challenging three ideas that are popular in contemporary philosophy; (i) that ‘reason’ is semantically ambiguous, (ii) that the concept of a normative reason is the basic normative concept, and (iii) that basic normative concepts are unanalyzable.  Nonnormative uses of ‘reason’ are taken as basic, and as meaning explanation why.  Talk about normative reasons for action is analyzed in terms of explanations why acting would be good in some way.  I show how a number of obstacles for this idea—including extending the analysis to normative reasons for attitudes—can be overcome by adopting a reductive, end-relational analysis of the meaning of ‘good’ which I have defended elsewhere.  Finally, I analyze talk of “motivating” reasons in terms of (supposed) normative reasons for which agents act.  [NOTE: this paper is an abbreviated version of a draft Chapter 5 of Confusion of Tongues, and builds on some ideas in ‘The Reasons that Matter’, 2006.]

The motivational reasons-internalism of Bernard Williams fails to capture our first-order reasons judgements, while the nonnaturalistic reasons-externalism of Derek Parfit cannot explain the nature or normative authority of reasons. This paper offers an intermediary view, reformulating skepticism about external reasons as the claim not that they don’t exist but rather that they don’t matter. The end-relational theory of normative reasons is proposed, according to which a reason for an action is a fact that explains why the action would be good relative to some end, where the relevant end for any ascription of reasons is determined by the speaker’s conversational context. Because these ends need not be the agent’s ends, Williams is wrong to reject the existence of external reasons. But contra Parfit, a reason for action is only important for an agent if it is motivationally internal to that agent.

Analyses of moral value judgements must meet a practicality requirement: moral speech acts characteristically express pro- or con-attitudes, indicate that speakers are motivated in certain ways, and exert influence on others’ motivations. Nondescriptivists including Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard claim that no descriptivist analysis can satisfy this requirement. I argue first that while the practicality requirement is defeasible, it indeed demands a connection between value judgement and motivation that resembles a semantic or conceptual rather than merely contingent psychological link. I then show how a form of descriptivism, the interest-relational theory, satisfies the requirement as a pragmatic and conversational feature of value judgement – thereby also accommodating its defeasibility. The word ‘good’ is always indexed to some set of motivations: when this index is unarticulated in many contexts the speaker conversationally implicates possession of those motivations.