Motivating Reasons

We conceive of ourselves as beings capable of acting in response to normative reasons. Given that our normative reasons are usually facts, this self-conception entails that we are capable of acting in response to facts. Arguments from error cases might seem to force us to deflate that self-conception, for they seem to show that to act in light of a fact must simply be a way of acting in light of a belief. The goal of this article is to argue against this deflationary view. I offer a counterexample to it and argue that in order to reject the argument from error on which it is grounded we should adopt a disjunctive view of acting in light of a consideration. According to this view there are two subjectively indistinguishable but distinct ways of acting in light of a consideration: acting in light of a fact and acting in light of a belief. This view allows us to take seriously the idea that our motivating reasons can be identical to facts and not mere true considerations and thus to take seriously our self-conception as beings that respond to and are capable of being moved by normative reasons for action.

Are reasons for action facts or psychological states? There are two answers in the literature on the ontology of reasons. According to the Standard Story, normative reasons are facts, while motivating reasons are psychological states. According to the factualist, both normative and motivating reasons are facts. In this paper I argue that neither of these views is satisfactory. The Standard Story errs in thinking that the two kinds of reasons are different ontological entities. The factualist gets this right, but incurs some distasteful ontological commitments by thinking of motivating reasons as facts. We should, thus, give a proper hearing to the only serious logically possible alternative to the two existing views: both motivating and normative reasons are psychological states.

I've defended the view that to act or believe for the reason that p, p must be true.  (Ultimately, the position I take in the book is that to act, believe, or feel for the reason that p, one must aptly believe p.) People run arguments from error to try to undermine this view.  I offer a partial response to such arguments here. The arguments from error rest on a mistake in that they assume that acting on a false belief is an instance of acting for a reason.  Acting for a reason is an achievement. To act for a reason one has to identify or recognise how things are and respond accordingly.  That there are ways to explain someone's behaviour in the case of acting on a false belief (or a Gettiered belief) does not show that there are ways to act for reasons in this case.

This essay is concerned with the claim that when an agent acts for a normative reason, that normative reason is identical with his or her motivating reason. I will call this thesis the 'Identity Thesis'. Many philosophers treat the Identity Thesis as a commonplace or a truism, and some claim that it plays the role of a constraint on every theory of reasons (Dancy 2000). Accordingly, the Identity Thesis has been used to rule out certain ontological views about reasons. I argue that the Identity Thesis can be read in different ways and that each of its interpretations is controversial. My conclusion is that there is no convincing argument for the Identity Thesis and that there is a viable alternative to the Identity Thesis, namely, to think of the relation between motivating and normative reasons as one of representation, not identity. This allows for ontological views about reasons that are incompatible with the Identity Thesis. Therefore, the Identity Thesis need not be accepted as a truism or as a constraint on every theory of reasons.

One of the main goals of this paper is to introduce the idea that a metaethical theory of the nature of normative judgment must be compatible with a plausible account of the reasons for which we act when we act on the basis of our normative judgments. Another main goal of the paper is to argue that when we try to satisfy this desideratum for a metaethical theory, we notice that cognitivism faces a challenge that non-cognitivism elegantly sidesteps. If cognitivism is true, then it is hard to explain how someone could perform an action, φ, on the basis of her judgment that she ought to φ, and thereby for the reasons that one might sensibly take to explain why she ought to φ. If we accept non-cognitivism, no similar problem arises. This, I claim, gives us a reason to prefer non-cognitivism over cognitivism. But even if someone does not find this argument against cognitivism and in favor of non-cognitivism entirely convincing, she might agree that the more general point is deserving of more attention than it has attracted in the past. I close with an attempt to deal with some possible criticisms.

Dieser Forschungsbericht gibt einen Überblick über die aktuelle Debatte über motivierende Gründe in der Handlungs- und Erkenntnistheorie. Folgende drei Fragen werden schwerpunktmäßig behandelt: a) Was für eine Art von Entität sind motivierende Gründe? b) Welche Beziehung besteht zwischen einer Handlung oder Einstellung und ihren motivierenden Gründen? c) Welche kognitiven Bedingungen gelten für die Zuschreibung motivierender Gründe?