PRACTICAL DELIBERATION WITHOUT PRACTICAL REASONS

When deliberating about which course of action to undertake, one needs to

believe there is an option or set of options such that the weight of practical

reasons favors it. Or so some moral theorists like David Enoch (2011) and

Talbot Brewer (2011) argue.1 Otherwise, so their thought goes, one would

not take oneself to be practically deliberating. Perhaps, one could see

oneself as picking arbitrarily, but one would not be practically deliberating,

absent the thought that one is trying to get something right. Intuitive as all

this sounds, the claim that we need to believe that there are practical

reasons in order to deliberate about what to do is false or absolutely

irrelevant to us as practical deliberators.2

In § 1 of the paper, I elucidate the claim of these moral theorists. I

then distinguish between strong and weak versions of the claim and try to

offer considerations which support them. With that on the table, I argue

against the strong version in § 2. In § 3, I argue against the weak version.

At the close of the essay in § 4, I recast the structure and import of the

argument.

§ 1 Understanding the Claim1 I should note at the outset that the reasons why Brewer and Enoch defend this claim and the broader arguments in which the claim is embedded are varied, so the consequence of refuting the claim is also varied. 2 I realize that it may not yet be clear what it means to say that a claim is ‘irrelevant to us as practical deliberators.’ I hope to clarify and substantiate this contention in the course of the essay, especially in § 4.

There are three tasks for this section. First, I want to make clear just

what is claimed when theorists like Enoch (2011) and Brewer (2011)

maintain that we need to believe that there are practical reasons in order to

practically deliberate. To this end, I delineate the key (equivocal) terms

that figure in this claim, namely practical deliberation, practical reasons,

and belief. The second task is to distinguish between a weak version of the

claim about what we need to believe in order to practically deliberate and a

much stronger, or more demanding, version of what is required for practical

deliberation. The third task is to motivate both versions of the claim by

reviewing arguments offered by Enoch (2011) and Brewer (2011).

1.1 Terms of the Debate

Let us render more precise the terms that figure in this debate. First,

let us call the basic contention of theorists like Enoch (2011) and Brewer

(2011) the BASIC CLAIM.

BASIC CLAIM: We, agents, need to believe that there are practical

reasons in order to practically deliberate.

We will start unpacking the terms in the BASIC CLAIM by homing in

on the activity for which some sort of belief is supposedly requisite; that is,

we will start by characterizing practical deliberation. Practical deliberation

is a practice by which we, agents, try to decide which, of some set of

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courses of action that we take to be available, we intend to pursue.3 In

claiming that practical deliberation, as I understand it here, is about

deciding about which intentions for action to form, I am excluding from

practical deliberation concerns about which other sorts of attitudes to take.

For this reason, theoretical deliberation, if we understand that as deciding

which doxastic attitudes to have vis-à-vis propositions, is distinct from

practical deliberation. Of course, the two sorts of deliberation often occur

in tandem. Additionally, deliberation whose goal is to suggest the right

emotional response to have vis-à-vis a proposition (or the contents of a

proposition) and deliberation whose end is merely to form the correct

evaluation of something – these are also both distinct from practical

deliberation.4 Of course, these sorts of deliberation also figure in practical

deliberation, even if we can distinguish between them. Also, it may help to

note that the central case of practical deliberation I imagine is the

individual case, that is, one in which a single individual is deliberating alone

about she intends to do, not in a group.5

3 In saying that practical deliberation is about deciding what to intend, I deliberately distinguish it from predicting what one will intend. The latter activity, interesting as it might be, obviously does not constitute what anybody calls practical deliberation. Also, one might have noted that I did not use locutions like “deciding what one ought to intend” or “deciding what one should intend” in defining practical deliberation. This was deliberate. There is ambiguity about should and ought, such that on one understanding of these terms, I think practical deliberation need not to be concerned with what we should or ought to intend. See 3.2 infra. Finally, I said that practical deliberation is a practice by which we decide what to intend, not the practice. There is at least another such practice, what I call, following Ullmann-Margalit and Morgenbesser, picking. For more on that, see 1.3 infra.4 Enoch explicitly makes this distinction. See Enoch 2011: 73, n54.5 I tend to think that if BASIC CLAIM is wrongheaded in the individual case, it is clearly wrongheaded in the group case as well, but it would take us far beyond the scope of the present effort to consider this thesis.

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Next are the contents of this belief. Apparently, we need to believe

that there are practical reasons. The thought that something is a reason is

actually fairly complicated, and there are many questions one might ask

about whether reasons are entities or relations, natural or sui generis,

unanalyzable or complex. Two points are in order. First, the BASIC CLAIM

is supposed to be neutral on those difficult metaphysical questions.

Second, while I do think we all need to accept a particular gloss on reasons

which I give below, we can leave these thoughts unexplored for now, since

nothing yet turns on having a more specific idea in mind. Now, what

distinguishes the practical reasons from other sorts of reasons is simply that

practical reasons are the sorts of reasons that bear exclusively on practical

deliberation.

Finally, what is meant by belief in the BASIC CLAIM? To answer this,

it may help to see what is not meant. Let us look at some ways of qualifying

the claim about believing, so that it does not seem implausibly strong.

First, saying that we must believe there are practical reasons in order to

deliberate practically is not to claim that no one who engages in practical

deliberation affirms skepticism or nihilism about practical reason. Indeed,

one could be a card-carrying error theorist about practical reason; however,

according to the proponent of the BASIC CLAIM, if one practically

deliberates, one has some sort of belief in practical reasons all the same.

Another thing: the proponent of the BASIC CLAIM is not committed to the

idea that every practical deliberator has some explicit, occurrent thought

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about the nature of practical reason; one need not have any explicitly held

philosophical views at all, so far as the BASIC CLAIM goes.6

There is also the risk of making the belief claim too weak. To

appreciate the way in which proponents of the BASIC CLAIM guard against

this, let us use an example. Suppose that I think the gambler’s fallacy is

good reasoning. Rolling a fair pair of dice for an hour, I have rolled two,

three, four, and every other combination but twelve; now, I think that

twelve must be much more likely to turn up than beforehand because I’m

due for a twelve. Suppose I thought like that, and then further suppose that

someone could show that this belief when combined with other things I

believe leads to a contradiction and from that contradiction anything

follows, even that gambling is morally wrong. Perhaps, there is a sense in

which I am committed, insofar as I am committed to a contradiction from

which anything can be deductively inferred, to the proposition that

gambling is morally wrong; however, this is not the sense of belief that

proponents of the BASIC CLAIM have in mind. They do not think that the

belief in practical reasons is something that just happens to be entailed by

other beliefs that one has; stronger than that, they think that this belief in

some sense importantly figures in one’s thoughts. One could not make

sense of a person’s experience, which features practical deliberations all

6 Enoch says as much himself: That “we don’t necessarily explicitly invoke normative truths [about practical reasons] when deliberating [practically]... doesn’t mean we don’t commit ourselves to normative truths when deliberating. The reasoner who routinely infers to the best explanation need not have explicit beliefs about IBE being a good rule of inference. But she is nevertheless committed to this claim” (2011:76-77).

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the time – one could not account for this in a uniquely first-personal way –

without positing this belief.

1.2 Distinguishing WEAK from STRONG

Everyone who accepts the BASIC CLAIM will think that, when

deliberating, we feel like we are trying to get something right. Some

supporters will stop at claiming that the thing we feel that we are trying to

get right is the practical reason. Others, however, are led further to think

that, when deliberating, we feel that we are trying to track practical

reasons, whose existence does not depend on us. This difference of opinion

is what separates proponents of the weak version of the BASIC CLAIM from

proponents of the strong version. If we wanted to be technical, we might

represent the difference of opinion like this.

WEAK CLAIM: In order to engage in practical deliberation, we need to

believe some non-error-theoretic cognitivism about practical reason is

true.

STRONG CLAIM: In order to engage in practical deliberation, we

need to believe some objectivist non-error-theoretic cognitivism about

practical reason is true.

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Since terms like objectivism and subjectivism are notoriously

equivocal, it may help to say a little more. Here, I understand a subjectivist

view of practical reason to claim that all practical reasons depend for their

existence upon an agent’s conative states (e.g. valuing, desiring, loving) or

practical point of view (to borrow a phrase from Sharon Street [2010]). An

objectivist view is the denial of this. A simple, perhaps simplistic, way to

emphasize the difference between the two positions is this: it is the subject

that creates reasons and value for the subjectivist; whereas, for the

objectivist, reasons and value are in the objects, and the subject must seek

them out.

To return to the WEAK/STRONG distinction, the proponent of the

former claims that, in order to deliberate practically, we need to believe

that there really are practical reasons, yet we can be agnostic about in

virtue of what these reasons exist. The proponent of the latter position

claims that, in order to deliberate practically, we need to believe not only

that there are practical reasons but also that we are not the source of those

reasons.7

1.3 Arguments for WEAK and STRONG

Enoch glosses the “distinctive phenomenological feel” of practical

deliberation as follows (2011: 73). “[I]t feels like trying to make the right

choice. It feels like trying to find the best solution, or at least a good

solution, or at the very least one of the better solutions, to a problem you’re 7 Of course, everyone on the objectivist train admits that our existence is required for the reasons to apply to us.

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presented with” (2011: 72, his emphasis). At another point, Enoch notes

that practical deliberation can feel like “trying to answer a straightforward

factual question” (2011: 73). With this much said, Enoch seems merely to

endorse the WEAK CLAIM; he has said nothing about the agent’s implicit

thoughts about in virtue of what something becomes the best solution (or a

good or better solution).

As support for this, Enoch begins by mentioning that we feel like

there are, at least, two types of processes of selection. We might call them

picking and practical deliberation. Sometimes, Enoch seems to want to say

that picking is, definitionally, selecting in the believed absence of reasons;

for reasons that come out near the end of my paper, I take this to be

tendentious. A neutral and more precise gloss of picking might be found by

following Ullmann-Margalit and Morgenbesser 1977. They understand

picking, most basically, as “a selection with the alternatives A and B such

that: (i) the agent cannot select both A and B… (ii) the agent is indifferent

between A and B; (iii) the agent prefers the selection of either A or B,

whichever it may be, to the selection of neither” (1977: 758). Examples of

picking are easy to come by: selecting which shoe to tie first or selecting

which of the identical boxes of Kellogg’s Mini-Wheats to purchase at the

grocery store, to use Enoch’s own example. Enoch thinks that practical

deliberation is quite phenomenologically distinct from mere picking, and I

agree. For Enoch, the difference lies in that practical deliberation requires

holding the belief that there are practical reasons to select one option as

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opposed to some other. This, of course, is what I aim to disprove in the

paper. The real difference lies in indifference, and I think Enoch himself

illustrates this.

Enoch has us to imagine a friend mulling over a decision he has to

make at t1. Ordinarily, one would think that the friend is engaging in

practical deliberation at t1. Now, imagine that at t2, the friend says that “it

really doesn’t matter one way or another, that there is absolutely nothing to

be said for or against any of the relevant alternatives, that there are no

considerations counting in favor of any of his possible decisions” (Enoch

2011: 75). At this point, Enoch concludes, either we should think the friend

changed his mind and is no longer practically deliberating or we should

think the friend is somehow being inconsistent. Of course, we could also

think that we initially misread his behavior at t1. All three ways of

understanding the case point to a single fact. While picking may be

paralyzing in a certain sense, only deliberation can feature mulling over the

decision because only in deliberation is it true that one is not indifferent

among the various alternatives.

Shifting gears a bit, Enoch goes on to further discuss the feel of

practical deliberation, saying that agents must believe that, “Making the

decision is up to you. But which decision is the one it makes most sense for

you to make is not. This is something you are trying to discover, not create”

(2011: 73, my emphasis). This marks a shift to the STRONG CLAIM. While

he is not specific about what the agent has to believe makes something the

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best solution, he has ruled out one sort of answer, namely, in virtue of the

agent’s own creation. Though Enoch believes the STRONG CLAIM, at times

he seems willing to just advance the WEAK CLAIM. This seems to be the

right interpretation of his response to a possible objection that asks why we

need to have any sort of beliefs about reasons as opposed to merely having

desires to facilitate practical deliberation. He writes that “when you allow

yourself to settle a deliberation by reference to a desire, you commit

yourself to the judgment that your desire made the relevant action the one

it makes most sense to perform... But... even with desires at hand, you still

commit yourself to a normative truth” (75-76). In other words, Enoch seems

to say, if one thinks practical deliberation could occur in such a way that the

agent sees her desires as generating the reasons on which to act, this can

be accommodated and is, thus, no objection. Insofar as Enoch does not take

this to be a major objection, it suggests that he is most adamant to defend

the WEAK CLAIM.

The more ardent defender of the STRONG CLAIM is Brewer (2011),

but before we consider his claims, one preliminary thing about the STRONG

CLAIM should be noted. One way of arguing for it is by thinking that only it

can account for the fact that deliberation can sometimes be hard, or, and

this is just another way of stating the idea, if we did not believe the

STRONG CLAIM, we would always be picking and never practically

deliberating. Neither Enoch (2011) nor Brewer (2011) expressly makes this

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argument, but something like this seems to be in the penumbra of their

explicit remarks.

Now, to turn to Brewer, he claims that “Desires do not present

themselves as reasons for action” (2011: 114) and that “Like desires, so too

these pleasures [pleasures gained from engaging in an activity] present

themselves as outlooks on an independent realm of value and not as original

sources of reasons” (115). When he talks about how desires and pleasures

present themselves, he means something about how we experience them.

When I desire something, so Brewer would say, I do not experience my

desire as a reason for action; instead, I experience myself as desiring

something for a reason. More generally, Brewer thinks that agents’ desires

and pleasures, even before we get to practical deliberations involving them,

are already bound up with judgments about practical reasons and values. It

follows, almost trivially for Brewer, that, when practically deliberating, one

cannot believe that conative states generate reasons or values; instead, one

must believe that these states, at best, respond to or track reasons or

values.

§ 2 Against the STRONG CLAIM

As I have rendered things, there are two main buttresses for the

STRONG CLAIM. First, one might think that subjectivist views cannot

capture the perceived gravity, lack of indifference, and difficulty of practical

deliberation, and second, one might think that such views cannot capture

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how we feel ourselves responding to pleasure and desiring. In short,

proponents of the STRONG CLAIM say that the subjectivist cannot get the

phenomenology right, so the way to upset the STRONG view is to consider a

subjectivism that is especially sensitive to the phenomenology of

deliberation. One such account is that of Jean-Paul Sartre (1956). In this

section, then, I show that one can believe Sartrean subjectivism while

practically deliberating, and I, thereby, disprove the STRONG CLAIM that

we have to be objectivists about practical reason in order to deliberate.

It may help at this point to say a word about methodology, since to

know who’s won the game, it helps to know the rules. To achieve what I

take to be my argumentative goal, all I need to show is that (i) Sartrean

subjectivism is a coherent view and (ii) believing Sartrean subjectivism

instead of some sort of objectivism about practical reason is compatible

with practical deliberation. I do not need to show that Sartrean

subjectivism is true, plausible, useful to accept, or anything of the sort. All I

aim to show is that having this belief, to the exclusion of a belief in

objectivism, is, in fact,8 compatible with practical deliberation; it is another

matter to see if the belief is a good one to have.9

8 This means I do not merely wish to show that Sartrean subjectivism purports to be compatible with practical deliberation.9 One might, at this point, wonder why I insist on showing that Sartrean subjectivism is even coherent. Well, recall how this dialectic is supposed to go. Enoch and Brewer say that in order to engage in practical deliberation one has to believe that p; in response, I say that one does not have to believe that p, for one could instead believe that q (where p and q are distinct). Now, if q is incoherent, q means something like r & not-r, and that means that q is nonsense. Using substitution, it looks like my response to Enoch and Brewer is that one does not need to believe that p in order to practically deliberate, for one could instead believe a bunch of nonsense about practical reasons, or what to my lights amounts

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2.1 The Sartrean Account of Practical Normativity

Before I use Sartre’s views to rebut the STRONG CLAIM, it may help

to give a general overview of his picture of agency and value.

Let us start at the beginning. For Sartre (1956), there are two main

dimensions or aspects of being a human agent, the in-itself and the for-

itself. Insofar as we are an in-itself, we are thing-like; we are a body of

definite proportions, with particular characteristics and a particular history.

Insofar as we are a for-itself, we transcend our thing-like selves; we are not

just that body of certain dimensions, we like that body or loathe it or aim to

transform it; we are not that particular history, we are the story that has yet

to be written. Less poetically, the for-itself is consciousness and the seat of

agency.

At this point, I should introduce one way that agents think about the

relationship between these two dimensions of the self, namely bad faith.

There are several ways to be in bad faith, but a prominent way is to behave

as if one is pure in-itself and to deny that one is also a for-itself. One makes

that sort of confusion when one, for instance, chooses to see oneself as ‘old

and set in my ways,’ when one chooses to see oneself as an object for

to the same thing, one could believe nothing at all about practical reasons. This is too strong for my purposes here. In the next section, I do try to show that one could believe nothing at all about practical reasons; there, too, I try to show that the view I offer is coherent, but the rationale is different, for the view itself offers an explanation of why believing nothing at all is both possible and desirable. If the view turned out to be incoherent, I would have no justification for my conclusion that the WEAK CLAIM is false. This means that the task in that section is not just to show that the view is coherent but also that one part, the part about the possibility of believing nothing at all about practical reasons is true.

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someone else’s manipulation, or when one chooses to see oneself as,

essentially, the role or job that one, actually, chooses to perform. In all of

these examples, by a choice, which itself exploits the fact that one has a

transcending capacity, one pretends that one has no such capacity. There is

something deeply unstable about having this sort of stance toward oneself,

so why have it? As one Sartre commentator notes, “Bad faith can protect

the psychological well-being of a person by serving as a guard rail against

anguish [the uncomfortable recognition of one’s freedom]. This in turn is

good for a person’s physical well-being because anguish, as a form of stress,

is unhealthy” (Cox, 125). This discussion of bad faith may seem like a

digression, but it will bear fruit soon.

The for-itself confers value on an otherwise valueless world. Or as

Sartre puts it, “human reality is that by which value arrives in the world”

(1956: 144). This is the central thesis of Sartrean subjectivism. Sartre’s

explanation of the process by which we confer value is a fairly complicated

one, one that draws on his controversial general views about metaphysics.10

10 Here is a brief sketch of the process by which this conference occurs. When the resultant is an action or an intention to act, the for-itself sees a nothingness, a lack, a way the world is not and decides that this has some positive or negative valence. For Sartre (1956), both the lack and the valence it gets do not exist before the for-itself creates them; the world, absent the for-itself, is all that there is, not all that there is plus the things that could be different. This may sound strange, so I will modify one of his many examples to help here. Imagine a worker who decides to take up “revolutionary action” (Sartre 1956: 563) which might mean quitting her job. The first step toward acting is when the worker sees herself as not doing the work. If she is doing the work, this thing that she envisions is not, strictly speaking, part of the world. Not doing the work comes into being as a thing the world lacks with the consciousness of the worker. Now, when the worker sees not doing the work as good, it is good not to do the work and she does have a reason not to do the work. Of course, this does not mean that this option is, thereby, the best or the one for which she has most reason to do, but it has some value.

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Most important for our purposes is the idea that we often – but not always11

– hide from ourselves that we are the ones that confer value on the world.

This process is quite similar to what happens when we are in bad faith. Just

as we think ‘we have no choice in the matter, we just are old and set in our

ways,’ we think ‘we have no choice in the matter, some things just have

value and others do not.’ Sartre calls the denial of subjectivism adopting

“the spirit of seriousness” (1956: 796), and he thinks that repudiating the

spirit of seriousness, as well as bad faith, is not only possible but also the

only way to have an internally stable life.12

2.2 How Sartre Survives STRONG Criticisms

With this all in place, we have the tools to rebut the motivations for

the STRONG CLAIM. Recall the two we noted. First, as Brewer (2011)

argues, we would misunderstand the conative states which supposedly give

rise to values if we did not recognize that agents understand them as

representations of independent value. Second, we cannot make sense of

the difficulty of practical deliberation through the subjectivist’s lens.

Sartrean subjectivism has answers to both criticisms; let us explore them in

turn.

11 Sartre does explicitly say that “human reality perpetually tries to refuse to recognize its freedom” (1956, 568). I take this use of perpetually to be hyperbolic, since otherwise Sartre would contradict himself when he later speaks of what an existential psychoanalysis would accomplish. See Sartre 1956: 796-797.12 As an additional note, Sartre does not think we need to abstain from taking anything seriously, in the normal sense of that word. His various political writings, most notably Anti-Semite and Jew and the introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, quite clearly demonstrate that he did not take what he saw as barriers to freedom lightly.

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First, Sartre can agree that people often do understand desire and

one’s feeling of pleasure as a response to values or reasons that exist

independent of their own conative states. While Brewer (2011) lauds this,

Sartre (1956) sees it as adopting the objectionable spirit of seriousness.

Sartre thinks that we perfectly could, and the most enlightened among us

do, repudiate this spirit. Brewer would argue that we cannot even

understand something as an instance of desiring or willing or taking

pleasure in an activity without assuming that the agent adopts the spirit of

seriousness. A stark way to put one variant of Brewer’s claim is that desire

minus the spirit of seriousness is incoherent. This bold contention seems

wrong, for I agree with Sartre in thinking that we surely can understand

what it would mean to desire without the spirit of seriousness. Sartre

would even go as far as to suggest that practical deliberation and desiring

sans the spirit of seriousness is the only way to truly take responsibility for

oneself. The best among us can recognize that we create the values without

falling into irremediable anguish he would claim. While one might dispute

the desirability of desiring without adopting the spirit of seriousness, this is

a coherent idea.

For the defender of the STRONG CLAIM, the next move is to shift to

the second consideration in favor of that claim. The thought might go like

this: even if making a decision is possible after repudiating the spirit of

seriousness, this is going to be like mere picking and not like deliberation

because making a decision while repudiating the spirit of seriousness could

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never feature the sort of lack of indifference or even painful pondering that

practical deliberation may sometimes involve. Alvin Plantinga (1956) makes

exactly this sort of criticism of Sartrean subjectivism, and Gary Foulk (1972)

offers a great subjectivist response. Plantinga (1956) argues that making a

decision while repudiating the spirit of seriousness should always feel easy

to the decision-maker because whatever she wills is automatically right.13

Foulk responds, saying, “it is no help to know that whatever one chooses

will be necessarily right, because the problem is in deciding what to choose,

what to make right” (1972: 333). In saying that it is “no help” to believe

Sartrean subjectivism, Foulk means that decision-making does not become

easier when one upholds Sartrean subjectivism; all the difficulty remains.

Maybe, if Sartre is right, decision-making is harder after repudiating the

spirit of seriousness because one cannot just pretend that certain decisions

are out of one’s hands.

To make this last claim vivid, consider a law such as America’s Patriot

Act which permits the federal government to access some of citizens’

private information in order to maintain domestic security. If one is the

legislator, one is answerable to the charge that this law fails to strike the

right balance between freedom and security. If one is the judge, where this

role consists solely in discovering what the law requires, one is not

answerable in the same way, for the question of whether we should have

13 See (Plantinga 1958)

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laws of this kind is out of the judge’s hands, at least qua judge.14 Sure, the

judge has an epistemic task that the legislator does not, but there is an

important sense in which the judge is less responsible for the effects,

pernicious or positive, that flow from the law than is the legislator.

Similarly, Sartre would say that the person who adopts the spirit of

seriousness acts like she is the judge and, in so doing, avoids, or at least

tries to avoid, the level of responsibility that comes with legislating. The

person who repudiates the spirit of seriousness, on the other hand, cannot

think to herself, “I only find out the truth about practical reason; the

consequences be damned,” and it is in this sense that her job is harder than

that of the judge.

2.3 The Modest Accomplishments So Far

At this point, I have shown that we cannot accept the STRONG

CLAIM; however, there are two things that I do not claim to have done.

First and perhaps most importantly, I do not claim to have given a

defensible interpretation of Sartre. By this, I do not merely mean that I was

engaged in a type of interpretative enterprise in which I pose questions to

Sartre that he never considered and make him give answers that he might

have plausibly given but did not because he never even considered the

questions. This is what Richard Rorty (1984) and others have called

“rational reconstruction.” Rorty notes that “Analytic historians of

14 Note: this is not my view about how any judiciary in the world actually works or even ought to work.

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philosophy are frequently accused of beating texts into the shape of

propositions currently being debated in the philosophical journals” (1984:

49). If anachronism were my only possible fault, I should be delighted. I

may, however, have more gravely distorted Sartre’s texts. If so, understand

me merely as claiming there is a subjectivist view, whose details I cursorily

sketched above, that is compatible with practical deliberation such that we

upset the STRONG CLAIM.

Second, I do not claim to have vindicated every possible subjectivist

view, for it may be central to some versions of subjectivism that they gloss

the nature of deliberation wrongly. To gloss the nature of deliberation

wrongly is, minimally, to ignore one important impulse behind the STRONG

CLAIM, namely that deliberation sometimes feels very difficult. If a view of

practical reasoning makes it incomprehensible why deliberation could ever

be a difficult task, then it fails to understand the phenomenon.15

§ 3 Against the WEAK CLAIM

Even if the STRONG CLAIM is too strong, one might still hold out

hope for the WEAK CLAIM. This, too, has problems. Below, I develop a

criticism of the WEAK CLAIM by introducing a novel view called Practical

Reason Pragmatism. According to this view, it is both unneeded and 15 Or, even if such a view is not in the business of describing phenomena but rather of prescribing, this view recommends a practice that is senseless to adopt. To tell us to adopt a practice whereby deliberation is always easy (or whereby a difficult decision is incomprehensible) is telling us to always pick and never to practically deliberate. In essence, this is a call to be invariably indifferent about what to do, and this is obviously senseless. For more on why we would prescribe as opposed to describe the practice of practical deliberation, see § 4.

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unhelpful to believe there are normative truths within the practical domain.

My argument here will not be that Practical Reason Pragmatism is the best

view to have, though I think it is; rather, I merely aim to show that (i) it is

coherent and (ii) adopting it is not incompatible with engaging in practical

deliberation. To begin these tasks, I first need to make a distinction that, so

far as I can tell, is never made in the literature but clearly ought to be.

3.1 Reasons and Considerations

Often, philosophers claim that a reason is a merely a consideration

counting in favor of something. There is, however, room to say that the set

of considerations counting in favor of things is not identical to the set of

reasons; the latter is, at best, a subset of the former. Just to be clear, I am

not offering a claim about how the words, consideration and reason, are

used; rather, my claim is that there are two concepts, one with all the

imprimatur of a reason and the other we might call a mere consideration.

Also, I will limit my discussion to differentiating between considerations and

reasons in practical deliberation because a fuller discussion would be

beyond the purview of the present effort, but something akin to my

formulation holds in other realms of deliberation as well.

Here is how I understand a consideration: c is a consideration to form

the intention i iff

(1) c is a proposition in light of which an agent could form i

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(2) c is not wholly orthogonal to i

About the first condition, I merely want to convey that considerations are

abstracta, specifically propositions, that somehow figure in agents’ minds in

such a way that agents can form intentions. This is intentionally vague, not

because I hold no view about how this process works, but because my view

about that is not important for our purposes.16 On the second condition, one

might wonder what is it is for c to be wholly orthogonal to i. Filling in the

details here too would take us into intricacies about my view that are simply

not relevant to the present inquiry. In lieu of this, I can offer some

examples.

(P1) It is 68 degrees outside.

(P2) I locked myself out the house last week.

(P3) My hair is in rollers.

(P4) There is a sale on airline tickets to Seoul.

16 Something else that I left vague: I said that considerations are things in light of which an agent could form an intention. By saying it this way, most basically, I am leaving open the possibility that x may be a consideration for A to intend to φ, but for whatever idiosyncratic reason, x is not something in light of which A can form the intention to φ. This might imply a certain measure of externalism about considerations, which echoes more well-known views that are externalist about reasons. Of course, I am not committing this sketch of the nature of considerations to this more specific view; I leave it open to the internalist to take the same words and to narrow the scope. An internalist could say, c is a consideration to form i iff c is a proposition in light of which an agent could form i in a nearby possible world or in the actual world; this is consistent with my remarks and would allow the internalist to hold on to her conviction that normative stuff cannot be too far removed or divorced from us.

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(P1)-(P4) are all wholly orthogonal to my intention to kick the dog, so far as

I can tell. We can all admit that these propositions are unrelated to that

intention, that they do not bear on whether to form that intention. If

someone said she was going to kick the dog because her hair is in rollers,

this would be very strange. For now, this is all I will say about

considerations.

To show how reasons involve something more than considerations let

us again consider some examples.

(P5) The dog was in my way.

(P6) The dog looked at me disrespectfully.

(P7) I get immense pleasure from kicking dogs.

(P8) All four-legged creatures deserve to be tortured.

While I do not have strong intuitions about this sort of thing, some

philosophers would say that (P5)-(P8) are not reasons to intend to kick a

dog. For instance, Brewer says, “sometimes the prospect of pleasure is no

reason at all – not even a redundant reason – to do that which gives rise to

it” (2011, 144). Since reasons-talk is infamously slippery, I want to flag

something here. Some philosophers will say of (P7) that it is a reason to

kick the dog, but a weak one that is outweighed by other reasons such that,

after all, one has no reason to kick the dog; this is a different thought than

what I’m driving at. There are some, like Brewer (2011), who would claim

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that (P7) is no reason to intend to kick the dog at all, not even a weak one.

Of course, many philosophers would take issue with this thought in

particular. Let’s think some about this, not to adjudicate the matter, but to

learn more the difference between reasons and considerations.

Whether or not one thinks that (P7) is a reason to intend to kick the

dog, it is pretty undeniable that (P7) is not unrelated, or orthogonal, to the

project of kicking a dog in the same way that (P1)-(P4) are. It is perfectly

clear that (P7) bears on the question of whether to form the intention to

kick the dog. And the way it bears on the question is not in virtue of the

fact that we could tell some causal story about someone believing (P7) and

then forming the intention to kick the dog, for we could just as easily tell

some causal story, like one about classical conditioning, whereby someone

believes (P3) and then forms the intention to kick the dog, and yet, (P3)

would not be a consideration counting in favor of kicking the dog. Another

thing of which to take note: it seems like there is genuine disagreement

about what constitutes a reason, and this means that the concept of a

reason is wide enough to allow for this. The notion of a consideration is not.

Again, consider the person who kicks the dog because her hair is in rollers;

those who find this felicitous are missing something or know many things

the rest of us do not.17

17 What sort of things could this person know? Basically, she could fill in the story to make this fact relevant. Maybe the dog has magical powers and used them to put rollers in the agent’s hair after she spent a fair amount of time straightening her hair. If the agent is privy to the dog’s powers and penchant for mischief and learns that her hair is in rollers, that proposition is now a consideration counting in favor of kicking the dog.

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To conclude this discussion about the distinction between

considerations and reasons, I am going to offer an analysis of a reason.

This, unlike the analysis of a consideration, is not entirely reductive;

nonetheless, it will prove helpful for what lies ahead. Here is how I will

understand a reason: r is a reason to form the intention i iff

(1) r is a proposition in light of which an agent could form i

(2) r is not orthogonal to i in the manner established by the realm of

practical reasons

In an obvious way, this is not very satisfying because reason, the

explanandum, is also in the explanans. Nevertheless, we do learn some

things. We now know that, when on the hunt for a reason, one is not just

looking for something that bears on the question of whether to form a

particular intention, one is trying to see if that consideration bears on the

question in a peculiar way. For something to be a reason, it must pass a

different kind of scrutiny than a mere consideration.

3.2 Explicating Practical Reason Pragmatism

With the distinction between considerations and reasons in mind, I

can now clarify Practical Reason Pragmatism. The Practical Reason

Pragmatist holds that we should be unconcerned about whether our

considerations are also reasons.

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At first blush, this sounds confused and perhaps contradictory. One

might think that should claims are, if correct, grounded by reasons, and that

this particular should claim looks like it has to be grounded in practical

reasons, that is, reasons about whether to intend to (try to)18 deliberate

without concern about whether one’s considerations are also reasons.

Thus, it looks like the Practical Reason Pragmatist herself is concerned

about reasons, for otherwise, she could not even recommend that people

refrain from concerning themselves with reasons, and this looks confused.

One might even think the Pragmatist’s suggestion is incoherent for the

following reason. Surely, this line intimates that one should be unconcerned

about whether there are practical reasons at all, and then, how on earth

does one ground this should claim, absent the belief that there are reasons

in the first place?

These worries invite us to explore one aspect of what is pragmatist

about this view. The Practical Reason Pragmatist does not think we need to

ground should claims in reasons. This is not because anti-pragmatists are

wrong about the underlying metaphysical matters that lead them to suggest

that we do need to ground such claims this way; rather, the Practical

Reason Pragmatist thinks that we could have a practice in which we avoid

doing this. This means that the Practical Reason Pragmatist is not offering

a competing explanation or description of the realm of practical reasons;

instead, the view is a non-truth-apt encouragement to adopt a practice, a

18 I say try to here, just because I have not yet completed the argument that one can, in fact, practically deliberate without reasons.

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practice in which we, indeed, are unconcerned about whether there are

practical reasons at all.

This is surely quite radical encouragement. Here are the thoughts

that lead the Practical Reason Pragmatist down this path; the following

thoughts are not meant to convince the reader of pragmatism but rather to

illustrate the view. First, one should be unconcerned with practical reasons

because these reasons might command actions that one would not endorse

from, as it were, the practical point of view. Second, querying whether

one’s considerations are also reasons before letting them have influence

upon one’s decision is one thought too many. Third, trying to ensure that

our considerations are also reasons is a misguided hope for ultimate

grounds for our deliberative practice. I will try to say a bit more about each

of these claims in turn.

To wrap one’s head around the first idea, here is an example. Imagine

a man, call him Henry has a GPS, a very special GPS, one that not only

calculates the quickest route, but it also takes into account the pleasantness

of the route, the cost of tolls, the foreseeable accidents, and all the other

practical reasons that bear on the question of which route to take to the

destination. Now, imagine Henry sees the route and even understands how

the GPS came up with the particular suggestion. Could he still sensibly

wish to take another route? Imagine, as would need to be the case, that

there is a particular weight assigned to the different variables (e.g. how

much to care about tolls versus pleasantness versus distance of the route,

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etc); it seems that Henry could disagree, not in the sense that he thinks the

GPS is factually mistaken but in the sense that he does not wish to follow its

instructions. He could think, “This is the best way, but I won’t drive off a

cliff or lose an excessive amount of time going this other way.” Thoughts

analogous to this have driven, so to speak, some people to say that

maximizing accounts of utility, happiness, preference-satisfaction, etc. are

mistaken and that something of a more satisficing flavor must be right.19 Of

course, this type of worry does not disprove maximizing accounts; in fact, it

is barely an argument against them at all since registering this worry is

merely to state an opposing intuition. Worries about maximization are

better understood as showing us that we could see that something is

preferred or even required by practical reason and yet disagree with the

normative consequences, the consequences that instruct us how to behave.

The point is not to critique those who like satisficing accounts of things;

instead, I recast their conclusions as showing that we might come to accept

that the tribunal of practical reason is a court whose verdicts we can reject,

even from the perspective of trying to decide what to intend to do in light of

relevant propositions, that is, from the practical perspective.

19 See, e.g., (Slote 1984).

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Let us explore the second idea, about one thought too many.20

Suppose we have Henry again, this time without the GPS. Suppose he has

chosen the route to take after duly deliberating about the matter. It seems

weird for Henry to step back from his decision and wonder if the decision

he made is what would be made by the super GPS. Of course, if Henry has

what he regards to be a better idea, he should implement it, but it seems

like an idle exercise to wonder if his considerations passed the higher test

of being such that the super GPS would approve. This is especially so given

that the GPS might tell him things he would knowingly disregard anyway.

Moreover, there may not anything like a super GPS in the first place.

Finally, I said that looking for practical reasons is a misguided hope

for ultimate grounds for our practically deliberative practice. The basic

idea is this: once we become dissatisfied with our considerations such that

we feel the need to ground them, to check them against something more

authoritative, we begin an infinite regress. We might wonder why the

verdict of the tribunal of practical reasons is authoritative. What test did it

pass? Another way to put the same worry: if we go looking for the source of

the normativity of our considerations, we are bound to come up empty-

handed, which is precisely why we should forgo the journey. When what we

take to be the weightier considerations lie on the side of option A as 20 This “one thought too many” criticism is not the same as the famous criticism from Bernard Williams (1981); however, there is an important similarity. Williams was contending that our deep emotional ties to others by themselves should motivate us to do things and that we should not need to check these against something else, like a utilitarian impartiality calculus. Similarly, I contend that our considerations by themselves should motivate us to form intentions and that we should need to check these against the tribunal of practical reason.

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opposed to option B, we should rest content with intending to pursue A

unless we find a better idea. Nothing comes of this grounding project.

While I should glad if the preceding suffices to win new converts to

Practical Reason Pragmatism, this was not my aim. I only aimed to

elucidate Practical Reason Pragmatism and show it to be internally

consistent. With this much clear, let us turn to the question of whether a

commitment to Practical Reason Pragmatism is compatible with engaging in

practical deliberation.

3.3 Compatibility with Practical Deliberation

Instead of offering a positive argument that a commitment to Practical

Reason Pragmatism is compatible with engaging in practical deliberation, I

want to focus on rebutting a potentially damning objection that one might

put to me. One might argue that practical deliberation can occur alongside

something like Practical Reason Pragmatism but only if the proponents of

such a view treat their considerations as practical reasons, and, in treating

something as a practical reason, one assumes that there are practical

reasons.21

It strikes me that there are two ways to reject this objection. Either

one could argue that deliberators who adopt Practical Reason Pragmatism

do not need to treat their considerations as practical reasons or one could

argue that, even if one has to treat considerations as practical reasons, one 21 Thanks to [redacted for blind review] and [redacted for blind review] for, separately, presenting versions of this criticism to me. I’m sure I cannot do full justice to the underlying thought.

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still may not believe that there are practical reasons. I will take the first

strategy, but I will briefly explain why the second strategy, though initially

plausible, probably will not work.

One might begin the second strategy by noting the following simple

fact. Generally speaking, treating x as a y does not commit one to believing

there are y’s. I can treat the tyrannical leader like a god (by bowing to her

statue and attending the religious ceremonies meant to honor her) even as a

committed atheist because I know that doing otherwise may result in my

early death. Someone else can treat a woman, call her Martha Corey, like a

witch (by bringing witchcraft accusations against Martha in court and

asking about Martha’s broom) not because this person believes that Martha

or anyone else is a witch but because treating her and others like this may

facilitate quieting outspoken women. Now, the objector might respond with

the thought that one can only treat x as a y in these cases because

somebody believes there are y’s. This is actually false; no one, the

tyrannical leader included, might believe that she is a god. She just may

like believing that she has inspired the belief in her own divinity because

she has poor self-esteem, and the others may keep up the act out of fear.

The better response, the one that may stop the second strategy in its tracks

is this. Even if it is not a general truth that treating x as a y entails that one

or anyone believes that there are y’s, it does seem that treating x as a y

without believing there are y’s only makes sense as a practice when there is

something to be gained, some pragmatic element. In the tyrant case and

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the witch case, we see the carrot at the end of the stick, but it is unclear

what this could plausibly be in the case of someone treating something as a

reason but not believing that there are reasons. This looks like enough to

defeat the second strategy.

This also means that if my argument is to be defended I have to use

the first strategy; that is, I need to deny that the person who adopts

Practical Reasons Pragmatism treats her considerations as reasons when

practically deliberating. To do this, let us consider a question. What does it

mean to treat something as a practical reason? It cannot merely mean to

use it in the course of practical deliberation because the pragmatist knows

that there are conceptually two kinds of things that can be used in the

course of practical deliberation, reasons and considerations. In other

words, that x is used in the course of practical deliberation

underdetermines that x is being treated as a reason instead of as a

consideration. To treat something as a reason is to treat it as having passed

a peculiar, stricter level of scrutiny than a mere consideration. This is

precisely, however, what the pragmatist does not do for the three reasons I

gave above.

If this is right, the objection fails. Having countered this objection, I

take it that both variants of the BASIC CLAIM are hereby refuted.

§ 4 Tying Up Loose Ends

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At the outset of this paper, I said that the BASIC CLAIM (along with

its two specifications) is false or absolutely irrelevant to us as practical

deliberators. It is false if we understand the proponents of the BASIC

CLAIM as trying to accurately describe the necessary conditions for some

practice to count as an instance of practical deliberation and if we

understand my efforts as offering counterexamples, that is, instances of

practical deliberation which fall outside the overly-narrow parameters the

proponents propounded. What, then, could I mean by claiming instead that

the BASIC CLAIM is irrelevant to us as practical deliberators?

It is irrelevant to us as practical deliberators if we understand the

dialectic more pragmatically. Suppose the proponents of the BASIC CLAIM

are trying to recommend or champion a certain way of engaging in practical

deliberation. If so, the BASIC CLAIM is not false because it is not an

attempt to describe anything in the first place. It is, however, something we

should ignore as practical deliberators, because, if we understand the

dialectic this way, my efforts show other forms of practical deliberation to

be perfectly felicitous and because my efforts criticize (to a small extent)

the form of practical deliberation that champions of the BASIC CLAIM

espouse.

Naturally, one might ask what is gained by understanding the

dialectic in this more pragmatic way. While there really might be some

Platonic form of practical deliberation, it is probably healthy to doubt we

know anything about that. But even if I am mistaken on this point, what

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should interest us as practical philosophers and what does interest me are

suggestions about how to live, not discussions about what practical

deliberation really is. This looks irrelevant to the question of how to live. If

the defenders of the BASIC CLAIM propound a useful practice around

which to orient our lives, why bother with whether this is really practical

deliberation?

For the reasons I offered in my explication of Practical Reason

Pragmatism, I think the practice that defenders of the BASIC CLAIM

propound, namely believing that there are practical reasons, is not so useful

upon reflection. Of course, I have not defended this in much detail, and

more needs to be said. What I hope to have made evident is that the BASIC

CLAIM is not the only show in town; we have options.

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