Defending the wide-scope approach to instrumental reason

The Wide-Scope approach to instrumental reason holds that the requirement to intend the necessary means to your ends should be understood as a requirement to either intend the means, or else not intend the end. In this paper I explain and defend a neglected version of this approach. I argue that three serious objections to Wide-Scope accounts turn on a certain assumption about the nature of the reasons that ground the Wide-Scope requirement. The version of the Wide-Scope approach defended here allows us to reject this assumption, and so defuse the objections.     

On the Normativity of Intentions

Suppose you intend now to φ at some future time t. However, when t has come you do not φ. Something has gone wrong. This failing is not just a causal but also a normative failing. This raises the question how to characterize this failing. I discuss three alternative views. On the first view, the fact that you do not execute your intention to φ is blameworthy only if the balance of reasons pointed to φ-ing. The fact that you intended to φ does not add to the reasons for φ-ing at t. On the second view, the fact that you do not execute your intention to φ is blameworthy because you violate a requirement of rationality. Both these views have in common that they deny that intending to φ at t creates a reason to φ at t. The third alternative, the one I defend, claims that you often create reasons to φ by intending to φ.     

Defending Double Effect

According to the doctrine of double effect(DDE), there is a morally significantdifference between harm that is intended andharm that is merely foreseen and not intended.It is not difficult to explain why it is bad tointend harm as an end (you have a ``badattitude' toward that harm) but it is hard toexplain why it is bad to intend harm as a meansto some good end. If you intend harm as a meansto some good end, you need not have a ``badattitude' toward it. I distinguish two ways inwhich you can treat something that is yourchosen means to your ends. You can pursue yourends directly, and treat X as a mere means thatyou pursue for the sake of your end. Or you canpursue your ends indirectly, and treat X as a``plan-relative end' that you pursue for its ownsake. I argue that much of the time we pursueour ends indirectly, and treat our means asplan-relative ends. There are significantanalogies between intending harm as an end, andintending harm as a plan-relative end. So,under certain circumstances, it is morallyworse to intend harm as a means or an end thanto foresee bringing about the same amount of harm.     

The symmetry of rational requirements

Some irrational states can be avoided in more than one way. For example, if you believe that you ought to A you can avoid akrasia by intending to A or by dropping the belief that you ought to A. This supports the claim that some rational requirements are wide-scope. For instance, the requirement against akrasia is a requirement to intend to A or not believe that you ought to A. But some writers object that this Wide-Scope view ignores asymmetries between the different ways of avoiding irrationality. In this paper I defend the Wide-Scope view against recent objections of this sort from Mark Schroeder and Niko Kolodny. I argue that once we are clear about what the Wide-Scope view is committed to—and, importantly, what it is not—we can see that Schroeder and Kolodny’s objections fail.     

Instrumental rationality,symmetry and scope

Instrumental rationality prohibits one from being in the following state: intending to pass a test, not intending to study, and believing one must intend to study if one is to pass. One could escape from this incoherent state in three ways: by intending to study, by not intending to pass, or by giving up one’s instrumental belief. However, not all of these ways of proceeding seem equally rational: giving up one’s instrumental belief seems less rational than giving up an end, which itself seems less rational than intending the means. I consider whether, as some philosophers allege, these “asymmetries” pose a problem for the wide-scope formulation of instrumental rationality. I argue that they do not. I also present an argument in favor of the wide-scope formulation. The arguments employed here in defense of the wide-scope formulation of instrumental rationality can also be employed in defense of the wide-scope formulations of other rational requirements.     

Instrumental Rationality

Does rationality require us to take the means to our ends? Intuitively, it seems clear that it does. And yet it has proven difficult to explain why this should be so: after all, if one is pursuing an end that one has decisive reason not to pursue, the balance of reasons will presumably speak against one's taking the means necessary to bring that end about. In this paper I propose a novel account of the instrumental requirement which addresses this problem. On the view I develop, the instrumental requirement is normative not because agents have reasons to comply with it, but because it is a normative standard intrinsic to intentional action—i.e., it is a standard that partly spells out what it is to exercise one's agency well.     

The Enkratic Requirement

Abstract: Agents are enkratic when they intend to do what they believe they should. That rationality requires you to be enkratic is uncontroversial, yet you may be enkratic in a way that does not exhibit any rationality on your part. Thus, what I call the enkratic requirement demands that you be enkratic in the right way. In particular, I will argue that it demands that you base your belief about what you should do and your intention to do it on the same considerations. The idea is that, if you base your belief and your intention on different considerations, then you are inconsistent in your treatment of those considerations as reasons. The enkratic requirement demands that you be enkratic by treating considerations consistently as reasons.     

Narrative and the Stability of Intention

This paper addresses a problem concerning the rational stability of intention. When you form an intention to φ at some future time t, you thereby make it subjectively rational for you to follow through and φ at t, even if—hypothetically—you would abandon the intention were you to redeliberate at t. It is hard to understand how this is possible. Shouldn't the perspective of your acting self be what determines what is then subjectively rational for you? I aim to solve this problem by highlighting a role for narrative in intention. I'll argue that committing yourself to a course of action by intending to pursue it crucially involves the expectation that your acting self will be ‘swept along’ by its participation in a distinctively narrative form of self‐understanding. I'll motivate my approach by criticizing Richard Holton's and Michael Bratman's recent treatments of the stability of intention, though my account also borrows from Bratman's work. I'll likewise criticize and borrow from David Velleman's work on narrative and self‐intelligibility. When the pieces fall into place, we'll see how intending is akin to telling your future self a kind of story. My thesis is not that you address your acting self but that your acting self figures as a ‘character’ in the ‘story’ that you address to a still later self. Unlike other appeals to narrative in agency, mine will explain how as narrator you address a specifically intrapersonal audience.     

Normative Practical Reasoning: John Broome

Practical reasoning is a process of reasoning that concludes in an intention. One example is reasoning from intending an end to intending what you believe is a necessary means: 'I will leave the next buoy to port; in order to do that I must tack; so I';ll tack', where the first and third sentences express intentions and the second sentence a belief. This sort of practical reasoning is supported by a valid logical derivation, and therefore seems uncontrovertible. A more contentious example is normative practical reasoning of the form 'I ought to φ, so I';ll φ', where 'I ought to φ' expresses a normative belief and 'I';ll φ' an intention. This has at least some characteristics of reasoning, but there are also grounds for doubting that it is genuine reasoning. One objection is that it seems inappropriate to derive an intention to φ from a belief that you ought to φ, rather than a belief that you ought to intend to φ. Another is that you may not be able to go through this putative process of reasoning, and this inability might disqualify it from being reasoning. A third objection is that it violates the Humean doctrine that reason alone cannot motivate any action of the will. This paper investigates these objections.     

Correctly responding to reasons while being means-end incoherent

This paper argues that Reason Responsiveness (RR) accounts of rationality, proposed for example by Benjamin Kiesewetter and Error Lord, fail to explain structural irrationality (i.e., the irrationality involved in holding incoherent attitudes). Proponents of RR hold that rationality consists in correctly responding to available reasons. Structural irrationality, they argue, is just a “by-product” of incorrect reason-responding. Applying this idea to cases of means–end incoherence, this paper shows that RR accounts must rely on a certain transmission principle. Roughly, this amounts to the principle that necessarily, if (1) A has decisive available reason to intend to E and (2) A has decisive available reason to believe that intending to M is necessary for E-ing, it follows that (3) A has decisive available reason to intend to M. By considering an example, this paper argues that even the most plausible version of this transmission principle does not hold true. It follows that one can correctly respond to one's available reasons while being means–end incoherent.     

Intentions,Intending, and Belief: Noninferential Weak Cognitivism

Cognitivists about intention hold that intending to do something entails believing you will do it. Noncognitivists hold that intentions are conative states with no cognitive component. I argue that both of these claims are true. Intending entails the presence of a belief, even though the intention is not even partly the belief. The result is a form of what Sarah Paul calls noninferential weak cognitivism, a view that, as she notes, has no prominent defenders.     

Evidence: A Guide for the Uncertain

Assume that it is your evidence that determines what opinions you should have. I argue that since you should take peer disagreement seriously, evidence must have two features. (1) It must sometimes warrant being modest: uncertain what your evidence warrants, and (thus) uncertain whether you’re rational. (2) But it must always warrant being guided: disposed to treat your evidence as a guide. It is surprisingly difficult to vindicate these dual constraints. But diagnosing why this is so leads to a proposal—Trust—that is weak enough to allow modesty but strong enough to yield many guiding features. In fact, I argue that Trust is the Goldilocks principle—for it is necessary and sufficient to vindicate the claim that you should always prefer to use free evidence. Upshot: Trust lays the foundations for a theory of disagreement and, more generally, an epistemology that permits self-doubt—a modest epistemology.     

Instrumental Rationality and Carroll's Tortoise

Some philosophers have tried to establish a connection between the normativity of instrumental rationality and the paradox presented by Lewis Carroll in his 1895 paper “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles.” I here examine and argue against accounts of this connection presented by Peter Railton and James Dreier before presenting my own account and discussing its implications for instrumentalism (the view that all there is to practical rationality is instrumental rationality). In my view, the potential for a Carroll-style regress just shows us that since instrumental rationality involves a higher-order commitment to combine our willing an end with our taking the necessary means, it therefore cannot, on pain of regress, itself be added as a conjunct to one of the elements to be combined. This view does not support instrumentalism.     

Other-Sacrificing Options*

I argue that you can be permitted to discount the interests of your adversaries even though doing so would be impartially suboptimal. This means that, in addition to the kinds of moral options that the literature traditionally recognises, there exist what I call other-sacrificing options. I explore the idea that you cannot discount the interests of your adversaries as much as you can favour the interests of your intimates; if this is correct, then there is an asymmetry between negative partiality toward your adversaries and positive partiality toward your intimates.     

Intending,believing, and supposing at will

In this paper I consider an argument for the possibility of intending at will, and its relationship to an argument about the possibility of believing at will. I argue that although we have good reason to think we sometimes intend at will, we lack good reason to think this in the case of believing. Instead of believing at will, agents like us often suppose at will.     

Simple Probabilistic Promotion

Many believe that normative reasons for action are necessarily connected with the promotion of certain states of affairs: on Humean views, for example, there is a reason for you to do something if and only if it would promote the object of one of your desires. But although promotion is widely invoked in discussions of reasons, its nature is a matter of controversy. I propose a simple account: to promote a state of affairs is to make it more likely to obtain than it previously was. I argue that this view has been unfairly neglected, that it avoids serious problems faced by many other views, and that it is a contender for the correct theory of promotion.     

Happiness in a Flux? The Instability Problem

In the recent discussion of happiness it has become popular to claim that being happy means having a certain positive attitude towards your life. This attitude involves both a judgement that your life measures up to your standards and a feeling of satisfaction with your life. In this paper, I am going to discuss a serious problem inherent in this account that has important ramifications for the normative question of how we ought to pursue happiness. If happiness is in part determined by your standards, how shall we determine whether you are happier in one life than in another when your standards change across these lives? Perhaps you will judge a life as a parent as better than a childless life, if you were to become a parent, but judge a childless life as better than a parenting life, if you were to remain childless. Which standard should determine the comparative happiness of the two lives? In this paper, I shall argue that some innocent-looking answers to this question will generate inconsistencies. To find an acceptable resolution, we need to make a difficult choice between what on the face of it look like two equally valid principles of happiness.     

Can desires determine ends?

According to a common view of human agency, desires determine at least some of the ends that agents set for themselves. In this paper, I argue that this view is false. I show that without reason’s ability to determine the means to an end it is impossible to determine ends. Furthermore, even when an end is determined in light of a desire, only reason can make sense of the distinction between an end and merely a means to that end. In fact, in many cases the end which is determined in light of desires is to remove these desires, rather than to “serve and obey” them. Hence, reason is necessary for determining our ends, and thus explaining the teleological aspect of agency.     

Mapping Moral Motivation

In this paper we defend a version of moral internalism and a cognitivist account of motivation against recent criticisms. The internalist thesis we espouse claims that, if an agent believes she has reason to A, then she is motivated to A. Discussion of counter-examples has been clouded by the absence of a clear account of the nature of motivation. While we can only begin to provide such an account in this paper, we do enough to show that our version of internalism can be defended against putative counter-examples. All theories of motivation which take what motivates to be a psychological state run foul of the following plausible constraint: the reason why you ought to do an action and the reason why you do it can be the same. In our view, however, while what motivates is a reason (which is a fact) the state of being motivated is a cognitive stage, viz. the belief that one has reason to act. In cases where the agent's relevant beliefs are false, then she has no reason to act, but nontheless her action can be explained in other ways.     

Fears as Conscious Perceivings

Peter Goldie has argued for the view that the intentionality of emotions is inseparable from their phenomenology (IPE), but certain criticisms have revealed his argument as problematic. I will argue that it is possible to address these problems, at least in the case of the emotion of fear, thereby vindicating IPE, by appeal to a Husserlian version of the perceptual account of emotions, centered on the idea that the contents of perceptual experiences are fulfillment conditions. Fulfillment means the achievement of a kind of immediate, or “full”, experience of an object or some of its aspects. In the case of visual perception, suppose you are looking at an apple. If you turn it around, you will find yourself in full view of its back side, which was previously anticipated “emptily”, fulfilling or disappointing (confirming or disconfirming) some of your anticipations in regard to it. On the Husserlian view, the success or failure of a visual perceptual experience consists in such fulfillments and disappointments. If we can provide an account of the intentionality of emotions along similar lines, it will necessarily involve the phenomenal contrast between fullness and emptiness, enabling us to support IPE.