First Personal Authority and the Normativity of Rationality (original) (raw)
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International Encyclopedia of Ethics
This entry considers the question of whether rationality is normative; that is, the question of whether one always ought (or, more weakly, has a reason) to be rational. It first distinguishes substantive from structural rationality, noting how structural rationality presents a more serious challenge to the thesis that rationality is normative. It then considers the plausibility of skepticism about structural rationality, and notes some problems facing such skepticism. However, if we are not skeptics about structural requirements, we face the task of formulating those requirements. But both narrow-scope and wide-scope formulations seem incompatible with the idea that we always ought to be rational. This suggests that we have good reason to think that rationality is not strongly normative.
EXPLAINING NORMATIVITY: ON RATIONALITY AND THE JUSTIFICATION OF REASON 1
Aspects of the world are normative in as much as they or their existence constitute reasons for persons, i.e. grounds which make certain beliefs, moods, emotions, intentions or actions appropriate or inappropriate. Our capacities to perceive and understand how things are, and what response is appropriate to them, and our ability to respond appropriately, make us into persons, i.e. creatures with the ability to direct their own life in accordance with their appreciation of themselves and their environment, and of the reasons with which, given how they are, the world presents them.
The Normativity of Structural Rationality
2014
Many of us take for granted that rationality requires that we have our attitudes combined only in certain ways. For example, we are required not to hold inconsistent beliefs or intentions and we are required to intend any means we see as crucial to our ends. But attempts to justify claims like these face two problems. First, it is unclear what unifies the rational domain and determines what is (and is not) rationally required of us. This is the content problem. Second, as philosophers have been unable to find any general reason for us to have our attitudes combined only in certain ways, it is unclear why, or in what sense, we are required to comply with these putative requirements in the first place. This is the normativity problem. My dissertation offers an account of rationality which solves these problems. I argue that the entire domain of rational requirements can be derived from a single ultimate requirement demanding that we not have sets of intentions and beliefs which cause their own failure. This General Requirement of Structural Rationality explains the unity of the rational domain and directly solves the content problem. But it also solves the normativity problem. I argue that whenever we violate the General Requirement we are engaged in a form of criticizable self-undermining. I propose that this is enough to ground the claim that we ought to comply with the General Requirement's demands. This conclusion can be secured as long as we accept the thesis of normative pluralism, according to which there is more than one fundamentally distinct form of normative 'ought.'
'Normativity and Reason' explores what might be involved in the claim that the normativity of moral standards is a normativity of reason. Taking the accounts of moral normativity given by a range of moral theorists, including Hume, Pufendorf, Locke, Sidgwick and Scanlon, and comparing these with medieval and early modern scholastic natural law theory, the paper argues that normative standards on action involve a variety of distinct kinds of justificatory force - and that standards of moral right and wrong or of moral obligation involve, in particular, a distinctive justificatory force of Demand. Using this theory of obligation, the paper argues for a new account of moral rationality, and of the relation of moral and legal obligation.
Normative Strength and the Balance of Reasons
2007
This paper calls attention to the fact that normative practical reasons play two quite different roles in determining the overall rational status of an action. It argues that any account of the normative strength of reasons will therefore need to distinguish two dimensions of normative strength: dimensions that we have no reason to expect to co-vary. It follows that views of rationality that make any significant use of such phrases as 'the strongest reasons' or 'what we have most reason to do' are relying on an assumption that is almost certainly false.
On the Normativity of Epistemic Rationality
Many epistemologists equate the rational and the justied. Those who disagree have done little to explain the dierence, leading their opponents to suspect that the distinction is an ad hoc one designed to block counterexamples. The rst aim of this dissertationpursued in the rst three chaptersis to improve this situation by providing a detailed, independently motivated account of the distinction. The account is unusual in being inspired by no particular theoretical tradition in epistemology, but rather by ideas in the meta-ethical literature on reasons and rationality. The account is also unusual in proposing that the distinction between rationality and justication can be derived from a reasons-based account of justication. Historically, this is a striking claim. In epistemology, reasons-based accounts of justication are standardly treated as paradigmatically internalist accounts, but this dissertation argues that we should believe the reverse: given the best views about reasonsagain drawn from meta-ethicswe should expect reasons-based accounts of justication to be strongly externalist.
Voluntarist reasons and the sources of normativity
Practical Reasons and Action, 2009
This paper investigates two puzzles in practical reason and proposes a solution to them. First, sometimes, when we are practically certain that neither of two alternatives is better than or as good as the other with respect to what matters in the choice between them, it nevertheless seems perfectly rational to continue to deliberate, and sometimes the result of that deliberation is a conclusion that one alternative is better, where there is no error in one’s previous judgment. Second, there are striking differences between rational agents – some rational agents have most reason to pursue careers on Wall Street while others have most reason to take up a career in teaching, or scuba diving, or working for political causes. These differences aren’t plausibly explained by ‘passive’ facts about our psychology or their causal interaction with our environment; instead, these facts seem in some sense to ‘express who we are’. But what is this sense? These puzzles disappear if we adopt a novel view about the source of the normativity of reasons – some reasons are given to us and others are reasons in virtue of an act of will. We make certain considerations reasons through an act of will and thus sometimes make it true through an act of agency that we have most reason to do one thing rather than another.
The Groundless Normativity of Instrumental Rationality
Journal of Philosophy, 2001
monarch who, wanting above all to be obeyed, tailors his commands to the anticipated behavior of his subject. When the little prince yawns, the King commands him not to do so again. The little prince objects-pleading that he cannot help yawning-so the king commands the little prince to yawn. Frightened, the little prince is unable to yawn. The king struggles for a moment and then commands the little prince to "sometimes yawn and sometimes not." As Saint-Exupery says:
Minimal Rationality: Structural or Reasons-Responsive?
A Tribute to Ronald de Sousa, 2022
According to a well-known view in the philosophy of mind, intentional attitudes by their very nature satisfy requirements of rationality (e.g. Davidson 1980; Dennett 1987; Millar 2004). This view (which I shall call Constitutivism) features prominently as the 'principle of minimal rationality' in de Sousa's monograph The Rationality of Emotion (1987). By explicating this principle in terms of the notion of the formal object of an attitude, de Sousa articulates an interesting and original version of Constitutivism, which differs in important respects from other extant versions. In this paper, I explore this version of Constitutivism against the background of recent developments in the theory of rationality and make explicit its ramifications for the long-standing dispute over whether the mind is essentially normative. My focus will be on how to conceive of the form of the rationality requirements that attitudes as such must satisfy according to this principle. I argue that, although de Sousa seems officially to endorse a structuralist conception of rationality, according to which these requirements are requirements of coherence, his considerations on formal objects suggest that they are more aptly conceived in terms of a reasons-responsive conception of rationality. I further argue that which of these two readings we choose makes a significant difference to the prospect of vindicating the essential normativity of mind by invoking the principle of minimal rationality.