No reason for identity: on the relation between motivating and normative reasons

Abstract

This essay is concerned with the relation between motivating and normative reasons. According to a common and influential thesis, a normative reason is identical with a motivating reason when an agent acts for that normative reason. I will call this thesis the ‘Identity Thesis’. Many philosophers treat the Identity Thesis as a commonplace or a truism. Accordingly, the Identity Thesis has been used to rule out certain ontological views about reasons. I distinguish a deliberative and an explanatory version of the Identity Thesis and argue that there are no convincing arguments to accept either version. Furthermore, I point out an alternative to the Identity Thesis. The relation between motivating and normative reasons can be thought of as one of representation, not identity.

Keywords:

• motivating reasons
• normative reasons
• acting for a reason
• psychologism
• Dancy
• identity

Acknowledgements

In writing this paper I benefited from comments by Matthew Braham, Christoph Fehige, Frank Hofmann, Donald C. Hubin, Kent Hurtig, Christian Kietzmann, Errol Lord, Elijah Millgram, Jonas Olson, Oliver Petersen, Thomas Schmidt, Attila Tanyi, and Christian Wendelborn, as well as from the discussions with the audiences of talks at the Eighth Congress of the Gesellschaft für Analytische Philosophie (GAP) in Konstanz, Germany, in 2012, and at a workshop at the island Reichenau, Germany, in the same year.

Notes on contributor

Susanne Mantel is a PhD student and scientific assistant at Saarland University. She works primarily on action theory, rationality, reasons, and normativity. Further fields of interest are epistemology and philosophy of mind.

Notes

1. For simplicity of expression, in the following I will refer to facts, states of affairs, and propositions that concern the psychology of the agent as ‘psychological entities’ and to such that do not as ‘non-psychological entities’. It is widely acknowledged that at least in rare circumstances normative reasons can be psychological entities in this sense. For example, the fact that one believes that one is being followed by everyone can be a normative reason to see a psychiatrist (cf. Dancy 2000, 124–125).

2. Among the latter are Setiya (2007, 28–32, 02), Wallace (2006, 70), and Hieronymi (2011, 409–414).

3. A third notion, namely that of a normative reason that motivates, seems to suggest itself in the work of some philosophers. It turns up in the argument from the normative notion of motivating reasons (Section 5). However, it is not nearly as common as the deliberative and the explanatory notion that I will go on to describe. Furthermore, in my discussion of the argument from the normative notion of motivating reasons, I will point out why this notion is problematic. For these reasons, I do not count it among the most important notions of motivating reasons and would not address it here in the introduction.

4. Motivating reasons understood as considerations that motivate are sometimes also referred to as ‘the agent's reasons’, ‘operative reasons’ (Scanlon 1998, 19), ‘deliberative reasons’ (Olson and Svensson 2005, 205), or ‘subjective normative reasons’ (Schroeder 2007, 14). The deliberative notion of motivating reasons seems to be used also, e.g. by Wallace (2006, 70), Velleman (2007, 198), Hornsby (2008, 247–248) (there referred to as ‘B-type reasons’), and Hyman (2011, 361).

5. The explanatory notion of motivating reasons seems to be the dominant notion in Davidson (1963), although Davidson's notion of a reason is a bit unclear. It can be found also, e.g. in Smith (1994, 2003), Heuer (2004) (although she calls these reasons ‘explanatory reasons’), Olson and Svensson (2005, 205), and Alvarez (2010, 30).

6. One of the first statements of something close to the Identity Thesis appears in Williams (1979): ‘If there are reasons for action, it must be that people sometimes act for those reasons, and if they do, their reasons must figure in some correct explanation of their action […].’ Williams (1979, 102) and ‘If something can be a reason for action, then it could be someone's reason for acting on a particular occasion, and it would then figure in an explanation of that action’ Williams (1979, 106). Admittedly, it is controversial whether to interpret the expression ‘someone's reason’ as equivalent to the notion ‘motivating reason’, and hence whether to interpret the statement as an expression of the Identity Thesis (and the same might be true with other authors I mentioned above), but those who defend the Identity Thesis sometimes refer back to Williams, and so I will read him in this way. The term ‘Identity Thesis’ was introduced by Heuer (2004). She interprets the thesis as concerned with the explanation of action (see Section 7).

7. Proponents of the Identity Thesis also believe that there are normative reasons and that people sometimes act for them. Thus their rationale for considering the Identity Thesis to be a truism is not that the conditional is trivially true because the antecedent is false. I will not discuss this possible argument because it is not an argument that they would give.

8. An example is Dancy's normative constraint on any theory of reasons, namely that ‘a motivating reason, that in the light of which one acts, must be the sort of thing that is capable of being among the reasons in favor of so acting; it must, in this sense, be possible to act for a good reason’ (Dancy 2000, 103). From this ontological constraint he argues that Psychologism for motivating reasons is wrong.

9. Some readers may find this argument not worth discussing. They may simply skip it. However, in discussion it has been suggested to me as an argument for the Identity Thesis. Moreover, I think many use premise (3.1) at least as a rule of thumb and are indeed influenced by it when thinking about reasons. So it does seem worthwhile to state explicitly that this argument does not work.

10. Another counterexample could be construed along these lines if we assumed that whenever an agent acts in an emotional state, the agent necessarily acts in some state of health.

11. It will become clear in sections six and seven that premise (4.2) is at least controversial both on the deliberative as well as on the explanatory notion of motivating reasons. The alternative explanation is less controversial, it seems. For the moment, however, it suffices to say that there is an alternative explanation that is widely accepted.

12. ‘Intentional, deliberate, purposeful action is always done for a reason’ (Dancy 2000, 1). The view goes back at least to Anscombe (1957, 9). Raz identifies this claim as one element of the ‘classical approach’ of the explanation of agency that originates in Plato and Aristotle (Raz 1999, 22–23). The claim is also found in Schueler (2003). It is rejected, for example, by Alvarez (2010, 140).

13. For example, Scanlon implies that the standard sense of the term ‘reason’ was that of a favoring entity in that he refers to normative reasons as ‘reasons in the “standard normative sense”’ (Scanlon 1998, 17–19). If the normative sense is the standard sense of the term ‘reason’, then, it seems, a motivating reason must also be a (certain kind of) normative reason. However, Scanlon eventually allows for ‘operating reasons’ which need not be normative reasons but should rather be understood as a sort of motivating reasons along the deliberative notion described in the next section. A similar view is put forward by Raz (1999).

14. This premise states that two differently described properties are identical. It implies that something is a motivating reason if and only if it is a normative reason that motivates.

15. I have only objected to premise (5.1) by saying that not every motivating reason is a normative reason that motivates. If (5.1) was weakened to the claim that every normative reason that motivates is a motivating reason, it would evade that objection. So in this weakened form (5.1) might still be true, but we cannot derive this weaker claim from the view that ‘motivating reason’ means ‘normative reason that motivates’, since that view is false. The weaker claim would have to be defended by an argument from another notion of motivating reasons, namely the deliberative or the explanatory notion. This strategy is pursued in the Sections 6 and 7. Therefore, if premise (5.1) was weakened accordingly, the present argument would collapse into one of those arguments and would face the same problems as these.

16. Some philosophers complain that what is a reason and motivates must be a ‘motivating reason’, but this is of no help. It must be a ‘motivating reason’ in the sense of ‘normative reason that motivates’. But as we have seen the term ‘motivating reason’ is canonically used to mean something different than ‘normative reason that motivates’. To insist that a normative reason that motivates could be called ‘motivating reason’ in the sense of ‘normative reason that motivates’ is only a verbal victory.

17. This is also noted by Olson and Svensson (2005, 209) and Lenman (2009).

18. ‘A consideration can operate as a motivating reason only if it has, or is thought to have, the status of a reason in the system of normative principles by which individuals govern their conduct’ (Nagel 1970, 15). The status he refers to seems to be that of a normative reason.

19. This line of thought seems to be expressed by Dancy (2000, 103): ‘If I am trying to decide what to do, I decide which action is right, noticing (we hope) the reasons that make it right; and then I act in the light of those reasons. They are the reasons why I do what I do (my motivating reasons)’.

20. Furthermore, I doubt that these ontological beliefs are beliefs a non-philosopher would have.

21. This argument is used by Heuer (2004, 45), discussed by Mele (2003, 80–81), and related to Williams (1979).

22. This view is especially plausible if one construes explanations of actions as causal explanations, because causal explanations are factive. But Dancy argues that there are also non-causal explanations and that these may be non-factive. In any case, it is important to take into account the various forms explanations can take and not to focus on just one common sort of explanations. The question to ask is whether factivity is an indispensable element in any sort of explanation.

23. It becomes relevant only if combined with the demand for a uniform kind of explanation, as will become clear in the next paragraph.

24. This view is argued for by Mantel (2012). Furthermore, it seems plausible that acting for a normative reason presupposes also that the agent's reasons-belief is not only true but true because of competence. According to Virtue Epistemology, this implies that the agent has knowledge of the normative reason when he acts for it (Mantel 2012). Cf., e.g. Sosa (2007).

25. To a large extent, the dispute between psychologists and anti-psychologists deals with this question.

26. Another attempt to construct a unified account is Dancy's view that motivating reasons in error cases are non-psychological states of affairs.

27. A unified account would be indispensable if the explanatory notion of motivating reasons was strengthened in the way that a motivating reason is the explanans of the sort of explanations that is constitutive for intentional action. On this view, the explanans must be such that whenever an event does not have an explanans of this sort it cannot be an action. The question is whether a motivating reason is an explanans in an explanation that is only sufficient for demarcating actions from other events or whether it must also be an explanans in an explanation that is necessary for demarcating actions from other events. The stronger view is endorsed by Smith (2003). By contrast, Hornsby (2008) argues against a unified and for a disjunctivist account of the explanation of actions. On a disjunctivist account, there seems to be no single constitutive explanation of actions.