The guise of good reason

ABSTRACT

The paper argues for a version of the Guise of the Good thesis, namely the claim that if someone acts as the result of practical reasoning, then she takes her premises to jointly provide a sufficient and undefeated reason for her action. I argue for this by showing, first, that it is an application of Boghossian's Taking Condition on inference to practical reasoning and, second, that the motivations for the Taking Condition for theoretical reasoning carry over to practical reasoning. I end by arguing that this version of the Guise of the Good withstands standard objections.

KEYWORDS:

• Guise of the good
• practical reasoning
• taking condition
• inference
• Aristotle
• Thomas Aquinas

Acknowledgments

Work on this paper was supported by the EXPRO grant No. 20-05180X of the Czech Science Foundation. Thanks for invaluable discussions or comments goes to Katharina Nieswandt, Eugene Chislenko, Eric Marcus, Keren Gorodeisky, Jennifer Lockhart, David DeBruijn, Matthias Haase, Sergio Tenenbaum, Viviane Fairbank, Jordan Walters, Kieran Setiya, James Shaw, John McDowell, and audiences at Auburn University, the LMU Munich, and Haifa University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For some recent literature, see Boswell (2018), Boyle and Lavin (2010), Chislenko (2016a, 2020), Milona and Schroeder (2019), Setiya (2007, 2010), Singh (2019), Tenenbaum (2007), and Yao (2019).

2 For a response, see Müller (2019).

3 Here, I mean what Aristotle would call a ‘prohairesis’. Aristotle says that we decide by practical reasoning (EN 1113a4).

4 See Setiya for a similar notion of practical reasoning. Setiya (2014, 221) writes:

Some authors reserve the use of ‘reasoning’ for calculative activity, for thought that invokes normative concepts, or for the kind of deliberation that is itself intentional. None of these restrictions will operate here. In our artificially inclusive sense, any instance of doing something for a reason counts as reasoning.

My use of ‘practical reasoning’ is similar in that any instance of deciding or choosing to do something for a reason counts as practical reasoning for me. Note that, for my purposes, ‘for no particular reason’ may count as the limiting case of such considerations. This is because, in some cases, doing something for no reason (or no particular reason) may be to do it for a sufficient and undefeated reason. Compare Anscombe:

Now of course a possible answer to the question ‘Why?’ is one like ‘I just thought I would’ or ‘It was an impulse’ or ‘For no particular reason’ or ‘It was an idle action – I was just doodling’. I do not call an answer of this sort a rejection of the question. The question is not refused application because the answer to it says that there is no reason, any more than the question how much money I have in my pocket is refused application by the answer ‘None’ (Anscombe 2000, § 17).

I agree and want to add: Just as no money is sometimes sufficient money to acquire something, namely when the thing can be had for free, no reason is sometimes sufficient reason to do something.

5 An anonymous referee points out that relying on the Taking Condition as a premise might make the project of this paper seem unambitious, for it can seem rather obvious that defenders of the Taking Condition would be sympathetic to GoG. I am not sure how obvious that really is. In any event, I think my project here is still interesting and important for two reasons. First, given the increasing tendency in philosophy to work in highly specialized and small sub-fields, it is important to point out connections between apparently distant sub-fields. Second, the connection that is my topic here has not been spelled out and investigated in detail, even if it seems plausible that there is some such connection. I think the details are worthy of examination.

6 For a response, see Marcus (2013).

7 My list diverges in minor details, which don't matter here, from Boghossian's list.

8 I say ‘action or intention or judgment’ in order to stay neutral regarding the question what the conclusion-states/acts of practical reasoning are.

9 Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me on this point.

10 See Richard (2019) for opposition. Note that Richard rejects the Taking Condition.

11 Similar to the objection in the previous paragraph, an opponent might hold that practical reasoning is agential in ways in which theoretical reasoning isn't agential because of its closer connection to the will. I need not deny that. It suffices for my argument if practical reasoning is at least as agential as theoretical reasoning and in at least the ways in which theoretical reasoning is agential. This is compatible with the claim that practical reasoning is agential in additional ways as well.

12 McHugh and Way (2017) have offered an alternative explanation of this phenomenon. But I have argued elsewhere that their alternative explanation fails (Hlobil 2019a).

13 Choose your favorite example if you don't like mine. Some utilitarians will, of course, claim that it may maximize happiness in certain situations to punish the innocent. Consequentialists of this kind could, e.g. plug in ‘To do this will maximize V’ as the premise, where V is the value that they think must be maximized.

14 I have argued for a particular construal of ‘takings’ in my (Hlobil 2019b). There I argue that to ‘take’ one's premises to support one's conclusion is to attach inferential force to the corresponding argument. And I explain inferential force as analogous to assertoric force. Plugging in this view here would yield the following: If someone acts on the basis of practical reasoning then she has attached (practical) inferential force to the argument with her reasons as premises and her action (or intention) as conclusion. This attaching of inferential force isn't a propositional attitude over and above the practical inference. Rather, it is what unites the premise- and conclusion-acts into an inference. I find this view plausible but defending it here would lead me too far afield.

15 I am simplifying. Anscombe would say that the question ‘Why?’ must have application but that this is compatible with the answers ‘I don't know why’ and ‘For no particular reason’. I actually doubt that Setiya can claim Anscombe's authority here. According to Anscombe, behavior that results from mental causes is something of which we know without observation or inference that we are doing it and why but it is not intentional. However, I shall not argue this exegetical point here.

16 Thanks to Kieran Setiya for clarifying this point in private conversation.

17 Of course, Setiya denies this because he denies the Taking Condition for practical inference. Setiya might object to the argument for the Taking Condition for practical inference that I have given above. But to the best of my knowledge, he has not presented any such objection in print.

18 Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me on this point.

19 Chislenko's version of GoG is not GGR. However, his response to the objection from akrasia is available to advocates of GGR.

20 One might worry that this conflicts with the idea behind the Kant and Aquinas quotes above, which motivate the restriction of my version of GoG to actions that issue from practical reasoning. It can seem that Kant and Aquinas want to restrict the Guise of the Good to the kind of actions that we find only in sophisticated agents. This might be correct for the historical Kant and Aquinas. Note, however, that the idea that I take from them is that we must look at acts of different capacities separately when considering GoG. By itself this idea does not imply anything about the sophistication that acts of a particular capacity require. On the view at issue here, e.g. human actions that result from practical reasoning and actions of non-human animals or small children that result from practical reasoning are acts of the same capacity. To put it in Aquinas's terms, these actions all proceed from the same power and are, hence, ‘in accordance with the nature of [this power's] object’. Nothing in what I took from Kant or Aquinas rules that out.

Additional information

Funding

Work on this paper was supported by the EXPRO grant No. 20-05180X of the Czech Science Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Ulf Hlobil

Ulf Hlobil is associate professor of philosophy at Concordia University, Montreal. He has published papers on reasoning, logic, virtue ethics, and epistemology. Together with Katharina Nieswandt, he has translated into German and edited a collection of papers by G. E. M. Anscombe (Aufsätze, Suhrkamp, 2014).