The wisdom of hindsight and the limits of Humean constructivism

Abstract

Ordinary normative discourse includes talk about the reasons for action we had in the past but only came to discover in hindsight. In some cases, we come to discover these reasons not because new information has come to light, but because our values have changed. Contemporary metaethical views, namely Street's Humean constructivism and Blackburn's and Gibbard's quasi-realism, have some difficulty accounting for these reasons and the claims we make about them. This difficulty hinges on the diachronic complexity of these reasons and claims. It cannot be the case that these reasons were constructed by the perspective we had in the past before our values changed. If there were no extant reasons in the past, then it would seem that our claims about them in the present cannot be true. Quasi-realists can account for the way in which reason claims purport to be true by appealing to a deflationary sense of truth and so can remain agnostic on the actual existence of these reasons. Nevertheless, Street argues that this agnosticism is inconsistent with the quasi-realists' naturalism that should have them reject the existence of such reasons. I argue that Street would suffer from an even more acute form of this inconsistency were she to account for reasons only discovered in hindsight. At best her view does no better than the view of her chosen rivals. At worst, it discounts reasons that are so central to our moral development that it fails to be plausible.

Keywords:

• constructivism
• quasi-realism
• repression
• practical reasoning
• coherence

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Andrew Forcehimes and two anonymous reviewers from this journal for comments. I also benefitted tremendously from ongoing discussions about metaethics with Andrew Forcehimes, Robert Talisse, Paul Morrow, Elizabeth Edenberg, Luke Semrau, and Emily McGill.

Notes on contributor

Gary Jaeger is Senior Lecturer of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Repression, Integrity, and Practical Reasoning (Palgrave Macmillan).

Notes

1. Brandt claims that it is rational to act on whichever desires survive cognitive psychotherapy, which involves vividly reflecting on all of the relevant information including facts about what will come to pass in the future.

2. Parfit (1984, 2011), for instance, holds that values are just some of the facts that provide us with reasons.

3. The assumption that Lynn at t₁ and Lynn at t₂ share the same personal identity is not without controversy. See, for example, Parfit (1971, 1984) and Velleman (1996). Even these skeptics about personal identity over time recognize a psychological continuity that explains the reason we have to care about our survival. Even if Lynn does become a different person, the force of my argument is not lost. My only point is that the normative thought and language expressed by Lynn at t₂ is evidence of reasons existing at t₁. On this point alone, Parfit, for one, should have no objection. As a realist about reasons he is able to accept the endurance of reasons even if he denies the endurance of persons. On this note, see, especially, Parfit (1982).

4. This is, of course, their responses to the Frege–Geach problem. See Blackburn (1984, 189–196, 1998, Chap. 3), Gibbard (1990, 83–105, 2003, Chap. 3).

5. Gibbard (2011) makes a similar point about mind-independence, claiming that the quasi-realist can deny the mind-dependence of reasons and still be intelligible.

6. The denial of a mind-independent standard is her rejection of realism. The denial of an interpersonal standard is her rejection of Kantian strands of constructivism.