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Abstract
On a widely held view, the canonical way to make sense of intentional actions is to invoke the agent's ‘motivating reasons’, where the claim that X did A for some ‘motivating reason’ is taken to be neutral on whether X had a normative reason to do A. In this paper, I explore a challenge to this view, drawing on Anscombe's ‘second-personal’ approach to the nature of action explanation.
Acknowledgements
Drafts of this paper were presented at conferences in Copenhagen, Granada, and Oxford. I am grateful to the audiences for helpful comments, in particular to Josef Perner, Glenda Satne, Dan Zahavi, Johannes Brandl, Guy Longworth, Doug Lavin, Christopher Peacocke, Eleonore Stump, Stephen Darwall and Andrew Pinsent. Special thanks to Naomi Eilan for extremely useful suggestions on the penultimate draft. Work on this paper was supported by a grant from the British Academy for a project on The Second Person.
Notes on contributor
Johannes Roessler is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Warwick University. He has published articles on issues in epistemology and the philosophy of mind and action, and has co-edited three interdisciplinary volumes, including most recently Perception, Causation, and Objectivity (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Notes
1. Put in the terms used in recent debates about the nature of the ‘favouring’ relation, Anscombe's reasons are arguably not exclusively ‘deontic’ or ‘peremptory’. For helpful discussion of non-deontic practical reasons, see Little (Citation2013).
2. According to Dancy, the canonical way to put the agent's reason is: his reason was that, as he believed, the bottle contained gin. See Dancy (Citation2000, 129).
3. More precisely: as an action performed with a certain intention. Trivial actions like doodling, for example, may be intentional without being open to rational explanations. Trading convenience for precision, in what follows I will revert to the simpler formulation.
4. See Josef Raz's discussion of what he calls the ‘normative/explanatory nexus’, in his 2011, ch. 2. Disjunctivists about acting for a reason (Hornsby Citation2008; McDowell Citation2013) make the further claim that the intelligibility of intentional actions in terms of non-factive attitudes depends on the intelligibility provided by normative reasons, recognized as such by the agent. I will come back to disjunctivism in Section 3.
5. As Stroud has stressed. See his (Citation2011, 111–112).
6. See Moran (Citation2005) for illuminating discussion.
7. Compare Vogler's suggestion that on Anscombe's (and Aquinas's) view, these are ‘basically the same question’ (Citation2002, 31).
8. Alternative styles include: ‘I am doing A in order to do B.’ and ‘I am doing B.’ What I mean by calling these types of answers less basic is that they are in a significant sense incomplete (which is not to say that they are not for many purposes perfectly adequate): they leave open why the fact that doing A facilitates doing B should be thought of as a consideration counting in favour of doing A.
9. Dancy's account of reason explanation encourages the following variant: ostensibly factive non-psychological explanations (‘X is doing A because p’) are ‘naturally taken’ as non-factive non-psychological explanations (‘X's reason for doing A is that p’, where this is held to be consistent with ‘but not p’). Compare Dancy's claim that ‘there are factive ways of giving an explanation which, in its own nature, is non-factive’ (Citation2011, 7).
10. I borrow the distinction between the two questions from Hornsby (Citation2011, 119). As Hornsby puts it, the two questions ‘go hand in hand.’
11. For helpful discussion of reasons for non-interference see Wallace (Citation2009).
12. Raz (Citation2011) presents grounds for a negative answer, independently of any commitment to a disjunctivist view of rational explanation.
13. ‘The link between explanation and justification is therefore a link between explaining the action and showing how, had things been as the agent supposed, there would have been most reason to do what he did.’ (Dancy Citation2000, 10)
14. This conception of the relation between the two disjuncts echoes some themes in Jonathan Sutton's account of the nature of epistemic justification (Citation2007). Hornsby's exposition of disjunctivism is couched in a terms of a distinction between two kinds of reasons (‘fact-type’ vs. ‘belief-type’), where the latter is said to ‘inherit the normativity’ of the former (Citation2008, 250). It is not obvious what Hornsby takes the ‘normativity’ of belief-type reasons to amount to. Perhaps she merely has in mind the weak sense of justification in which (mere) beliefs excusing someone's doing something might be said to ‘justify’ her doing it, without any implication that there was a normative reason, of any kind, for doing it, or that there was any sense in which the agent ought to do what she did.
15. Dancy assumes that to ‘enshrine the primacy of the successful case’ disjunctivists need to offer an account of the nature of ‘mere believing’ in terms of its relation to knowledge (Citation2008, 273). For dissent, see McDowell (Citation2013).
16. This is left open by Davidsons' famous remark that ‘there is a certain irreducible – though somewhat anaemic – sense in which every rationalization justifies: from the agent's point of view there was, when he acted, something to be said for the action’ (Citation1980, 9). The question is whether, and why, the agent's view that there was something to be said for the action should be taken to imply that there was, in some sense, something to be said for the action.