The Range of Reasons

This book contributes to two debates and it does so by bringing them together. The first is a debate in metaethics concerning normative reasons, the considerations that serve to justify a person’s actions and attitudes. The second is a debate in epistemology concerning the norms for belief, the standards that govern a person’s beliefs and by reference to which they are assessed. The book starts by developing and defending a new theory of reasons for action, that is, of practical reasons. The theory belongs to a family that analyses reasons by appeal to the normative notion of rightness (fittingness, correctness); it is distinctive in making central appeal to modal notions, specifically, that of a nearby possible world. The result is a comprehensive framework that captures what is common to and distinctive of reasons of various kinds: justifying and demanding; for and against, possessed and unpossessed; objective and subjective. The framework is then generalized to reasons for belief, that is, to epistemic reasons, and combined with a substantive, first-order commitment, namely, that truth is the sole right-maker for belief. The upshot is an account of the various norms governing belief, including knowledge and rationality, and the relations among them. According to it, the standards to which belief is subject are various, but they are unified by an underlying principle.

Sandwiched in the Workplace

According to Ronald Robinson’s ‘theory of collaboration,’ non-European mediating elites helped regulate and maintain imperialism. This chapter argues that not all collaborators were crucial to the rise and decline of colonies. A peek into the circumstances of Macanese employment in Hong Kong shows a more practical aspect of how early colonial establishments were built through the services of migrant workers, who toiled in lower- and middle-ranking administrative positions in the public and private offices. Reassessing existing claims that Macanese workers were victims of racial prejudice, the careers of three Macanese men reveal the normative reasons behind their stagnant careers, as well as an alternative understanding of the terms of collaboration between colonial governments and their subjects from the migrant perspective.

Reasons to Be Rational

In the wake of Kolodny (2005) and Raz (2005), the normativity of rationality has become the topic of an intricate debate: what normative reasons are there, if any, to be rational? This article explains what kinds of ‘reasons to be rational’ there are. It then argues that, while we often have reason to be rationally disposed, rationality is neither itself normative nor necessarily underwritten by normative reasons – at any rate not when construed as conformance with coherence requirements. Allegedly omnipresent reasons to be coherent are shown to be ‘ghost-like’: hard to disprove, and yet irrational to believe in. This conclusion is rendered persuasive with scenarios featuring rewards for violating coherence constraints. The article also deals with the long-standing objection that such ‘irrationality rewards’ would be reasons ‘of the wrong kind’. Furthermore, Kolodny’s explanation of why rationality has the appearance of being normative is replaced with a more credible ‘error theory’.

The matter of motivating reasons

It is now standard in the literature on reasons and rationality to distinguish normative reasons from motivating reasons. Two issues have dominated philosophical theorising concerning the latter: (i) whether we should think of them as certain (nonfactive) psychological states of the agent—the dispute over Psychologism; and (ii) whether we should say that the agent can ϕ for the reason that p only if p—the dispute over Factivism. This paper first introduces a puzzle: these disputes look very much like merely verbal disputes about the meaning of phrases like ‘S’s reason’ in motivating reasons ascriptions, and yet charity requires us to think that something substantive is afoot. But what? The second aim of the paper is to extract substantive theses from certain natural argument for Psychologism and Anti-Factivism—theses which are versions of a Cartesian view of the nature and normative structure of rationality. The paper ends by arguing against these substantive theses on phenomenological and ethical grounds. The upshot is that proponents of Psychologism and Anti-Factivism are either engaged in the project of defending merely verbal theses or they’re engaged in the project of defending false substantive ones.

Elusive Reasons and the Motivational Constraint

The Motivational Constraint says that a consideration is a normative reason for an agent to act only if it is logically possible for the agent to act for that reason, or at least to be moved so to act. Because it is entailed by a number of prominent views about normative reasons, its truth or falsehood has important implications. Mark Schroeder (2007) and Julia Markovits (2014) have criticized the Motivational Constraint for its inconsistency with so-called “elusive reasons.” Elusive reasons are normative reasons that an agent cannot act for. Hille Paakkunainen (2017), Neil Sinclair (2016), and Michael Ridge and Sean McKeever (2012) have offered three strategies for reconciling the Motivational Constraint with elusive reasons. In this paper, I argue that these strategies fail in that conciliatory task. Furthermore, I argue for the existence of a type of elusive reason not heretofore discussed in the literature, and show how these strategies also fail to reconcile this type of elusive reason with the Motivational Constraint.

IQ and digital inequality: An empirical investigation

Cognitive intelligence is rarely discussed in the context of digital inequality for practical and normative reasons: substantial difficulties around measurements and the fact that it cannot (easily) be changed. In the current contribution, cognitive intelligence is studied in relation to resources and appropriation theory which explains digital inequality as a process of four successive phases of Internet access: motivational, material, skills, and usage. For the measurement of cognitive intelligence, we build on considerable efforts devoted to developing alternatives to cumbersome intelligence quotient (IQ) tests of intelligence. We conducted a two-wave online survey in the Netherlands, resulting in a sample of 1733 respondents. The importance of IQ was confirmed with direct positive effects on education, economic, social, and cultural resources, and on Internet attitude and skills. The results reveal several details that can enhance our understanding of the specific mechanisms through which IQ and education operate in digital inequalities.

Reasons are Competitors

Chapter 2 introduces the classical argument for the analytic and explanatory priority of reasons, and articulates a minimal characterization of normative reasons to be relied on throughout the remainder of the book. According to the classical argument, which derives from W.D. Ross, reasons play an important role in the analysis of what we ought to do because they compete in the determination of what we ought to do. This argument is developed and expanded to treat the contrasting explanatory perspective of consequentializing moral theories and extended to apply to a wide range of moral concepts. In addition to competing, it is argued that to play their explanatory role, reasons must support actions rather than outcomes, and must in general be the kind of thing that can be acted on.

The Goals of Moral Worth

While it is tempting to suppose that an act has moral worth just when and because it is motivated by sufficient moral reasons, philosophers have, largely, come to doubt this analysis. Doubt is rooted in two claims. The first is that some facts can motivate a given act in multiple ways, not all of which are consistent with moral worth. The second is the orthodox view that normative reasons are facts. I defend the tempting analysis by proposing and defending a heterodox account of both normative and motivating reasons that is inspired by Donald Davidson’s primary reasons. We should adopt the heterodox view, the chapter argues, because it addresses an overlooked but fatal defect in the orthodox conception of reasons, of which challenges to the tempting analysis are a special case.

Epistemic Blame and the Normativity of Evidence

The normative force of evidence can seem puzzling. It seems that having conclusive evidence for a proposition does not, by itself, make it true that one ought to believe the proposition. But spelling out the condition that evidence must meet in order to provide us with genuine normative reasons for belief seems to lead us into a dilemma: the condition either fails to explain the normative significance of epistemic reasons or it renders the content of epistemic norms practical. The first aim of this paper is to spell out this challenge for the normativity of evidence. I argue that the challenge rests on a plausible assumption about the conceptual connection between normative reasons and blameworthiness. The second aim of the paper is to show how we can meet the challenge by spelling out a concept of epistemic blameworthiness. Drawing on recent accounts of doxastic responsibility and epistemic blame, I suggest that the normativity of evidence is revealed in our practice of suspending epistemic trust in response to impaired epistemic relationships. Recognizing suspension of trust as a form of epistemic blame allows us to make sense of a purely epistemic kind of normativity the existence of which has recently been called into doubt by certain versions of pragmatism and instrumentalism.