Conscience

Building upon Fichte’s theory of drives discussed in the previous chapter, the present chapter offers a new interpretation of his theory of conscience from §§14–15 of the System of Ethics. At the heart of this interpretation is the idea that we can access the alignment between our actual willing and our original drive only in the mode of feeling. When that alignment occurs, Fichte explains, we feel a pleasurable self-harmony; when that alignment does not occur, we feel a painful self-disharmony. For this reason only the feelings of self-harmony and self-disharmony afforded by the power of conscience give immediate certainty to our convictions of duty. That is the basis of Fichte’s claim that conscience gives us an unerring criterion in practical deliberation.

Irony, Disruption and Moral Imperfection

Irony has a suspicious moral reputation, especially in popular media and internet culture. Jonathan Lear (2011) introduces a proposal which challenges this suspicion and identifies irony as a means to achieve human excellence. For Lear, irony is a disruptive uncanniness which arises from a gap between aspiration and actualisation in our practical identity. According to Lear, such a disruptive experience of ironic uncanniness reorients us toward excellence, because it passionately propels us to really live up to that practical identity. However, Lear’s understanding of irony is idiosyncratic and his proposal overlooks that disruption often results from value incompatibility between different practical identities. The disruption which follows from value incompatibility does not inherently reorient us toward excellence. The point is exactly that achieving excellence in one practical identity is sometimes incompatible with excellence in the other. Pace Lear, I do not identify this disruptive experience as a central example of irony. Instead, I consider irony a virtuous coping strategy for such disruption, because it introduces the necessary distance from our moral imperfection to sustain practical deliberation and maintain good mental health. Such virtuous irony negotiates a golden mean between too little disruption (complete insensitivity toward one’s imperfection) and too much disruption (a complete breakdown of practical deliberation and mental health). I argue that ironic media in popular culture provide a rich source of such virtuous irony, which I demonstrate through analysis of satirical examples.

The Plight to Choose: Cultivating Practical Deliberation in Management Learning and Education

Departing from discussions at Research in Management Learning & Education (RMLE) Unconferences, we identify the problem of practical deliberation: When faced with multiple, relevant theories that all demand to be given weight in a process of deliberation, how do management students, while drawing on these theories, justify their choice? Based on contemporary practical philosophy, we claim that students must aim for rational necessitation when practically deliberating about such decisions. Using the example of our teaching on a Master of Public Governance program at a major European business school, we delineate how we have employed a philosophical pedagogy to teach MBA students to practically deliberate in order to reach rational necessitation. With our theoretical and practical research, we aim to show how contemporary practical philosophy offers a distinct, original contribution to management learning and education in contrast with the traditional philosophies of education We end the article by suggesting and motivating five avenues of further research into the problem of practical deliberation in management learning and education.

Why preferences can be optional

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] In practical deliberation, your aim should not always only be to promote objective goodness. Rather, I argue, you should use your own practical evaluations, as long as they are reasonable. Reasonable evaluations are sensitive to agent-centered reasons (e.g., you should not have a favorite child), instrumental reasons (e.g., to have more common interests with others), and rational reasons. This dissertation primarily develops an account of rational reasons for evaluations. Particularly, I investigate which evaluations rationally fit objective values. For many items (e.g., career paths or hobbies), it is plausible that no particular sharp evaluation is rationally required, even though some evaluations are clearly too high or low. For other items (e.g., someone else's pain), their weight in practical deliberation do not depend on the evaluator's perspective. To explain this difference, I defend an interval account of rationally fitting evaluaations, noting that the intervals can collapse to points. Each chapter rebuts an objection to the interval account. Chapter 1 rebuts the objection that value relations cannot be modeled using relations between intervals. I offer different definitions. Chapter 2 rebuts the objection that arbitrarily sharpened evaluations (within the intervals) cannot be practically authoritative. I respond that they must be practically authoritative or else perfect rationality would be possible in principle. Chapter 3 responds to the objection that evaluations cannot be practically authoritative because it is practically impossible to change them. I grant that it is often permissible to change our evaluations, but I rhetorically challenge the objector to deny that such things can (though need not) contribute meaning to a life.

Socrates, Vlastos, Scanlon and the Principle of the Sovereignty of Virtue

This article offers a new formulation of the Socratic principle known as the Principle of the Sovereignty of Virtue (PSV). It is divided in three sections. In the first section I criticize Vlastos’ formulation of the PSV. In the second section I present the weighing model of practical deliberation, introduce the concepts of reason for action, simple reason, sufficient reason and conclusive reason that were offered by Thomas Scanlon in Being realistic about reasons (2014), and then I adapt these concepts so as to render them apt to be used in the formulation I intend to offer. In the third section I present my formulation of the PSV using the concepts introduced in the second section and explain why I believe this formulation is better than the one offered by Vlastos.

Hopeless practical deliberation – reply to Bobier

Bobier (2017) argued that hope is necessary for practical deliberation. I will demonstrate that Bobier’s argument for this thesis fails. The problem is that one of its main premisses rests on a sufficient condition for hoping that is subject to counterexamples. I consider two ways to save the argument, but show that they are unsuccessful in doing so.

The Problem of Moral Obligation

This chapter looks at the issue of the normative significance of moral requirements in the first-person perspective of deliberation. Moral conclusions are customarily treated as considerations that matter within an agent's practical decision-making. That a course of action would be impermissible, for instance, or morally the right thing to do, are conclusions that appear to have direct relevance for practical deliberation, which agents who are reasoning correctly will take appropriately into account in planning their future activities. The philosophical problem in this area is often understood to be the problem of making sense of the reason-giving force of morality. That is, an account of moral rightness or permissibility should shed light on the standing of these considerations as reasons for action, which count for and against actions in the first-person perspective of agency. However, this conventional understanding seriously underdescribes the challenge that faces a philosophical account of morality.

Fatalism: thoughts about tomorrow's sea battle

The hold of the fatalistic reasoning that Aristotle criticizes is dependent, first, on the idea, articulated by Frege, that the real candidates for truth and falsity are something other than particular contingent happenings such as affirmations or thinkings, and, second, on the idea that the demand for speculative reflection overrides any demand for practical deliberation. Standard challenges to the reasoning embody the same presuppositions and so simply perpetuate the core confusions. They do so most fundamentally in the assumption that we need a ‘metaphysical’ grounding for our idea of ourselves as agents who have influence on the course of events.

Epistemic Norms of Assertion and Action

This chapter surveys the work on epistemic norms of action, practical deliberation, and assertion. In doing so, it is considered how these norms are interrelated. If there are important similarities between the epistemic norms of action and assertion, these may have important ramifications for how we should think about asserting. Thus, the chapter indicates how thinking about assertions as a speech act might benefit from a broader action theoretic setting. In consequence, we begin by considering the epistemic norms of action and practical deliberation on the market. On this basis we proceed to considering the epistemic norms of assertion. Finally, we consider their interrelation and wider ramifications.