Irrationality

This chapter replies to one common objection to desire-as-belief: that it makes poor sense of practical irrationality such as akrasia. This objection to desire-as-belief is closely related to two others: the worry that we sometimes desire to do things without believing we have reason to pursue them, and the worry that we sometimes believe we have reason to pursue things without desiring to do them. The chapter offers a series of complementary responses to these objections: that our beliefs can be irrational, that some of what we say about our desires is misleading, and that we might fail to be motivated by our desires. Between these factors, it is doubtful that such objections succeed. The chapter finishes with a brief aside on second-order desires, and concludes that they are of little relevance to the occurrence of akrasia.

Perverse Reasons

For an agent to be motivated by a normatively perverse reason is to be motivated by a normative or evaluative thought as such which, if true, would count as such against the action that it motivates the agent to perform, or against the attitude that it motivates the agent to take. For example, that an action is morally wrong or prudentially bad counts, as such, against performing the action. When the thought that an action is morally wrong or prudentially bad (bad for me) motivates me as such to perform the action, my motivating reason is normatively perverse. If being motivated by normatively perverse reasons is possible, then what, if anything, is wrong about it? I present and reject some accounts of what may be wrong about normative perversity (wrong reasons, malfunctioning attitudes, practical irrationality, instability, evaluative ignorance). In the course of this discussion some desiderata emerge. Then I defend the suggestion that normative perversion is socially undesirable, in that it undermines certain valuable interpersonal and intrapersonal relations. Entering and maintaining these relations is constitutive of valuing people as beings to whom reasonable justification is owed. I show how this account satisfies the desiderata.

Reasons, rationality, and motivation

According to one of the most influential and popular theories in the contemporary theory of action, an agent S is motivated to perform a certain act A if and only if she endorses some set of reasons R on the basis of which it follows that she should perform A, and given that she does not suffer from some sort of practical irrationality (e.g. depression, weakness of will, psychopathy, mental or physical exhaustion etc.). At least at first glance, this theory - which is known as the rationalist motivational internalism - appears to be uncontroversial and unproblematic. Yet, over the past ten years, this popular position has faced numerous very serious objections. In the course of this work, I intend to present some of these objections, in order to justify the claim that the concept of practical irrationality - i.e. the concept that plays the central role in this particular version of internalism - should be left out from the philosophical explanation of motivation. I will then attempt to defend the conclusion that the rationalist motivational internalism represents a completely inadequate theory of motivation.

The Humean Theory of Practical Irrationality

Christine Korsgaard has argued that Humean views about action and practical rationality jointly imply the impossibility of irrational action. According to the Humean theory of action, agents do what maximizes expected desire-satisfaction. According to the Humean theory of rationality, it is rational for agents to do what maximizes expected desire-satisfaction. Thus Humeans are committed to the impossibility of practical irrationality – an unacceptable consequence. I respond by developing Humean views to explain how we can act irrationally. Humeans about action should consider the immediate motivational forces produced by an agent's desires. Humeans about rationality should consider the agent's dispositional desire strengths. When (for example) vivid sensory or imaginative experiences of desired things cause some of our desires to produce motivational force disproportional to their dispositional strength, we may act in ways that do not maximize expected desire-satisfaction, thus acting irrationally. I argue that this way of developing Humean views is true to the best reasons for holding them.