Reasons First

The last fifty years or more of ethical theory have been preoccupied by a turn to reasons. The vocabulary of reasons has become a common currency not only in ethics, but in epistemology, action theory, and many related areas. It is now common, for example, to see central theses such as evidentialism in epistemology and egalitarianism in political philosophy formulated in terms of reasons. And some have even claimed that the vocabulary of reasons is so useful precisely because reasons have analytical and explanatory priority over other normative concepts—that reasons in that sense come first. Reasons First systematically explores both the benefits and burdens of the hypothesis that reasons do indeed come first in normative theory, against the conjecture that theorizing in both ethics and epistemology can only be hampered by neglect of the other. Bringing two decades of work on reasons in both ethics and epistemology to bear, Mark Schroeder argues that some of the most important challenges to the idea that reasons could come first are themselves the source of some of the most obstinate puzzles in epistemology—about how perceptual experience could provide evidence about the world, and about what can make evidence sufficient to justify belief. And he shows that along with moral worth, one of the very best cases for the fundamental explanatory power of reasons in normative theory actually comes from knowledge.

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.

Acting and Believing Well

Chapter 10 introduces and elaborates on the deliberative role for reasons, and lays out the Fundamental Argument for Reasons First. It is shown that the fact that reasons can be acted on played very little role in any of the main arguments in Chapters 3 through 9, and argued that this means that it is possible to apply yet more leverage in order to show that reasons have analytic and explanatory priority. It is argued that deontic properties such as being the right thing to do, permissible, rational, obligatory, advisable, and the like each come with the corresponding well property of not only doing the right thing, but doing it well. The fact that reasons can be acted on is especially important, it is argued, when it comes to understanding the relationship between right properties and their corresponding well properties. The Fundamental Argument for Reasons First seeks to show that we must appeal to reasons in our analysis and explanation of right properties in order for them to result in corresponding well properties in a way that is non-recursive.

Special Concern and Personal Identity

As discussed by John Locke, Joseph Butler, and Thomas Reid, prudence involves a special concern for the agent’s own personal good that she does not have for others. This should be a concern for the agent’s overall good that is temporally neutral and involves an equal concern for all parts of her life. In this way, prudence involves a combination of agent relativity and temporal neutrality. This asymmetrical treatment of matters of interpersonal and intertemporal distribution might seem arbitrary. Henry Sidgwick raised this worry, and Thomas Nagel and Derek Parfit have endorsed it as reflecting the instability of prudence and related doctrines such as egoism and the self-interest theory. However, Sidgwick thought that the worry was unanswerable only for skeptics about personal identity, such as David Hume. Sidgwick thought that one could defend prudence by appeal to realism about personal identity and a compensation principle. This is one way in which special concern and prudence presuppose personal identity. However, as Jennifer Whiting has argued, special concern displayed in positive affective regard for one’s future and personal planning and investment is arguably partly constitutive of personal identity, at least on a plausible psychological reductionist conception of personal identity. After explaining both conceptions of the relation between special concern and personal identity, the chapter concludes by exploring what might seem to be the paradoxical character of conjoining them, suggesting that there may be no explanatory priority between the concepts of special concern and personal identity.

Against Jazz Combo Theories of Meaning and Reference

The “jazz combo theory” captures the common spirit of various theories that reject reference and the “bottom up” approach to the problem of objective representational content. We can imagine the members of a jazz combo initially playing together without any shared musical norms. But they continually adjust to one another until norms emerge and are mutually endorsed. Players start holding one another to these norms, and it’s this that gives the sounds they produce—what would otherwise be mere noise—determinate musical content. Similarly, on the jazz combo theory, what would otherwise be productions of meaningless strings by language users, come to constitute determinate linguistic acts with determinate propositional contents, by virtue of the users adopting, and holding one another to, a shared set of linguistic and discursive norms. This chapter argues that jazz combo theorists overstate the case against reference, although they’re right in stressing the importance of norms and their dependence on social interaction. Jazz combo theorists tend to reject bottom-up approaches, including causal theories, because they take those approaches to be incompatible with the explanatory priority of the sentence and to fail to bridge the supposed gap between cause and norm. A number of conceptual tools are introduced to counter their arguments and to defend the consistency of the dynamic priority of the sentence, the syntactic correlativity of sentences and their constituents, and the semantic priority of constituents.

Naturalizing Christians: A Response to Joel Marcus, John the Baptist in History and Theology

This essay examines the conceptual framework that informs Marcus’s distinction between history and theology, and considers what stands to be gained by this manner of classification. The essay observes that Marcus’s classification hinges upon a theory of religion that views gospels as artifacts expressive of sincere belief and, further, suggests this approach serves to mystify the origins of the Christian theological metanarrative by replicating the explanation asserted within the gospels themselves. By reversing the conceptual framework and the explanatory priority, one could deploy a theory of religion that sees gospels as artifacts of persuasion and thereby argue that they aim to naturalize the initially unnatural truth claim that Jesus was the christ by connecting him to a known social type: John. From this approach, it would not be belief in Jesus as the christ that explains the modified constructions of John the Baptist; rather, modifications of John the Baptist would be precisely what construct belief in Jesus as the christ.

Wittgensteins Kritik am additiven Verständnis des sprachlichen Zeichens

This paper argues that Wittgenstein, both early and late, rejects the idea that the logically simpler and more fundamental case is that of “the mere sign” and that what a meaningful symbol is can be explained through the elaboration of an appropriately supplemented conception of the sign: the sign plus something (say, an interpretation or an assignment of meaning). Rather the sign, in the logically fundamental case of its mode of occurrence, is an internal aspect of the symbol. The Tractatus puts this point as follows: “The sign is that in the symbol which is perceptible by the senses.” Conversely, this means that it is essential to a symbol – to what a symbol is – that it have an essentially perceptible aspect. For Wittgenstein there is no privileged direction of explanatory priority between symbol and sign here: without signs there are no symbols (hence without language there is no thought) and without some sort of relation to symbols there are no signs (hence the philosopher’s concept of the supposedly “merely linguistic” presupposes an internal relation to symbols).

Wittgenstein’s Critique of the Additive Conception of Language

This paper argues that Wittgenstein, both early and late, rejects the idea that the logically simpler and more fundamental case is that of "the mere sign" and that what a meaningful symbol is can be explained through the elaboration of an appropriately supplemented conception of the sign: the sign plus something (say, an interpretation or an assignment of meaning). Rather the sign, in the logically fundamental case of its mode of occurrence, is an internal aspect of the symbol. The Tractatus puts this point as follows: “The sign is that in the symbol which is perceptible by the senses.” Conversely, this means that it is essential to a symbol – to what a symbol is – that it have an essentially perceptible aspect. For Wittgenstein there is no privileged direction of explanatory priority between symbol and sign here: without signs there are no symbols (hence without language there is no thought) and without some sort of relation to symbols there are no signs (hence the philosopher’s concept of the supposedly "merely linguistic" presupposes an internal relation to symbols).