Normativity and the Will Selected Essays on Moral Psychology and Practical Reason [Oxford U.P.] 2006.pdf

Normativity and

the Will

Selected Papers on Moral Psychology

and Practical Reason

R. JAY WALLACE

CLARENDON PRESS

●

OXFORD

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,

and education by publishing worldwide in

Oxford New York

Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi

Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi

New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto

With ofﬁces in

Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece

Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore

South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press

in the UK and in certain other countries

Published in the United States

by Oxford University Press Inc., New York

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

First published 2006

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,

or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate

reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction

outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,

Oxford University Press, at the address above

You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover

and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Wallace, R. Jay.

Normativity and the will: selected papers on moral psychology and

practical reason / R. Jay Wallace.

p. cm.

1. Normativity (Ethics) 2. Will. 3. Practical reason. I. Title.

BJ1458.3.W35 2006 153.8—dc22 2005033114

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

Printed in Great Britain

on acid-free paper by

Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk

ISBN 0–19–928748–1 978–0–19–928748–2

ISBN 0–19–928749–X (Pbk.) 978–0–19–928749–9 (Pbk.)

13579108642

Contents

Introduction

I. REASON, DESIRE, AND THE WILL

1. How to Argue about Practical Reason

2. Three Conceptions of Rational Agency

3. Explanation, Deliberation, and Reasons

4. Normativity and the Will

5. Normativity, Commitment, and Instrumental Reason

II. RESPONSIBILITY, IDENTIFICATION,

AND EMOTION

6. Reason and Responsibility

123

7. Moral Responsibility and the Practical Point of View

144

8. Addiction as Defect of the Will: Some Philosophical Reﬂections

165

9. Caring, Reﬂexivity, and the Structure of Volition

190

10. Ressentiment , Value, and Self-Vindication: Making Sense

of Nietzsche’s Slave Revolt

212

III. MORALITY AND OTHER NORMATIVE DOMAINS

11. Virtue, Reason, and Principle

241

12. Scanlon’s Contractualism

263

13. The Rightness of Acts and the Goodness of Lives

300

14. Moral Reasons and Moral Fetishes: Rationalists and

Anti-Rationalists on Moral Motivation

322

Index

343

Introduction

Moral philosophy has turned increasingly to topics in moral psychology and

the theory of normativity in recent years. But there are very different ways of

approaching both of these clusters of issues. Some philosophers treat moral

psychology as a largely empirical domain, dedicated to the description and

explanation of human thought, emotion, and behavior, through methods

that are broadly continuous with those of the sciences. The moral psychologist,

on this conception, tries to get clear about what people are like as a matter

of fact, ignoring for these purposes normative questions about how people

ought to behave or what it would be valuable for them to do. On the other side,

normativity is sometimes taken to constitute an autonomous intellectual

realm, one that can be studied largely in abstraction from questions about

human psychology. Normative considerations deﬁne ideals for human thought

and action, and it is natural to suppose that our conception of the ideal should

not be held hostage to messy facts about what human beings actually think

and do.

There is no doubt something importantly right about the distinction

between fact and value on which these approaches rely. It is one thing to ask

what people are like, quite another to consider how they ought to behave.

While acknowledging the distinction between these questions, however,

I myself do not believe that they can effectively be addressed in isolation from

each other. Normativity in the domain of practice is fundamentally about

reasons for action, the considerations that count for and against actions in the per-

spectives of deliberation and advice. But reasons can be normative in this sense

only if they are considerations that agents are able to acknowledge and to com-

ply with, insofar as they are rational and are otherwise deliberating correctly.

To the extent this is the case, the study of normativity in practice must attend

to the psychological capacities that undergird normative response, and that

make it possible for normative reasons to ﬁgure properly in the deliberations of

the agents to whom they apply. Conversely, human motivational psychology

distinctively involves capacities to respond to considerations whose normative

signiﬁcance for action the agent acknowledges, as well as motivations and emo-

tions that can interfere with these forms of rational response. These reciprocal

connections between normativity and motivation raise a series of large and dif-

ﬁcult questions for philosophy, centering on the interpretation of our capaci-

ties for rational agency, the nature and conditions of normativity in general,

Introduction

The present volume collects fourteen papers on these central questions in

moral psychology and the theory of practical reason. All of the papers reﬂect my

commitment to the general idea that normativity and moral psychology are best

pursued together. They might be thought of as advertisements for this idea,

attempts to explore the interpenetration of the normative and the psychological in

a series of debates that lie at the heart of moral philosophy.

Substantively the essays are united in their allegiance to three broad claims:

(a) Rationalism in ethical theory, which holds that moral considerations are

reasons for action.

(b) Realism in the theory of normativity, the thesis that there are facts of the

matter about what we have reason to do that are prior to and independent

of our normative convictions.

desires have a substantial role to play in explanations of rational action.

The essays that have been selected pursue these central philosophical issues from a

variety of perspectives. I have organized them into three parts, to emphasize the-

matic continuities between individual papers; a brief account of each part follows.

1. REASON, DESIRE, AND THE WILL

This part addresses general issues about the relation between normative considera-

tions and motivation. It collects ﬁve papers on these issues.

Chapter 1, ‘How to Argue about Practical Reason’, was written as a survey of

contemporary approaches to practical reason. A main focus here is the relation

between normative reasons for action and the dispositions and desires of the

agents to whom they apply. Many philosophers, taking their inspiration from a

perhaps inaccurate reading of Hume, have held that normative reasons for action

must be grounded in the antecedent desires and dispositions of the agents to

whom they apply. (This is what Bernard Williams has called the internal reasons

model,

1 For more on the interpenetration of normative and psychological issues in these domains, see my

‘Moral Psychology’, in Frank Jackson and Michael Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of

Contemporary Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), and ‘Practical Reason’, in Edward

N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , URL http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/

practical-reason/ .

and the possibilities for motivated departures from our own judgments about

what we have reason to do.

or ‘internalism’, as I shall refer to it.) Chapter 1 traces the intuitive appeal

of this approach to the ideas that normative reasons must be capable of being

acted on in deliberation, and that intentional action in turn involves states of

See Bernard Williams, ‘Internal and External Reasons’, as reprinted in his Moral Luck

(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 101–13.

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: