FROM SUBJECTIVE TO OBJECTIVE, FROM FACT TO VALUE

After describing my attempt to make sense of normativity through an account of the aspirations and practices of our shared moral life, John Skorupski writes:

This characterization identifies a guiding idea throughout in these essays. We humans are a curious species. Since the earliest recorded times, we humans appear to have posed – and felt the need to answer – questions about our place in the world and the legitimacy of what we do. A capacity to articulate and respond to normative concerns is a deep part of us, including the capacity to feel the force of radical doubt. Should we take existing morality as a given when doing moral philosophy, or should we take skepticism seriously? I align with the latter view – history has witnessed the flourishing of many normative systems we now find dubious or even paradigmatically unacceptable. We obviously can't refute the skeptic, or escape the confines of our going world-view. But we can attempt to determine whether morality and its demands can be understood and motivated in independently intelligible, epistemically respectable terms. To me, this suggests beginning with elements that are empirically accessible and minimally controversial normatively.

In that spirit, I attempt to move within a broadly naturalistic framework from the familiarly subjective and prosaically factual to the objective and normative. This movement is, as Skorupski notes, dialogical rather than purely conceptual. Normative concepts and objectivity seem to me irreducible to natural concepts and features of subjects. Instead of an outright reduction, then, I attempt to give a constructive account of morality that shows how subjective beings like ourselves are able to attain a degree of objectivity within a normative realm, and how prosaically factual features of ourselves and our practices can meet the job descriptions of moral properties. If these arguments succeed, the result will be what is sometimes called a fundamental or vindicatory explanation (for short, a funding explanation), namely, an account of how morality can arise and live up to its objective purport in a world of facts and subjectivities.

Skorupski rightly identifies the kinship of this project with Mill's much-criticized attempt to provide a naturalistic reconstruction of morality along empiricist lines. If I am to escape the powerful criticisms leveled at Mill, I must provide an account of the semantic content of moral thought and discourse that does not run afoul of Moore's ‘open question’ test, explain how a naturalist can capture normativity, and dovetail the account with a realistic account of human psychology and natural and social history. This is an absurdly ambitious set of goals. My more modest hope is that, insofar as I make some progress along these lines, morality will lose some of its mystery, and emerge as a domain of human thought and activity that can survive the reflective scrutiny of reasonable, well-informed people and win their open-eyed allegiance. I think this makes me what Skorupski calls a ‘New Constructor’, though one who believes that the construction itself will license a significant degree of ‘Conservative Holism’, since the construction shows why existing morality can be expected to embody a great deal that is true and important. Hence the Neurathian image with which I conclude, duck or boat.

PUTTING INSTRUMENTALISM IN ITS PROPER PLACE

Skorupski's analysis of my view assigns a pivotal role to the instrumentalist conception of practical rationality, which he speculates I fully endorse. He needs to speculate, since my desire to start with minimal normative assumptions led me to shy away from offering any account of rationality as a whole. Instead, I made claims like, ‘for all its faults and all that it needs to be developed,’ the instrumental conception is ‘the clearest idea we have of what it is, at a minimum, to have a reason for action’ [6, 47; quoted by Skorupski].Footnote ¹ This, I now realize, is a confused way of characterizing what I was after, so I will try in what follows to be clearer. It would be unfortunate if my view does commit me to full-blooded instrumentalism, since that is a controversial and, to my mind, implausible view of practical rationality as a whole.Footnote ²

We can think of full-blooded instrumentalism (hereinafter simply the instrumental conception of rationality or instrumentalism) as the view that, apart from assuring internal coherence in one's beliefs and preferences and assisting in inference and the discovery of facts, the role of reason in action is restricted to identifying and directing us to take the most effective means toward our ends. My mistake was to write as if one could treat instrumentalism as a ‘minimal’ core element likely to be shared by most fully developed accounts of practical rationality. Instrumentalism is instead a maximal conception, since, beyond commending coherence in preferences and accuracy in factual belief, instrumentalism precludes rational criticism of an agent's ends. For my part, I want to give a theory of just how such criticism is possible, though I could not assume it at the outset.

I should have detached the means/end principle (M/E) from instrumentalism:

What I wanted was a principle that ‘captures a central normative feature of reason giving, since we can readily see the commending force for an agent of the claim that a given act would advance his ends’ [6; quoted in Skorupski]. Unlike instrumentalism, (M/E) does not rule out the existence of non-instrumental reasons or the rational evaluability of ends. Nor is it controversial. Indeed, something like (M/E) is common ground among all the major traditions in practical rationality, Aristotelian, Humean, and Kantian.Footnote ³

Is this because it is a mere truism, rather than a bona fide normative principle with which I might begin a construction of morality? Skorupski at one point suggests something like this. He considers the possibility that I might be able to rely upon a more modest principle than instrumentalism, namely, ‘if there's reason to advance an aim there's reason to do whatever would advance that aim’. However, he claims, this would-be principle is ‘arguably analytic’, and so presumably cannot do the substantive normative work I need done (p. 228). (M/E), however, is not a principle bridging the admittedly tiny gap between ‘reasons to advance an aim’ and ‘reasons to do what would advance an aim’. Rather, (M/E) presents a substantive normative connection between two quite distinct things, ends and the means requisite to them. It tells us, for example, that an act with nothing to recommend it in itself, like walking in circles carrying dumb-bells, may have rationality conferred upon it if it serves y for a worthwhile end, like healthy bones. (M/E), then, is neither tautological nor controversial – a good place for me to start.

But (M/E) alone won't get us far, since it yields no reasons at all until it is combined with ends that we have some reason to seek. A further, appropriately minimal principle is needed, something like (B/D):

Is (B/D) appropriately minimal, or is it too controversial, or too biased toward Humeanism, to serve as part of a minimal starting point? Anti-Humeans often claim that some desires or beliefs are so bizarre, perverse or self-defeating that no rational person would accord them any authority. (B/D) does not preclude this possibility, however, since a default, defeasible reason has only presumptive ceteris paribus authority, and thus can be contextually silenced or even self-cancelling.

Moreover, ask what would become of a would-be agent who was disposed not to accord even prima facie authority to his own beliefs and desires in their own right, who always insisted upon having some independent justification before taking their proffered guidance seriously. In what terms could such an individual provide herself a justification, if not those she finds antecedently credible? Suppose she were to propose as a form of independent justification subjecting her beliefs to a test of coherence or cogency. Well, either she trusts this test and her ability to apply it or she doesn't. If she lacks such trust, she will have no justification; if she is trusting, then this is yet another set of credences of hers, to which she cannot accord authority without an independent justification, launching a regress.

A similar dilemma confronts an agent who insists that she will accord no desire action-guiding authority until it has been independently certified, perhaps by a test like universalizability. But how is she to view her favorable attitude toward acting only on universalizable desires? Does she defer to it immediately, without subjecting it to an independent test? Then by her own standards she is unjustified. But if, out of a sense that she must be consistent, she does demand an independent certification, she now will find she needs independent justification for according authority to that sentiment. And so on.

Thoroughgoing rejection of (B/D) thus threatens a would-be agent with inability to manage the ABCs of forming beliefs and stable intentions. Deliberation, decision and judgment need something to work with, something that doesn't first require deliberation, decision and judgment. This suggests a weak present aim principle:

(B/D) is a strengthening of (WPA) from some to all. Consider things from the standpoint of a would-be agent facing a question of whether and how to begin deliberation – which beliefs or desires are to be allowed the ab initio prima facie action-guiding authority needed to get things underway? Would it make sense to her at this point simply to pick some subset of her beliefs and desires and ignore many of things she thinks true or cares about it? In practice, under the pressure of time, we of course always consider only a fraction of what we think or want. But absent such limitations, it seems most reasonable in principle to seek the widest possible reflective equilibrium in light of the whole truth as we see it, and everything that we feel matters.Footnote ⁵Then we can show our discernment by how we go on to assess, weigh, cull, act on or revise these beliefs and desires as we acquire new ideas and undergo new experiences. (B/D) simply holds that rational agents have the disposition that accords with this sensible advice.

Let me, then, replace misleading talk of starting out with instru-mentalism ‘at a minimum’, with an initial commitment to (M/E) and (B/D). They strike me as minimal enough, but contentful enough, to get my constructive account of intrinsic non-moral value and well-being underway, and thus take the first steps toward morality. I will, however, need two more principles before going much further:

Combining these elements, it is possible to carry out a stepwise approach to intrinsic value, beginning with what people actually believe and care about, and proceeding through the evolution of these attitudes and interests in light of increasing information and wider experience. Each step in this evolution would be normatively intelligible to the agent (assuming (Exp) and (Refl)), and therefore would, ceteris paribus, preserve reason-giving force. If this evolution at some point stabilizes, then we have arrived at what would matter to an individual in its own right even when she fully understands its nature and her own.Footnote ⁶ This, I claim, is the best evidence we can have of what would give her life real, and not merely apparent, value.Footnote ⁷ The dialectical strategy here obviously traces back to Hume on taste and Mill on desirability.

As we noted earlier, Skorupski also favors a dialogical approach to explaining the source and nature of normative force, but he asks pointedly whether such an approach could warrant the realism about value I advocate – surely dialectics are better suited to a more constructivist understanding of value and objectivity? Here is the beginning of an answer. What appears to underwrite the strategy in Hume or Mill, and to provide the basis for their confidence that the dialectical process will have some definite, stable upshot, is a conception of aesthetic or intrinsic value as arising from a natural match or fit between individuals and their capacities, on the one hand, and certain activities, experiences, relationships, and forms of life, on the other. Hume, for example, speaks of certain qualities as ‘fitted by nature’ to bring down an appreciative response when attended to by a sensitive individual.Footnote ⁸ In a similar vein, Mill speaks of discovering what is genuinely desirable in life – what is ‘grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being’ – through the experience of ‘experiments in living’.Footnote ⁹ In both cases, the inherently compelling, intrinsically rewarding character of ‘finding fit’ affords a real-world translation of the otherwise mysterious ‘normative force’ of intrinsic value into actual lived experience.Footnote ¹⁰ If we understand objective value in realist terms – as a matter of such relations of fit – we have more than a dialogue. We have a funding explanation of how the dialogue, and associated practices, can be both a source of genuine knowledge and the discovery of a domain with robust normative allure.

Skorupski is right to highlight the ways in which starting out with a minimalist conception of rationality shapes my work. My hope is to start the search for a funding explanation ‘close to the ground’ of everyday life, not with an ambitious theory of the demands of reason but with our experience of what makes our lives go well or ill, and our sense of the reasonableness of acting so as to promote or protect the things that matter. (M/E), (B/D), (Exp) and (Refl), taken together, embody this minimalism. Do they amount to an objectionable instrumentalism? It is hard to see that they do. For although they provide an initial core of reasons centered on an agent's present beliefs and current aims, the outer edge of this core is not the horizon of the agent's potential reasons. Rather, it is the jumping-off point for an agent to begin experimentation with a wider world of facts, values and reasons. Surprisingly, perhaps, this minimal, personal approach can bring us to embrace impartial, non-hypothetical norms for belief, action and appreciation. These norms gain their standing for us in part because they grant no privilege to anyone's particular standpoint or preferences, including one's own. Only by taking up this wider, less subjective point of view can we speak in the name of value rather than liking, and express the sort of respect that we feel value is due, whether it be realized in our own lives or the lives of others.Footnote ¹¹

PUTTING INTERNALISM IN ITS PROPER PLACE

In the case of the means/end principle, then, the interesting question about theories of practical reason is not whether they incorporate it, but where and in what role. The same is true with the much-disputed question of ‘internalism’. A moral theory that nowhere incorporated an ‘internal connection’ with actual human concerns or motives would be hopelessly alienated. Where moral theories differ is in where and in what role internalism shows up.

Expressivists, for example, locate the internal connection in the content of moral judgment, which they see as functioning to express a pro-attitude in the mind of the speaker. I believe this puts internalism in the wrong place. The expressivist does have a very straightforward explanation of the ‘action-guiding force’ of my moral judgments on me, since the state of mind they express is motivating. But Kant points out that a mark of a normative judgment, as opposed to an expression of personal preference, is that it purports to give a reason to others, indeed, to provide a reason for all of us alike. What ground would I have for thinking that my moral judgment makes the same normative claim upon others as it does on me, if its normative force for me resides in the motivating force of the pro-attitude my judgment expresses? Perhaps my pro-attitude favors only claims that can engage others motivationally on equal terms, and perhaps I am appropriately disciplined in forming this attitude. But none of this is essential to moral judgment on the expressivist account. We seem to be missing an adequate account of why moral judgments have the authority they do within our social lives.

Skorupski advocates a cognitivist approach according to which moral judgments express ‘normative propositions’, which have an internal connection with practical reasons, such that ‘one cannot consistently accept [such a proposition] and yet deny that it affords a reason’ (p. 227). This, of course, is trivially true if the reason is a moral reason, so it must be a reason with normative force in its own right. The question now becomes, is motivation internal to the recognition of such a reason – and if so, whose? If its motivation were altogether external, the worry would arise that the reason in question cannot really be practical. If its motivation is internal on the part of the speaker, then an a priori necessary connection has been forged between making a cognitive judgment about the existence of a practical reason, i.e., asserting a proposition with standard truth conditions, and being in a motivational state. This leaves us with the puzzle about what such truth conditions could be that expressivism was devised to solve. Fortunately, there is a third possibility: the internal connection can belong to the truth conditions for the judgment if the motivation in question is internal to the subject of the judgment. That is, the ‘X has a reason to F’ can be true just in case X has some motive to F.

This is the sort of internalism I favor. It helps explain the Kantian symmetry of normative judgment mentioned above: when I judge that X has a reason to F, I am committed to there being an appropriate motive for X to F, whether X is myself or someone else.

This sort of ‘existence internalism’ recognizes two species of reasons: subjective and objective. Subjective reasons support directive judgments of what an agent ought to do or would be subject to rational criticism for failing to do, so they must lie within the agent's epistemic ken, and must have the power to move him to thought and action more or less as he is; otherwise, we cannot expect him to see the rationale of the ought or hold him responsible for failing to feel its action-guiding force. Objective reasons also have an internal connection to the agent's motivational structure, not as it actually is, but as it would be under an idealization of his information, imagination, experience, acumen and understanding. Objective reasons support evaluative judgments of what would be best for the agent – what is rational for him ‘in the extended sense’ as I called it in the book [cf. 20ff.]. Failure to act on one's objective reasons can occur with no fault in one's epistemic agency or deliberative rationality. How is the man in Bernard Williams’ example who is about to drink a toxic cocktail to know that someone has used the gin bottle in the cupboard to store gasoline?Footnote ¹² The man has good, motivating reason in the objective sense not to drink it, but he is not irrational for failing to act accordingly. Are objective reasons ‘explanatorily irrelevant’ as some have alleged, since they lie outside the individual's ken and thus cannot explain why he acted as he did? No. Reasons unknown to the agent can shape and color his experience, and thereby steer one in the direction of discovering objective reasons, as this man is about to discover.

Skorupski describes a ‘bipolarity’ in my view: there is a potential gap between a person's good and what he has reason to pursue. This he thinks is at odds with the most natural way of thinking, according to which it is necessarily true that, ‘there is reason for A to pursue his good, whatever that might be’.

I am not sure how to understand this claim. It certainly can't be true of a person's subjective reasons. Skorupski acknowledges this in the case of moral reasons: ‘my moral obligations are something I can tell for myself I have, so that moral obligation, unlike optimality of consequences, must be information-relative’ (p. 225). It must, therefore, be a thesis about objective reasons. Here it looks promising. If objective reasons are those the agent would recognize or appreciate under ideal circumstances, and if I am right that a person's good is what best explains his ideal preferences (with regard to the course of his own life), then there will be a metaphysical connection between one's objective reasons and one's good.

This would seem to remove any worry about bipolarity, but Skorupski argues that the worry arises again at the level of the modality of the connection. It should, he believes, be conceptual not metaphysical – it belongs to the concept of a person's good that he has (objective) reason to pursue it, whatever it is.

Is it a bipolar disorder to deny this, as I do? Although many find an analysis of a person's good into what he has reason to pursue plausible, do those of us who think that the concept of a person's good is sui generis, or explanatorily prior to the concept of a person's reasons for action, make a conceptual mistake? It seems to me, for example, that a deeply pious person would not be conceptually confused if she agrees that what is best for her is to live well, but at the same time insists her reason to promote her own well-being is contingent on whether doing so would serve God's will or celebrating his glory. Similarly, I do not believe Kantians have abused the concept of well-being in arguing that acting on any subjective maxim, including the maxim ‘Promote my own well-being’, is rational only if it could be willed as a universal law.

REASONS FOR BELIEF

I now am able to respond to Skorupski's questions concerning the relation between reasons to believe that P properly so-called versus reasons to bring it about that one believes that P of whatever sort. He believes these are two distinct concepts, as do I. He further believes that it would be ‘immoderate’ and at odds with common sense to allow reasons of the second kind to supplant reasons of the first kind. Am I immoderate in this way? It certainly sounds that way when I write, ‘questions of what it would be rational to believe belong to practical rather than theoretical reason’ [35]. Wouldn't this allow wishful thinking to replace epistemic norms, so long as it proved more satisfying?

Consider the distinction between logical arguments and human inferences. The first are formal patterns that say nothing about how anyone should think; the second are psychological processes that sometimes do and sometimes do not conform to logical patterns. Let's take Skorupski's example of global climate change. Suppose that I observe that winters are getting warmer, see photos illustrating the polar ice cover in retreat, and hear that the dominant view among scientists is now that global warming is the root cause. Now I ask myself, what should I make of this? I might consult the principles of logic, and draw any of an infinite number of deductive consequences from these premises. None of these consequences, however, will get me to the conclusion that global warming actually is taking place – any such inference would be content-extending rather than deductive. Alternatively, I might have confidence in scientific opinion, especially when it shows wide convergence, and think that the best explanation of why winters are warmer, the ice cover is shrinking and scientists are largely of one mind is that global warming really is occurring. In the case of drawing out logical implications, I defer to some very definite norms and rules about which there is little or no controversy; unless I slip up, my conclusions will have at least as much credibility as my premises. In the case of my ‘inference to the best explanation’, I defer to vaguer, much more controversial norms, and the conclusion I draw far outstrips the content of my premises, and therefore is significantly less probable.

It sounds, then, as if all the normative advantage lies with narrowly logical reasoning. If belief by its nature ‘aims at truth’, why would I go in for risky, content-extending reasoning when deduction would yield an indefinite supply of truths? The answer seems clear enough – in deciding what to believe, we care about things other than truth: relevance, informativeness, explanatoriness, unification, economy, comprehensibility, understanding, predictive power, fruitfulness, and so on.

As Quine and others argued, even in the paradigmatically respectable domain of natural science, theory choice is massively underdetermined by ‘narrowly evidential’ or confirmatory criteria. Yet we hardly wish that scientists would just stick to the evidence and its implications. What sort of reasoning is it, then, that leads scientists and common-sense thinkers alike to think it appropriate to rely on non-confirmationalist criteria in moving from modest evidence to ambitious conclusions? Means/end reasoning relative to the wider goals of inquiry, whether scientific or common-sense. And that was my point. We reason not a priori, from epistemic first principles, but a posteriori, in light of the track record of various regulative norms for inquiry. Inevitably, in doing so, we rely upon some of the very norms whose benefits and costs we seek to assess. So once again we are in the realm of dialectics rather than rational demonstration. In effect, we reach working conclusions about the expected value of various ways of regulating inquiry and according epistemic authority. It is in light of such conclusions that we think it rational to prefer everyday and scientific practices that take non-confirmationalist criteria into account and permit the formation of general, predictive theories, as opposed to a restriction of inquiry to ‘narrowly epistemic’ norms.

Although this reasoning is hypothetical, it leads us to adopt non-hypothetical norms of inference and inquiry. Mathematics, for example, would be impossible if mathematicians did not impose upon themselves non-hypothetical standards of logical consistency and validity; the spectacular growth of science would never have occurred if scientists did not impose upon themselves non-hypothetical norms of experimental procedure and quantitative statistical evaluation of results. In this way we are led back from human inference and its ambitions to logical argument, which we take as a model for our reasoning, thereby giving logic a normative standing in relation to belief and inference that it lacks in itself.Footnote ¹³ The normativity comes from us, as we discipline ourselves and others to follow logical patterns because we see the necessity of this if we are to achieve our most elementary theoretical and practical ends.

Thus within a hypothetical framework we develop a working distinction between reasons to believe that P proper and other sorts of reasons to bring it about that one believes that P. Interest-driven bias and self-fulfilling belief are always a danger, and erroneous expectation can be costly. A lot – indeed, everything – is at stake. Most of us never face grand choices of strategies of inquiry, posed as such. Rather, we face an endless succession of small-scale versions of them in deciding what or whom to trust, what conclusions to draw, when to venture a prediction or explanation, and so on. For all of us, there is a massive disproportion between the rich, indeed infinite content of our beliefs and the very finite amount of evidence and argument we can offer for it. On the other hand, we readily appreciate how badly hobbled we'd be as agents and inquirers if we stuck to the narrowest interpretation of reasons to believe. So we take risks with the truth for the sake of wider cognitive and practical goals, making our peace with a more tolerant, more ambitious epistemic regime. Recognizing these epistemic compromises does not destroy belief, or lead us to cease trusting one another or ourselves. That would indeed be an immoderate conclusion.

PUTTING GARY IN HIS PROPER PLACE

This brings us to Gary. In my example, Gary is somewhat obnoxiously asking us to face up to the fact that, at bottom, following norms is an activity, a matter of choice. It involves us in substantive commitments about what matters and how things are, not just analysis of our own conceptual scheme. Thus, he argues, even when the norms to which we are committed are themselves non-hypothetical, our rationale in following them will always be to some extent hypothetical.

He has a point. What might appear a priori to be a rational requirement, such as deductive closure in belief, we may simply disregard in order to get on with our ambitious theorizing and lives. An a priori principle like the principle of sufficient reason falls by the wayside if it stands in the way of accepting a promising new science of the atom. Where Gary goes wrong is in thinking that his point calls into question the basic framework of practical and theoretical reason. Far from challenging the normative authority of principles like (M/E), (B/D), (Exp), logical consistency, etc., his argument and his self-understanding depend upon these principles for their own intelligibility and normative force. In arguing with us, he, too, accords authority to these non-hypothetical norms, for he sees himself as giving us reasons to accept his claims that we cannot rationally ignore simply because that would be convenient for us.

It seems to me a way of avoiding confusion to separate the question of what authority we attribute to a norm from the question of rationale we can give for that.Footnote ¹⁴ If the rationale is for following a non-hypothetical norm, then that is the sort of authority reason tells us to accord it. This is an application of (M/E), and so a piece of practical reasoning. But we'd be flying in the face of the very reasoning we are trying to follow – and so violating (M/E) – if we took this to mean that practical reason is to supplant theoretical reason. On the contrary, it funds it.