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7 - Deliberation about value

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 September 2009

Bennett W. Helm
Affiliation:
Franklin and Marshall College, Pennsylvania
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Summary

My aim has been to understand the kind of practical rationality distinctive of persons so as to be able to solve certain problems of human practical reason. To this end, first, I have given an account of a distinctive kind of rationality governing the interconnections among our felt evaluations and evaluative judgments: a rationality of import, as we might call it. Why is such a rationality of import distinctive? These felt evaluations and evaluative judgments, I have argued, are disclosive commitments to import. By this I mean that they are neither cognitive commitments having mind-to-world direction of fit to an antecedent fact, nor conative commitments that project that import by virtue of their world-to-mind direction of fit. Rather, our commitments to import are simultaneously both responsive to that import and constitutive of it by virtue of their complex rational interconnections. This rationality of import, therefore, is distinctive insofar as it is neither instrumental nor epistemic and so is intelligible neither in terms of specifying how to get the world to fit our conations nor in terms of specifying how to get our cognitions to fit the world.

Second, in articulating an account of human practical reason, I have provided an account of how we can exploit this rationality of import in controlling both our motivations and our felt evaluations, potentially coming to have both freedom of the will and freedom of the heart. For, by identifying in judgment reasons for acting, we thereby exert rational pressure on our felt evaluations and motivations to conform.

Type
Chapter
Information
Emotional Reason
Deliberation, Motivation, and the Nature of Value
, pp. 199 - 244
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2001

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  • Deliberation about value
  • Bennett W. Helm, Franklin and Marshall College, Pennsylvania
  • Book: Emotional Reason
  • Online publication: 19 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511520044.007
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  • Deliberation about value
  • Bennett W. Helm, Franklin and Marshall College, Pennsylvania
  • Book: Emotional Reason
  • Online publication: 19 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511520044.007
Available formats
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Deliberation about value
  • Bennett W. Helm, Franklin and Marshall College, Pennsylvania
  • Book: Emotional Reason
  • Online publication: 19 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511520044.007
Available formats
×