Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- I Action, freedom, responsibility
- 1 How free does the will need to be?
- 2 Voluntary acts and responsible agents
- 3 Internal reasons and the obscurity of blame
- 4 Moral incapacity
- 5 Acts and omissions, doing and not doing
- 6 Nietzsche's minimalist moral psychology
- II Philosophy, evolution, and the human sciences
- III Ethics
- Index
3 - Internal reasons and the obscurity of blame
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- I Action, freedom, responsibility
- 1 How free does the will need to be?
- 2 Voluntary acts and responsible agents
- 3 Internal reasons and the obscurity of blame
- 4 Moral incapacity
- 5 Acts and omissions, doing and not doing
- 6 Nietzsche's minimalist moral psychology
- II Philosophy, evolution, and the human sciences
- III Ethics
- Index
Summary
Internal reasons
I have argued elsewhere for a view that can be rather roughly expressed by saying: there are only internal reasons for action. A number of discussions has led me to think there is something about this view, or the ways I have so far found to express it, that easily leads to misunderstanding. Here I shall first try to explain, as well as I can, what the view is, and I shall then apply it to the question of blame.
What are the truth conditions for statements of the form ‘A has a reason to Φ’, where A is a person and ‘Φ’ is some verb of action? What are we saying when we say someone has a reason to do something? Consider the following formulation: A could reach the conclusion that he should Φ (or a conclusion to Φ) by a sound deliberative route from the motivations that he has in his actual motivational set – that is, the set of his desires, evaluations, attitudes, projects, and so on. (The agent's actual motivational set I shall label, as I have done elsewhere, with the unlovely abbreviation ‘S’.) The internalist view of reasons for action is that this formulation provides at least a necessary condition of its being true that A has a reason to Φ: A has a reason to Φ only if he could reach the conclusion to Φ by a sound deliberative route from the motivations he already has.
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- Making Sense of HumanityAnd Other Philosophical Papers 1982–1993, pp. 35 - 45Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
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