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.