The secondary application

Let us turn to the secondary application now. It claims that if desire does not add to the reasons for doing the thing desired, nor does it add to the reasons for doing what subserves the thing desired (and, as noted, one way of doing this is by doing the thing desired, so we would get the primary application back as well). On the face of it, this application looks implausible. Take the extreme case when one has no reason to φ. The application says that because the agent desires to φ and because ψ-ing makes it easier for him to φ, he has reason to ψ. Dancy gives the following example. (Dancy 2000b, 37) Imagine that some shameful act that would immediately bring the agent’s marriage to an end but which he still has some desire to do. It seems perverse, Dancy suggests, “to claim that my desire to φ does add to the stock of reasons for ing just because ψ-ing subserves φ-ing, and so gives me good reason to do something because it subserves doing something that there is every reason not to do.”

There are two ways to get around the implausibility charge. One can claim that, just as with the previous application, here too the application only covers certain cases. The problem

72 This is not exactly so. She does give some sort of a reply. She says that “In so far as doing what one feels like is relevant to what one should do, ‘feeling like it’ can rationalize as an independent reason in its own right, not as a reason that is conditional on the other reasons being of trivial importance.” See Chang (2004), pp. 85. I must confess I don’t understand this claim. If desires are relevant only because they are made relevant by higher-order reasons, then they are not independent reasons, full stop. I can’t find anything in Chang’s remark that would meaningfully question this thesis.

Attila Tanyi, THESIS, Page 134

with this suggestion is that examples can nowhere be found in the literature, so there is nothing to evaluate (perhaps this is because the two applications are conflated and the same examples are supposed to back both applications). The second way to defend the application is by invoking the so far neglected first version of the Model, the idea that Dancy’s Advice Point articulates. To repeat, it goes like this. (Ibid. 34) What the Model claims, Dancy says, is that reason-attributions are like giving advice to a friend: perhaps his aim makes no sense by my light (even, perhaps, by his light too: so it is just an urge), I tell him what he should do given what he aims at. This reading of the Model, one might claim, would give us the second application; in fact, it would prove the truth of the application over the entire range of desires.

It would not. From Chapter I we know how the Advice Point comes about. We take the instrumental principle understood as a consistency requirement on human action and desire, then claim that there is reason to be instrumentally rational, and finally accept what it seems to come with such a claim, namely bootstrapping reasons into existence.⁷³ Here is the reasoning in more detail. Very roughly, the instrumental principle says that if you desire some prospect, rationality requires you to do whatever subserves that desire. If there is reason to conform to the principle, it follows that if you desire some prospect, you have reason to do whatever subserves that desire.

Fully spelled out, the claim is this: the fact that φ-ing subserves your desire that p constitutes a reason for you to φ, if you desire that p. And this is just what the second application needs.

There are two ways to refute this argument. One is to endorse the claim that reason is understood in terms of rationality and deny the reverse option on which the argument is partly based. But I myself don’t accept this claim; moreover, charity to the Model also dictates that we don’t take such an ‘easy’ way out. This leaves us with the option of rejecting bootstrapping. I see

73 We should note that there are other problems with this claim. These too were mentioned in Chapter I. The most important is where exactly the reason(s) to be instrumentally rational comes from. See Broome (2005), Kolodny (2005), section 3, and Dancy (forthcoming b) on this question.

Attila Tanyi, THESIS, Page 135

two problems here. One is that bootstrapping is not necessarily an attractive prospect even for advocates of the Model. Recall the discussion in Chapter I. Just as bootstrapping can lead to self-justificatory beliefs, it can also lead to self-justifying desires. This is a point Broome and Quinn makes in the argument I examine in Appendix III. They want to say that this makes the Model self-defeating but, as I point out there, they need be right about this because it is not clear whether advocates of this version of the Model would not be willing to bite the bullet. Advocates of the other two versions of the Model would certainly resist the idea of self-justifying desires since they do rule out certain desires as reason-giving. But it is not at all clear that advocates of the Advice Point would also protest. After all, their original idea, put in terms of rationality, also has the consequence that all desires count as normative for the agent. So I suggest that we set this issue aside here.

Even so, there is a second problem. We just have to employ the general strategy, known from Chapter I, against bootstrapping. In the present case it looks like this. (Hare 1971; Darwall 1983, 15-17; Dancy 2000b, 42-3; Broome 1999, section 6; 2004, 29; Greenspan 1975; Hill 1992, 23-4; Blackburn 1998, 242-3) What the instrumental principle claims is that one ought not to desire some prospect and be unwilling to do whatever subserves that desire. Since this is a disjunctive, wide-scope ought of the form “You ought, if you desire that p, to do what subserves that desire”, there are two ways of satisfying it: one can do so by doing what subserves the desire or by giving up the desire. And from this complex obligation one cannot detach a simple obligation to act: there is no reason to do what subserves the desire. What reason dictates is to do what subserves the desire, if one has the desire, or not to do what subserves the desire but then give up the desire. The second application is in trouble again.

From Chapter I we know what could be the possible responses to this argument. The option of denying that detachment is indeed impossible I don’t treat here since I have said

Attila Tanyi, THESIS, Page 136

everything I can about this matter back in Chapter I. The other option, namely Kolodny’s argument is more interesting, although in this case too I cannot provide a detailed discussion of the issues the argument raises. Kolodny’s argument, recall, has the following structure: at least certain rational requirements are what he calls process-requirements and at least some of these requirements are also narrow-scope. Since I have explained these terms in Chapter I, I am not going to repeat this explanation here. Our question, then, is whether the particular requirement as encoded in the instrumental principle is also a narrow-scope process requirement. I don’t want to question that the requirement can be given a process reading, I think the issue here is rather whether requirements of rationality involve process requirements in general. This again is a question I discussed in Chapter I, trying to show that Kolodny may be wrong on this point. So this is one thing. As to the second part of the claim, i.e. the claim that the requirement in question is a narrow-scope requirement, it is worth noting that Kolodny himself does not take the requirement to be a “simple narrow-scope requirement’. (Kolodny 2005, 541) What exactly this statement means requires further examination before we can decide what the truth of the matter is.

Finally, there is Kolodny’s own explanation of the normativity of rationality. The Transparency Account, as he calls it, also explains rationality in terms of reasons but without bootstrapping. Again, we know the story from Chapter I. Kolodny’s idea (shared and, according to Kolodny, further developed by Scanlon) is that all rational requirements can be derived from two core requirements. These are “If one believes that one ought to have A, then one is rationally required to have A” and “If one believes that one lacks sufficient reason to have A, then on is rationally required not to have A.” (Ibid. 557) Kolodny rightly points out that his account does not lead to bootstrapping because it does not claim that there is reason to be rational. It is called the Transparency Account exactly because it derives the normativity of rationality not from

Attila Tanyi, THESIS, Page 137

reason, but only from what it seems to the agent is a reason: from an appearance, not from a reality. Of course, as I pointed out in Chapter I and as Kolodny himself admits, the success of the account hinges on an argument, not yet provided that indeed all rational requirements, including the one the instrumental principle articulates can be derived from the core requirements. If such an argument can be provided, and Kolodny strongly believes it can be (in fact, he refers to Scanlon ms as having answered most of the problems such a view encounters), then even if the instrumental principle does not give us a wide-scope requirement, bootstrapping, hence the second application still won’t follow.⁷⁴

Recently, however, Stephen Darwall has come up with a suggestion that might offer some hope for the second application. (Darwall 2001, 144-51; 2003, 440-2) Before ending our discussion, we should consider this argument. Darwall’s idea is that integrity and self-respect can enable the agent’s desires to provide reasons for acting within the constraints of a general ban on detachment. He gives two examples. One concerns an agent with the deeply held moral conviction that abortion lacks moral justification and who now has to decide whether to have an abortion or not. Darwall claims that even if one holds the opposite moral view one should, when asked for advice, say that if the agent really feels that way, then he has a reason not to have the abortion - and this is because having the abortion would violate his integrity. The other example is about a middle-aged daughter whose parents are trying to get her to eat broccoli, which she hates. In this case, Darwall says, she can claim that she has a reason not to eat broccoli on grounds of self-respect – for not allowing herself not to eat broccoli would be a failure to respect herself as a free and equal person.

74 This may sound mysterious. At the point where Kolodny makes this statement he gives two examples: one is the instrumental principle, the other is the requirement of logical consistency. But he only takes up the case of the latter, arguing that it can be accounted for a disjunction of three narrow-scope requirements, and says nothing about the instrumental principle. See Kolodny (2005), pp. 541-2. Hence follows my statement in the text.

Attila Tanyi, THESIS, Page 138

Observe, first, that Darwall’s wording of his claim is misleading. He suggests that there are some desires, which get exempted from the ban on detachment on grounds of self-respect and integrity. In fact, his reference to integrity, especially the example about moral conviction, may suggest that this happens because these desires are so crucial that they cannot be given up. They form the agent’s deepest convictions and ends and therefore abolishing them would put an end to the agent’s personality. But this is certainly not what Darwall has in mind. First of all, it would go against the main thrust of his argument. As his second example demonstrates, his point is a general one that applies to all ordinary desires and aversions. It is that there is a fundamental difference between theoretical and practical reason. Unlike the theoretical sphere where we can discount the agent’s perspective, i.e. give up certain beliefs, in the practical realm we are called to being true to ourselves and others in ways that can make our desires to be a source of normative reasons. Of course, as a matter of fact it might be true that the agent cannot give up certain ends of his. But this sort of psychological incapacity, as Bernard Williams has pointed out, abolishes the normativity of those ends. (Williams 1981c, 128-9; 1995b, 53) Since having such ends allows no room for failure – one cannot fail to do what one is irresistibly driven to do – they make one’s reason depend on what one actually does or will do. And this, arguably, would abolish their reason-giving potential.

I conclude that Darwall’s claim should be taken to be a wholly general point, one that doesn’t reject the ban on detachment on the basis of incapacity to give up some end. Instead, it claims that giving deliberative weight to our desires is a form of respect for ourselves as independent persons; hence we have reason to do what subserves them even if we otherwise share the ban on detachment. But this much wouldn’t do. In his reply, Dancy puts the point well:

someone accepting the ban can accommodate claims about integrity and self-respect by regarding them as grounds for the otherwise disjunctive, wide-scope oughts we are concerned with. (Dancy

Attila Tanyi, THESIS, Page 139

2003, 474-5) That is, we can say that the agent ought not to have an abortion because that would violate his integrity; and the daughter ought not to eat the broccoli because that would be a way of disrespecting herself. But the ‘ought’ invoked here is still a disjunctive, wide-scope ought and the ban on detachment is still in place: the Advice Point gains no significance leaving the second application intact. What we get is only a proposed reason why we should conform to a particular requirement of rationality and this is only the beginning of the story, not the end of it.