Content area
Full text
Philos Stud (2014) 167:221235 DOI 10.1007/s11098-012-0086-2
What is a reason to act?
Kieran Setiya
Published online: 1 January 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012
Abstract Argues for a conception of reasons as premises of practical reasoning. This conception is applied to questions about ignorance, advice, enabling conditions, ought, and evidence.
Keywords Action Advice Ought Reasons Reasoning Evidence
A reason for action is a premise of practical reasoning. When someone acts on the ground that p, she reasons to action or intention from the proposition that p. Some authors reserve the use of reasoning for calculative activity, for thought that invokes normative concepts, or for the kind of deliberation that is itself intentional. None of these restrictions will operate here. In our articially inclusive sense, any instance of doing something for a reason counts as reasoning. More broadly, practical reasoning incorporates any form of thought to which assessments of practical rationality apply.
These observations speak to what some call explanatory or motivating reasons.1 This essay is not primarily concerned with them, but with normative or justifying reasons, considerations that count in favour of action. Normative reasons bear a different relation to practical reasoning. When a fact is a reason for A to / in the normative or justifying sense, it need not be a reason for which she acts; she may not even be aware of it. But the fact is a premise for sound reasoning to a desire or motivation to / whose further premises are available to A.2
K. Setiya (&)
Department of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA e-mail: [email protected]
1 For conicting theories, see Davidson 1963 on primary reasons; Smith 1987, Dancy 2000, and Alvarez
2010.
2 I assume that normative reasons are facts in that they are true propositions, not worldly states that correspond to them: normative reasons must be as nely individuated as the premises of practical reasoning.
123
222 K. Setiya
This picture has been developed in different ways and in different idioms. Introducing a collection of essays on practical reason published in 1978, Raz appealed to practical inference: The premises of a valid practical inference if they are all true (or justied) state a reason (p. 5).3 For Williams (1979), the pivot was deliberation, which...