Thinking Clearly about Reasons

Why practical reasons for belief are like reasons for chocolate

I recall being baffled, as an undergraduate student, by the debates over epistemic vs practical reasons for belief: “If the fate of the world depended on it, who could deny that having the world-saving belief was more important than having an epistemically rational belief?” I only later realized that of course nobody does deny that. My mistake was thinking that reasons must be markers of importance, when that’s only true of specifically practical reasons. To call an attitude reasonable, or supported by normative reasons, is not necessarily to say that you all-things-considered recommend it or are glad that it obtains. It’s a much more specific and limited form of positive assessment. More like: “the agent’s rational processes for forming and maintaining judgment-sensitive attitudes of that sort are functioning well.” This could be a bad thing! But it’s usually good, and the exceptions are sufficiently weird and rare that it makes sense for us to evaluate people’s rational capacities and responsiveness with a strong presumption that responding appropriately to (even non-practical) reasons is a good thing.

Below the fold, I’ll share an excerpt from Beyond Right and Wrong (my book manuscript in progress) which I think makes a compelling case for seeing so-called “practical reasons for belief” as no such thing. (Instead, they are better understood as reasons for wanting to have the belief: they indicate what would constitute rational ends or desires, not rational ways of believing.) I don’t like to get too hung up on terminology, of course, but some ways of carving up conceptual space are genuinely clearer and more illuminating than others. In what follows, I introduce a distinction between the audience and object of a reason that I find especially clarifying.

The tasty chocolate furnishes us with reasons for desire and action. Are there also “reasons for chocolate”? (To do what? Get eaten?)

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