CARING AND NECESSITY

1. In their discussions of issues concerning the nature of human action and its essential determinants, and also in their inquiries into the structure of practical reasoning, philosophers typically draw upon a more or less standard and rather limited conceptual repertoire. The most familiar item in that repertoire is the indispensable, ubiquitous, and protean notion of what people want, or – synonymously, at least in the somewhat procrustean usage that I shall adopt – the notion of what they desire. This notion is deployed routinely, and often rather carelessly, in a variety of different roles. It is important that these roles be carefully differentiated and severally understood. Otherwise, the significance of some fundamental aspects of our lives will tend to be severely blurred. In this connection, I think it may be useful to extend the standard repertoire by articulating certain other notions which, although they too are both familiar and philosophically significant, have been to some extent neglected.

2. What is the point of practical reasoning? One natural and appealingly plausible answer is that people engage in practical reasoning, or deliberate, in order to determine how to attain the goals they desire to reach: a person wants to get certain things, and so he tries to figure out – through the use of practical reason – how best to get them. Now I do not wish to suggest that this account of the matter is incorrect.