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Reasons for Acting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2010

Jon Wheatley
Jon Wheatley
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
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Extract

It is occasionally desirable to take an overview of quite a wide area of philosophy: what one loses in detail one gains in perspective. I follow this procedure in the present paper. Ia m concerned with the whole area where we indulge in practical deliberation, or where we attempt to justify some course of action we propose to follow or have followed. To do this I investigate the nature of a reason for acting and how such reasons can enter into an attempt to justify some act. It should be noticed that just having reasons for acting in some way does not entail that acting in that way is justifiable. In what follows, I speak first of reasons, later of justifications.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 7 , Issue 4 , March 1969 , pp. 553 - 567
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1969

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References

1 In Analysis, March 1967 I tried to define this non-contingent relationship exactly (I called it engagement). I also gave, what I have avoided discussing here, what exactly it is tha t the relationship holds between.

2 There is one minor set of exceptions to this formulation. Where à reason for doing A is requested, to say “I intended (planned, proposed, etc.) to do A” is not to give a reason for doing A (though t o say “I intended (planned, proposed, etc.) to do B” may well be). This is the case because, in discussing doing A, the notion of intention is built in ; unless A was done intentionally there is no necessity for having reasons for doing A at all. Thus we must exclude from possible reasons for doing A statements using AC-words where that the AC-word applies is part of (in the full sense) doing A.

3 There is an ambiguity in the symbolism here: are we talking about ‘X doing A’ or about ‘A getting done as a consequence of what X did’: it makes a difference to some wives whether a present was bought by their husband or their husband's secretary. To work this into the general form is complex and theoretically uninteresting.

4 This also seems to be the difference between a strong and a weak reason: not something in the reason (the fact) but a relation between the reason, the action and the other reasons for or against the action. In general, a good reason s i one which might be decisive in endeavouring to justify an act. Thus disliking someone is a good reason for avoiding him but a poor reason for killing him.

5 I shall not argue the thesis that there are no true indefeasible principles here, though I take it to be correct. The way to show the thesis false, if it is to be shown false, is to produce a contrary case. The only plausible candidate in the literature is some variant on:

Treat different people differently only on the basis of relevant reasons.

This perfectly true statement about the conceptual structure embodied in our talk about actions (I say ‘statement’ because it is surely not the sort of thing we would normally call a principle at all) is fully encompassed in what is said in this paper about practical arguments.