Introduction to 'The Many Moral Rationalisms', OUP

Principia, 2019

In this paper I will analyze John McDowell's broad account of practical rationality and moral reasons, which he displays mainly in his articles "Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?" (1978) and "Might There Be External Reasons?" (1995). My main aim is to argue that from a philosophical perspective, no less than from an empirical one, McDowell's account of practical rationality is not a realistic one. From a philosophical point of view, I will argue that his intellectualist account is not convincing; and if we consider his virtue-ethical ideal of practical rationality in light of the model of human cognition, we also realize that moral behavior is not immune to cognitive biases and does not always flow from robust traits of character like virtues. At the same time, this puts at stake his strong thesis of moral autonomy-the idea that with the 'onset of reason' moral beings are no longer determined by 'first nature' features.

Ratio

Moral Rationalism is the view that if an act is morally required then it is what there is most reason to do. It is often assumed that the truth of Moral Rationalism is dependent on some version of The Overridingness Thesis, the view that moral reasons override nonmoral reasons. However, as Douglas Portmore has pointed out, the two can come apart; we can accept Moral Rationalism without accepting any version of The Overridingness Thesis. Nevertheless, The Overridingness Thesis serves as one of two possible explanations for Moral Rationalism. In this paper I will investigate which of these two explanations a moral rationalist should accept. I will argue that when we properly attend to the form of Moral Rationalism supported by the intuitions that motivate the view, we are left with no reason to accept The Overridingness Thesis.

2010

In this thesis I explore the impact and arguments that were based on recent discoveries in empirical moral psychology on the explicit and implicit ideas of philosophical moral rationalism.

Journal of Value Inquiry, 2017

Philosophical Quarterly, 2016

It is standard, both in the philosophical literature and in ordinary parlance, to assume that one can fall short of responding to all one’s moral reasons without being irrational. Yet when we turn to epistemic reasons, the situation could not be more different. Most epistemologists take it as axiomatic that for a belief to be rational is for it to be well-supported by epistemic reasons. We find ourselves with a striking asymmetry, then, between the moral and epistemic domains concerning what is taken for granted about whether failures to respond to reasons are failures of rationality. My aim in this paper is to interrogate this asymmetry, and ultimately to argue that the asymmetry is groundless. Instead, I will offer an error theory to explain the asymmetry in intuitions (away). This error theory suggests that we should amend the conventional wisdom about the relationship between epistemic reasons and rationality.

2012

What can a moral realist say about why we should take morality seriously and about the relation between morality and rationality? I take off from Christine Korsgaard's criticism of moral realism on this score. The aim is to achieve an understanding of the relation between moral and rational properties and of the role of practical deliberation on a realist view. I argue that the justification for being concerned with rational and moral normative properties may not be an aspect of our minds to which we have access. I argue against a view that gives automatic pride of place to the rational properties of our mind by drawing attention to valuable non-rational modes of thought such as creative, imaginative and instinctive thought. Thus the value of taking account of rationality is contingent on its benefits. But this is not why we should be taking account of morality.

Philosophical Books, 2006

2001

order to decide what to do. As a result of this ill-advised assumption, the moral agent is alienated from a whole wealth of methods of decision-making that I claim are, under certain conditions, morally pennissible or even, more controversially, morally compulsory. Contrary to that, I believe that the substantive moral rules that apply to decision-making processes are rather more complex. The fact that so much of contemporary practical philosophy assumes that reasoning is always the best way to make decisions is at least partly due to the lack of a clear distinction between reasoning as a way that leads to the morally correct action and reasoning as a means to know what is the morally correct action. The failure to understand the distinction between those two modalities of reasoning processes blurs the perception of the peculiar moral rules that apply to the use of reasoning as a tool of moral decision-making. My claim that there is a complex relation between the morality of actions and the morality of decision-making methods is not to be confused with the much more familiar claim that the rationality (in the sense of means-end calculation1) of decision-making is independent of the morality of the action to be performed. What is at stake is the morality of decision-making processes and their relation to the morality of the actions performed as a result of the decision-making processes. This complex relation is a recurring theme in many of the arguments presented below, notably in the first and the fourth chapters. However, the fact that there is a distinction between the morality of decision-making and the morality of actions does not imply that there is no relation between them. Indeed, I shall try to explain this connection in chapter four, in doing so, I expect to clarify the moral relevance ofthe distinction. The alienation between the moral agent and her decision-making might take yet another form. Namely, it might take the form of an argument that tries to justify the thesis that some sorts of rational decision-making, notably public decision-making, should be regarded as 'non-comprehensive' or 'non-plenary'. I use those expressions to refer to processes of decision-making in which the agent should not use all the reasons that could 1 Pursuing this sort of 'rationality', means to engage into what Habennas 'pragmatic discourse' which, as he pointed out, is only one sort of practical discourse (see his Between Facts and Norms Translated by William Rehg, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996, p. 151-168, see also his On the Pragmatic, the Ethical and the Moral Employments of Practical Reason in Habermas, Jurgen Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics (Transl. by Ciaran P. Cronin) Cambrige/Mass: MIT Press, 1993, pp. 1-17.