Rationality and Responsibility

'Reason, voluntariness and moral responsibility' argues against the theory of responsibility and blame of T.M. Scanlon, that reduces moral responsibility to a form of rational appraisability for our psychological attitudes generally - as opposed to leaving it a distinctive kind of responsibility for how we act, dependent on a power to determine for ourselves which actions we perform. Scanlon's theory is shown to ignore obvious and central features of blame; and to be the result of a theory of action defended by Hobbes, Davidson and others, and widely held in English-language philosophy - a 'voluntariness-based' theory that action is by its nature an expression and effect of prior motivating pro attitudes to its performance. To accommodate our ordinary understanding of blame and moral responsibility, we need instead to adopt a 'practical reason-based' theory of action: intentional action consists in a distinctively practical mode of exercising reason.

2023

In this paper, I provide an answer to the question “what is it for a reason to be the reason for which a belief is held?” After arguing against the causal account of the reason-for-which connection, I present what I call the rationalization account, according to which a reason R a subject S has for a belief P is the reason for which S holds P just in case R is the premise in S’s rationalization for P, where the argument from R to P becomes S’s rationalization in virtue of her endorsing it. In order to bring explicitly into view the version of the rationalization account I aim to argue for, I draw two distinctions, one between occurrent and dispositional endorsement and the other between personal and public endorsement. I show that the version of the rationalization account thus clarified receives intuitive support from various cases and survives some formidable objections that might be tempting to level against it.

1995

Journal of Ethics, 2017

According to a guiding idea in metaethics, there is a necessary link between the concept of normative reasons and the concept of practical rationality. This notion brings up two issues: The exact nature of this link, and the nature of rationality. With regard to the first issue, the debate is dominated by a certain standard claim. With regard to the second issue, the debate is dominated by what I will refer to as ‘subjectivism’ and ‘objectivism’ about rationality, where the latter is assumed to be a necessary condition for the existence of categorical reasons. In this paper, it is argued that subjectivism is able capture an ordinary, non-technical, sense of ‘rational’ whereas objectivism is not. The basic reason is that objectivism fails to account for the essential connection between rationality, malfunctioning, and rational criticism. This means that we face a puzzle: While objectivism appears to be a necessary condition for the existence of categorical reasons, it fails to capture a central sense of ‘rational’. It is finally argued that this puzzle can be solved by abandoning the standard claim about the link between reasons and rationality.

Disputatio, 2002

Political Studies Review, 2018

Rationality is an enduring topic of interest across the disciplines and has become even more so, given the current crises that are unfolding in our society. The four books reviewed here, which are written by academics working in economics, political science, political theory and philosophy, provide an interdisciplinary engagement with the idea of rationality and the way it has shaped the institutional frameworks and global political economy of our time. Rational choice theory has certainly proved to be a useful analytic tool in certain contexts, and instrumental reason has been a key tenet of human progress in several periods of history, including the industrial revolution and the modernity that emerged in the nineteenth century. Given the complexity of our current challenges, however, is it time to ask whether this paradigm might be better complemented by more holistic and heterodox approaches? Hindmoor A and Taylor TY (2015) Rational Choice (Political Analysis), 2nd edn. London; N...

Oxford Scholarship Online, 2017

Philosophical/epistemic theories of rationality differ over the role of judgment in rational argumentation. According to the “classical model” of rationality, rational justification is a matter of conformity with explicit rules or principles. Critics of the classical model, such as Harold Brown and Trudy Govier, argue that the model is subject to insuperable difficulties. They propose, instead, that rationality be understood, ultimately, in terms of judgment rather than rules. In this paper I respond to Brown’s and Govier’s criticisms of the classical model, and to the “judgment model” they propose in its place. I argue that that model is unable both to distinguish between rational and irrational judgment and to avoid recourse to rules, and is therefore inadequate as an account of rationality, critical thinking, or argument appraisal. More positively, I argue that an adequate account of rationality must include a place for both rules and judgment.

Philosophica, 1974

At first sight there seem to be four different possible approaches to the problem of rationality. First of all, one may study those philosophical schools or those cultural movements that are to be considered as defenders of "rationality", in comparison with schools that are to be considered as defenders of "irrationality". The schools will be selected either on the basis of their self-characterization or on the basis of the current opinion during some period or by means of one or another criterion for rationality. A second kind of approach consists in identifying rationality with some phenomenon or other, and then studying the properties of this phenomenon. Examples of such phenomena are (some part of) scientific praxis, the praxis corresponding to a certain philosophy of science, etc. In the third place, one may study the meaning of 'rationality', 'rational', etc. within natural language or within some specific part of it. All three kinds of approaches start either from a definition of rationality or from some actual use of the term. A fourth kind of approach, viz. to search for "justified rationality", will be followed in this paper. The problem may be described roughly as follows: Under what circumstances and in what way may one justifiedly make use of one's "reason"? This question is vague in the first place because the meaning of 'justifiedly' is unclear. By 'justify' I understand neither "build up from nothing" nor "build up on the basis of some or other kind of certainty which is not subject to criticism". As will become clear later on I rather believe with Otto Neurath /1933/ that "We are like sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea, never able to dismantle it in dry-dock and to reconstruct it there out of the best materials". The notion of justification is linked to that of rationality itself, and hence

2014

In contemporary philosophy and social science the features of rationality play a new significant role in the theory of mind, language, action, decision theory and in questions of cross cultural understanding. The approaches do not conceive of rationality as a subjective a priori principle of reasoning; they present a different attitude towards questions of conceptualizing rationality, and this is a first step towards contextualized understanding of rationality. We can only grasp what rationality means in this way. Rationality is not given but is rather a result of our conceptualizing and a matter of contextualization and this is also a question of rationalization of means for our personal and our collective goals. The reader presents an outline on contemporary orientations about the subject of understanding "rationality" along the main topics in philosophy, theory of language, and social science. Topics are radical interpretation, naturalized epistemology and normativity; intentions and the social aspects of rationality; and concepts of explanation, justification and reality.

The paper sets forth from an account of human rationality that identifies rational action (as opposed to what we do instinctively, unwittingly, thoughtlessly, impulsively, etc.) as reasoned action; as action undertaken for a reason. A person has reason to act, it will argue, whenever a state of affairs strikes one as sufficiently lacking, wanting, flawed, under-developed, problematic, deficient, or in any other way wrong. to warrant that person’s intervention. Hence the inherent connection between rationality and criticism. Here, in our unique and general capacity to be knowingly motivated to respond to perceived failings and self-failings, lie, I shall argue, the rudimentary universal elements of human sapience, and hence, coupled to our linguistic capacity, the basis for a generative account of human rationality. However, the fundamental coupling of rationality and criticism is an empty formal shell as it stands, that aquires its motivating force and content from the radically diverse normative systems by which variously committed individuals and societies judge particular situations to be at odds. As with language and human anthropology more generally, the universally shared, potentially generative thin “grammar” of human rationality can only be actualized through the refracting lens of the specifically thick normative vocabularies it meets. However, and this will be the talk’s main claim, human rationality harbors an additional and essentially second-order shared deep-structure that pertains to a different dimension of human sapience. Unlike the linguistic and social realities studied by generative anthropology, human rationality, I shall argue, is not only actualized in and by the normative vocabularies it meets, it is uniquely constrained by them. This is because the norms by which we rationally act would themselves seem immune to rational assessment, for the simple reason that it is by means of them that one rationally assesses! – a problem that has virtually stumped the entire philosophical community. The way out, I shall argue, is to appreciate the potentially transformative force of external criticism. In the normatively ambivalating capacity of discursive engagement with trusted critics committed differently from ourselves, I locate the second-order, potentially generative universal of human rationality at it utmost, intriguingly embodied, not in what we linguistically share, but in the very cultural diversity of our normative vocabularies and ability to converse with others.