Williams on Internal and External Reasons - Part 4

The following two statements appear in Bernard Williams, in “Internal and External Reasons” (in Moral Luck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, 101–13),

(iv) internal reason statements can be discovered in deliberative reasoning. 

and

the deliberative process can add new actions for which there are internal reasons, just as it can also add new internal reasons for given actions. 

There is an important difference between what these two statements are claiming. The first says that, through deliberative reasoning, we can discover internal reasons for an action or relationships between an action and internal reasons. The second says that, through deliberative reasoning, we can create new internal reasons or new relationships.

It is one thing to say that, through deliberative reasoning, we can discover internal reasons. It is quite another to say that, through deliberative reasoning, we can create new internal reasons.

Perhaps I am being uncharitable. Perhaps we should simply interpret the second passage cited above as follows and go on about our business:

the deliberative process can add to our awareness of new actions for which there are internal reasons, just as it can also add to our awareness of new internal reasons for given actions. 

We would then have a statement that is consistent with this passage:

Reflection may lead the agent to see that some belief is false, and hence to realize that he has in fact no reason to do something he thought he had reason to do. 

However, Williams then says:

In his unaided deliberative reason, or encouraged by the persuasions of others, he may come to have some more concrete sense of what would be involved, and lose his desire for it, just as, positively, the imagination can create new possibilities and new desires. 

Again, Williams is talking about deliberative reasoning or the persuasions of others not only cause an agent to realize relationships between actions and reasons for action that she was previously unaware of. He is saying that deliberative reasoning and the persuasion of others have the capacity to literally create and destroy desires.

There is a sense in which this is true.

We begin with a distinction between what an agent desires for its own sake (as an end), and what the agent desires as a means to something else. "Desires-as-means" are bundles of desires-as-ends and beliefs. Because deliberative reasoning and the persuasions of others have the power to influence beliefs, they have the power to alter bundles of desires-as-ends and beliefs. That is to say, they have the power to create or destroy desires-as-means.

However, the reasons for action - that which actually holds the reason to pursue the means - comes from the desires-as-ends. Desires-as-ends are outside of the scope of deliberative reasoning and the persuasions of others.

I think we can clear some of this up by introducing two distinctions that seem to be being ignored here.

The first is the distinction between revealing a reason for action (revealing a relationship between an internal reason and an action) versus creating a reason.

The second is the classic distinction between desires-as-ends and desires-as-means.

Deliberative reasoning can reveal relationships between desires-as-ends and action. Thus, it can create and destroy desires-as-means. However, it cannot create or destroy desires-as-ends. It can only reveal the relationships between the desires-as-ends and possible actions that already exist.