Reasons I Have vs Reasons There Are

School is squeezing my time again.

Updates: I have written a short paper revising Sharon Smith's Darwinian Dilemma and published it on the documents page of the Desirism site under the title "Revised Darwinian Dilemma".

In other news, I am in a discussion of sorts with my thesis adviser concerning desire-based theories of action.

As can be expected, I am all for desire-based theories of action.

However, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has several entries concerning reasons for action which raise objections to this theory.

I argue that they present desire-based theories correctly. They fail to distinguish between the desires that an agent has and the desires that there are.

Specifically, I wrote to her to express the following:

Authors seem to switch back and forth between versions of the proposition “Agent has a reason to do X” and “There is a reason for Agent to do X” almost as if they take these to be synonymous.

For example, the SEP entry on the "Internal and External Reasons" defines the "Humean Theory of Reasons" as:

The Humean Theory of Reasons (HTR): If there is a reason for someone to do something, then she must have some desire that would be served by her doing it.

This definition strikes me as conflating two distinct claims. Rather, shouldn't it state:

The Humean Theory of Reasons (HTR): If there is a reason for someone to do something, then there must be some desire that would be served by her doing it, and If she has a reason for someone to do something, then she must have some desire that would be served by her doing it.

This properly distinguishing "having a reason" from "there is a reason".

The distinction between the reasons that an agent has and the reasons that there are is the same as the distinction between the money that she has and the money that there is.

In “Internal and External Reasons,” Bernard Williams makes an explicit reference to the distinct phrases, “has a reason” and “there is a reason.” However, he interprets this as a rough approximation of the distinction between internal and external reasons, rather than as a distinction between the internal reasons the agent has and the internal reasons that exist (that other people have).

Of course, the "internal reasons that others have" are "external to the agent" in a sense, but not in the sense Williams objects to. You can't go straight from "Agent A has an aversion to pain" to "Agent B has a(n external) reason not to cause Agent A to experience pain." However, you can go from Agent A has an aversion to pain" to "Agent A has a reason to cause (endorse/promote) Agent B to have a(n internal) reason not to cause Agent A to experience pain."

So, now, we have a distinction between the reasons (motives) that an agent has, and the reasons (motives) people generally have reason to endorse/promote.

I keep wondering if I am missing some basic explanation as to why philosophers treat "has a reason" and "there is a reason" as if they are two ways of saying the same thing.

I found the same object of confusion in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on "Justifying, Motivational, and Explanatory Reasons".

It jumps from “Agent has a reason to do X” to “There is a reason for Agent to do X” as if they mean the same thing.

The article states:

"Roughly, someone’s having a reason to act requires their having some motivation that would be served by acting in the way favoured by the putative reason."

But then asserts that there is a problem here.

But desire-based accounts fare less well in accommodating another central claim about normative reasons. For it seems equally plausible that there are reasons (for instance, moral reasons) that apply to agents regardless of their motivations.

Here, again, I see a move from “having a reason” in the first quote to “there are reasons” in the second that I simply do not understand.

As a desire-based theorist, it is obvious that the reasons (motives) that I have are not the only reasons (motives) that there are. I see myself surrounded by people who have their own desire-based reasons. And the desire-based reasons that others have are desire-based reasons to endorse or condemn the reasons that I have.

This leads to the same distinction I noted in my previous email.

(1) Having a reason to act requires having a motivation that would be served by acting in the way favoured by the putative reason.

(2) There being a reason for me to act requires there being a reason that would be served by acting in the way favoured by the putative reason.

And the reasons that "there are" are reasons that others have to encourage or discourage the development of the reasons that "I have".

This comes out of Hume, who argued for evaluating the motives (passions, character traits) that an agent has according to the reasons that there are for encouraging or discouraging them - pleasing to self, useful to self, pleasing to others, and useful to others.

So . . . what am I missing, if I may ask, that explains this jump for "reasons that I have" to "reasons that there are"?

We'll see what kind of response I get.