The Reasons We Should Have

Somebody is wrong on the Internet.

That “somebody” is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The error occurs in several articles concerning “reasons for action,” in which it is assumed that desire-based theories cannot make use of a distinction between ‘Agent has a reason to do X” and “There is a reason for Agent to do X.” Instead, they contain the assumption that the desire-based theorist must provide the same analysis to both phrases. They show or assert that this fails and conclude that the problem resides in desire-based theories of value.

In my previous post, I gave two examples of this. One occurs in Reasons for Action: Internal vs. External where the author literally defines “there is a reason” in terms of “has a reason."

In Reasons for Action: Justification, Motivation, and Explanation, the article presents desire-based theories in therms of “having a reason,” then raises an objection to this thesis on the grounds that the same analysis cannot be applied to "there is a reason."

I discuss these cases in the previous posting, Reasons I Have vs Reasons There Are.

In this second case, the author ended her presentation by writing:

Arguably, we all have reason to do what morality dictates, whether or not we are (or would be, if we reasoned consistently from our current motivations), motivated by those reasons.

Arguably, indeed.

The claim is false.

It is not the case that we all have reason to do what morality dictates. Instead, on the desire-based model, we should have reason to do what morality dictates, and there is often a gap between the reasons we have and the reasons we should have.

The distinction between the reasons we have and the reason we should have depends crucially on the distinction between the reasons we have and the reasons there are - which is precisely why the conversation changes from "reasons she has" to "there are reasons" when we switch from practical to moral "ought".

It is clearly not the case that the "reasons I have" = "the reasons there are," unless one accepts the unlikely assumption that the agent is the only person that exists. The reasons that I have are the motives behind my actions. However, at the same time, I see that I am surrounded by other people who also have their own reasons for their actions. There is a distinction between the reasons I have and the reasons there are, just as there is a distinction between the car that I have and the cars that exist. Indeed, the reasons that I have are an extremely small fraction of the reasons that there are.

If you think about it, this practice of saddling desire-based theorists with the assumption that "the reasons I have" are all of the reasons that exist is quite absurd.

The "reasons there are" provide other agents with reasons either to endorse, promote, strengthen, and make universal some of the reasons that I may have, and to disavow, condemn, and try to extinguish others. That is, the reasons that there are feeds directly into conclusions about the reasons I should have (the reasons that people generally have reason to promote universally) and the reasons that I should not have (the reasons that people generally have reasons to extinguish).

The reasons I should and should not have may be quite different from the reasons that I do and do not have.

So, it is fully consistent with the desire-based theory of reasons to say:

We all should have reason to do what morality dictates, whether or not we are (or would be, if reasoned consistently from our current motivations), motivated by these reasons.