Sources, reasons, and requirements

Guindon, Bruno

doi:10.1007/s11098-015-0544-8

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 25 publications

(28 reference statements)

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“…- (Conee, 2000) Conee's contention is that keeping or breaking a promise per se has zero deontic value, although we should assign positive and negative deontic value to acts that are done for appropriate and inappropriate motives. By 'motives', Conee refers to the explanations for why the agent acted the way she did (see Guindon, 2016). The idea is rather straightforward: what matters is not just which acts are done, but also why the agent is performing them.…”

Section: Two Proposalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Promising to Do Wrong

Lin

2019

Reinvention

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We commonly think that promising creates reason for us to act. If I promise to have lunch with you, there will then be reason in favour of me doing so, and there will also be reason against me doing anything else. But this seemingly plausible view generates a puzzle: if making a promise gives us reason to do something, moral agents can sometimes promise to fulfil a less weighty obligation, and thereby ensure that they will do all they ought to do by fulfilling this obligation. Call this the puzzle of suboptimal promises. In this paper, I examine and reject two proposals for responding to this puzzle, before presenting my own solution. I argue that we should conceptualise promising with reference to what Joshua Gert calls the ‘justifying/requiring strength’ of reason. In particular, when an agent S promises to do something, the requiring strength of doing that thing increases in virtue of the promise.

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Section: Two Proposalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Promising to Do Wrong

Lin

2019

Reinvention

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“…However, Kolodny thinks that reasonable agents are necessarily consistent. See Buchak and Pettit (2015), Guindon (2014Guindon ( , 2016 and Reisner (2011) for discussion. See also Kolodny (2008a, b) and Raz (2005, p. 6) for discussion related to the practical realm.…”

Section: Consistency Coherence and Eliminationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The explanatory role of consistency requirements

Daoust

2018

Synthese

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Is epistemic inconsistency a mere symptom of having violated other requirements of rationality-notably, reasons-responsiveness requirements? Or is inconsistency irrational on its own? This question has important implications for the debate on the normativity of epistemic rationality. In this paper, I defend a new account of the explanatory role of the requirement of epistemic consistency. Roughly, I will argue that, in cases where an epistemically rational agent is permitted to believe P and also permitted to disbelieve P (relative to a body of epistemic reasons), the consistency requirement plays a distinct explanatory role. I will also argue that such a type of permissiveness is a live possibility when it comes to rational epistemic standards. Keywords Rationality • Consistency • Epistemic reasons • Requirements • PermissivenessLinda believes that P and she also believes that ~P. She displays a kind of epistemic irrationality-she is inconsistent. Here is how we can define the requirement she violates:Consistency: Rationality requires that, if A believes that P at time t, A does not believe ~P at time t. Now, why is Linda irrational? Does her violating Consistency explain why she is irrational? Perhaps her inconsistency is just a symptom or a by-product of her having violated other requirements of epistemic rationality. Indeed, there are two main explanations of why Linda is irrational:

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“…About the same time, Niko Kolodny began in a series of papers to argue for a kindred conclusion with even wider scope, which he occasionally summarized in an unsettling slogan: “There is no reason to be rational as such” (Kolodny , , ). The ‘Myth Theory’ that has thus emerged since then has triggered a ramified debate (see, e.g., Broome , ; Southwood ; Bratman ; Dancy ; Way ; Reisner ; Ross ; Shackel ; Guindon ; Kiesewetter ; Wedgwood ). Yet it seems fair to say that so far, Kolodny's challenge has not been successfully met: the challenge, that is, to name credible normative reasons to conform with requirements of subjective rationality as such.…”

Section: Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rationality, Virtue and Higher-Order Coherence

Gillessen¹

2018

Dialectica

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Since it is hard to see how subjective rationality could be normative, a humbler, purely evaluative account of rationality's importance has been suggested: rationality is a non‐moral virtue, and rational action is good so far as it reveals that an agent ‘functions well’. This paper argues, however, that even this fallback position is threatened by ‘eccentric billionaire’ scenarios: sometimes, flouting purported coherence standards of rationality is maximally virtuous. In defense of the virtue account, I argue that a novel view of rational constraints is called for: rationality requires a certain form of higher‐order coherence – as considerations about instrumental coherence can show.

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Sources, reasons, and requirements

Cited by 5 publications

References 25 publications

Promising to Do Wrong

Promising to Do Wrong

The explanatory role of consistency requirements

Rationality, Virtue and Higher-Order Coherence

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