Desires, Reasons, and Causes

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Jonathan Dancy's Practical Reality makes a significant contribution to clari fying the relationship between desire and reasons for acting, both the norma tive reasons we seek in deliberation and the motivating reasons we cite in explanation. About the former, Dancy argues that, not only are normative reasons not all grounded in desires, but, more radically, the fact that one desires something is never itself a normative reason. And he argues that desires fail to figure in motivating reasons also, concluding that neither the fact nor the state of desire is ever a motivating reason for acting. I am in sig nificant agreement with Dancy about these matters, but I want to register some reservations nonetheless. Dancy is certainly right to reject the DBR (desire-based reasons) thesis that all normative reasons are grounded in desires.1 Desires, he points out, call for reasons no less than do actions. But I think he insufficiently appreciates a way in which facts about the agent's desires and related practical psychic states can provide normative reasons. Not that this gives away anything to Dancy's Humean opponents. What gives an agent's desires, values, and moral convictions normative weight, I shall sug gest, is her dignity and integrity as an individual person. With regard to motivating reasons, I argue that the issue between Dancy's anti-psychologism and psychologistic approaches is to some extent verbal, depending on whether we take 'motivating reason' to be synonymous with 'agent's reason' or not. Humeans about motivation, like Michael Smith, can consistently use 'motivating reason' for the state that plays a certain role in teleological explanations while using 'agent's reason' in ways that agree more or less with Dancy. Even here, however, I argue that Dancy's analysis rightly emphasizes an important distinction that Humeans appreciate insuffi ciently, namely, between having a goal and taking something as a reason, and that Dancy is right that the latter is centrally involved in action in ways the Humean account fails to bring out.