Enkratic Reasoning and Incommensurability of Reasons

Abstract

There is fairly wide agreement that in order to provide an adequate theory of agency, we need to account for the central role of enkratic reasoning – the type of practical reasoning where an agent reasons to an intention to F from a belief that the agent ‘ought all things considered’ or has ‘most reason’ to F. Any view that admits of a widespread and systematic incommensurability of reasons, however, seems to have trouble with accounting for the centrality of this type of reasoning. If the reasons that apply to us tend to be incommensurable, then it seems that we cannot assess those reasons together, and so, it seems, neither can we arrive at any conclusion about what we ought all things considered, or have most reason, to do. This seems to leave little room for enkratic reasoning, and so views that admit of a widespread and systematic incommensurability of agency might be accused of not being able to account for our conception of agency. Views that admit of a widespread incommensurability of reasons have also been the target of other complaints regarding conceptions of agency. It has, for example, been claimed that such incommensurability would serve to make agents’ choices unintelligible, or that such choices can amount to no more than ‘plumping’. These complaints are perhaps the result of thinking that the acceptance and the rejection of incommensurability of reasons are connected with two fundamentally different conceptions of agency. This kind of distinction between two conceptions of agency