Explanation, Deliberation, and Reasons

Abstract

Jonathan Dancy's Practical Reality defends a strikingly nonpsychologistic account of motivating reasons for action. When we explain what people do by citing their reasons, we are trying to isolate the considerations that were actually effective in moving them to act. But it is crucial, Dancy contends, that these considerations be understood in a way that preserves their connec tion to the normative contexts in which the concept of a reason also has a place. The considerations that move agents to act are considerations that agents take to cast a favorable light on the actions they perform, and it is at least sometimes the case that peoples' motivating reasons are also good rea sons for action, considerations that really do recommend or speak in favor of the action that was undertaken. If we make the plausible further assumption that these normative reasons are typically not psychological states of the agents to whom they apply, it follows that motivating reasons equally cannot be understood in essentially psychological terms. The reasons for which peo ple act are rarely if ever psychological states to which they are subject, but (real or purported) facts or states of the world of the sort that are capable of counting in favor of actions, and that in successful cases render sensible or reasonable the very actions that agents in fact perform. I agree wholeheartedly with Dancy that normative reasons do not in gen eral consist in psychological states. I also agree with Dancy that motivating reasons should be understood in a way that preserves their connection to the kinds of normative consideration that recommend or speak in favor of actions. As Dancy helpfully puts the point, our aim in answering the question as to why a given agent did something is to reveal the favorable light in which the agent saw what he was doing (p. 97).The considerations we cite in explaining action must be such as to enable us to understand the normative factors that were salient from the agent's point of view. This important dimension of motivating reasons goes missing when we construe them as psychological states whose contribution to the explanation of what the agent does derives