Favouring for No Reason

Abstract

Abstract ‘Favouring for No Reason’ addresses two matters. First, it argues that some favourings (i.e. pro- or contra-attitudes) may not be reason-governed. Various examples, including some from Joseph Raz, suggest that neither the guise of the good nor the guise of reason thesis is true: some of our favourings are favourings for no reasons. Being motivated is often a matter of having a set of beliefs and desires whose content appears normative to the agent, but sometimes being motivated does not involve motivating reasons but is rather a matter merely of having the right sorts of belief and desire. A second issue concerns whether fitting-attitude analysis (FA) should require that the valuable object’s properties appear in the content of the fitting pro- or contra-attitude. The so-called dual-role approach to FA analysis affirms that the properties that make an object x valuable have a dual role: on the one hand, they provide reasons for favouring x, and on the other hand, they appear in the intentional content of the favouring. It is argued that the dual-role approach is preferable to the classical form of FA analysis. However, that does not mean that the classical FA analysis is incorrect. Dual-role FA analysis should be regarded as a specification of its classical forebear. The remaining sections of this chapter consider different cases that challenge the dual-role approach.