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Previous articleNext article No AccessPractical Reason and the Possibility of Error*Douglas LavinDouglas Lavin Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 114, Number 3April 2004 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/381695 Views: 241Total views on this site Citations: 42Citations are reported from Crossref © 2004 by The University of Chicago. 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Highlights

  • That there is a deep connection between reason and the possibility of error is these days a philosophical commonplace: For a creature to be correctly said to have a rule, it is necessary that it should be able to break the rule

  • An agent may be mistaken about what he has reason to do. . . . This is essential to preserving the point that statements of what people have reason to do have normative force; no account that excludes this can be adequate

  • Reason-giving explanations require a conception of how things ideally would be, sufficiently independent of how any actual individual’s psychological economy operates to serve as the basis for critical assessment of it

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Summary

THE ERROR CONSTRAINT

That there is a deep connection between reason and the possibility of error is these days a philosophical commonplace: For a creature to be correctly said to have a rule, it is necessary that it should be able to break the rule. Since I am assuming that being an agent, that is, having the capacity to employ concepts in the service of action, has an essential normative dimension which I have expressed as being subject to principles, we might characterize the main thread of this essay as an inquiry into whether liability to error is a condition of agency or will. The Martian would be a rational agent, of a sort, and yet would be entirely limited to employing reason in the service of achieving further aims On its face, this mere possibility places a wedge between possession of practical reason and being subject to more-than-instrumental standards and disrupts the attempt to derive the latter from the former. About that we must settle for more modest, conditional results: if we go as far as imperativalism would have us go, we are prohibited from a constitutivist understanding of principles and forced to choose between improbably writing them into “a world beyond, which exists God knows where,” or drearily giving up on the idea of there really being standards of correctness for action.[4]

THE LOGICAL INTERPRETATION
IMPERATIVALISM AND INSTRUMENTALISM
KANT ON IMPERATIVES
THE ALLURE OF IMPERATIVALISM
IMPERATIVALISM AND THE LIBERTY OF INDIFFERENCE
IMPERATIVALISM AND PERFECTLY RATIONAL AGENCY
VIII. THE INCOMPATIBILITY OF IMPERATIVALISM AND CONSTITUTIVISM
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