Rationality and Responding to Normative Reasons

Abstract

My aim in this paper is to show that the reasons-responsiveness theory of rationality fails to explain the intuitive irrationality of practical akrasia. First, I argue that the best explanation for the distinction between acting in accordance with a normative reason and responding to that reason involves appealing to one’s competence or knowledge about how to respond to that reason. Nevertheless, one might possess practical competence to respond to her decisive practical reasons to perform an action, without having the parallel theoretical competence to rationally believe, through deliberation, that she has decisive reason to perform that action. If possessing a normative reason is a matter of having the ability to respond to that reason, and responding to a reason is grounded in facts about manifesting one’s competence about how to respond to that reason, then the mismatch between one’s practical and theoretical competences may give rise to a normative mismatch between one’s possessed reasons for action and one’s possessed reasons for what to believe about her reasons for action. In this case, there would be possible situations where one possesses decisive reasons to perform an action ⱷ, but lacks sufficient reasons to believe that she has decisive reasons to ⱷ. In those situations, the reasons-responsiveness theory requires one to act against her own normative judgment about what she ought to do. I conclude by considering whether it could be rationally permissible to act against one’s own normative judgment about what one ought to do if one’s reasons for action diverge from one’s reasons for a certain judgment about what one ought to do.