Reasons and Purposes

Abstract

AbstractThis book involves rethinking the answer to Davidson's question, ”What is the relation between a reason and an action when the reason explains the action by giving the agent's reason for doing what he did?” It focuses on the thought that practical deliberation is central to explaining human action. One common version of the widely held view that explanations of actions in terms of the agent's reasons are causal explanations understands desires and beliefs as the main causal factors and says roughly that what might be called a purely causal or ’non‐purposive’ account of desire‐belief interactions underlies the surface and (apparently) purposive or teleological explanation in terms of the agent's reasons. It is argued in this book that any such view can make no sense in the end of a common, and indeed essential, element in reasons explanations, practical reasoning itself.In the alternative account suggested here, explanations of actions in terms of the agent's reasons have an ineliminable normative element, not explicable in unadorned causal terms, which stems from the central role of practical deliberation in the genesis, and thus in the explanation, of actions. Intentional actions are always done for reasons, and the agent's reasons for doing what she did, even when there is no explicit deliberation, are whatever led her to think that this action is what she should do. So her reasons for doing what she did are intelligible only as features of her actual or possible practical deliberation, which must therefore always be at least implicitly referred to in explanations of her actions in terms of her reasons. At the same time, practical deliberation is inherently normative, both in the sense that the agent must employ evaluations in her deliberation and in the sense that her reasons are automatically open to normative criticism from herself and others. It is argued here that this requires that explanations of actions that refer essentially to the agent's deliberation have a normative element as well.