Reply to Tenenbaum

Abstract

In his clear, gracious, and helpful critical notice of Brute Rationality, Sergio Tenenbaum raises a number of worries about the way in which the central distinction in that book — the distinction between the requiring and justifying roles of practical reasons — is brought in to explain some commonplace normative data. He also suggests two alternate ways of accounting for the same data, one of which derives from Sidgwick and has recently received its most sophisticated presentation in Derek Parfi t’s forthcoming Climbing the Mountain, and the other of which is inspired by Kant’s distinction between perfect and imperfect duties. In this response to Tenenbaum I would like to do three things. First, of course, I would like to defend my own account. The cases Tenenbaum uses to argue against my use of the justifying/requiring distinction all have a common characteristic; roughly put, they are all ones in which it seems that some sort of maximizing principle applies, but is beyond the resources of my account. The same criticism has been raised in a number of other reviews. I would like to take this opportunity to make clear a general strategy that is available for dealing with all such cases. Next, I would like to show that both the Sidgwickian and Kantian al-