Sellars on External Reasons

Abstract

Bernard Williams's essay “Internal and External Reasons” presents a now-classic challenge to the categorical bindingness of moral reasons. This chapter argues that for Sellars, there are external reasons; and moral reasons are among them. A Sellarsian will reject Williams's internalism about reasons as relying on an implausible individualism about normative reasons. Reasons internalism is often tied to the Humean theory of reasons (HTR). Sellars's anti-reductionist and anti-individualist conception of reasons present a powerful challenge to the HTR: A significant range of reasons have a social and intersubjective dimension that resists a Humean analysis. Indeed, most reasons we have display this anti-Humean character; and to focus only on reasons that admit of a Humean, individualistic analysis is to leave us with a violently truncated agent – indeed, one who might not even be a rational agent. This chapter concludes that most reasons are social – we are subject to them not qua individuals but qua members of a society, occupying various roles and identities. Because of the inherently social nature of reasons, to occupy the standpoint of rational agency is to occupy the standpoint of the “we” and to be bound by its norms, including its moral norms.