Setiya on Intention, Rationality and Reasons

Abstract

practical thought are traits of character, that if the virtue theory is false, there must be something in the distinctive nature of those dispositions to explain its failure. This is possible only on a rationalist conception of ethics, according to which the standards of practical reason derive from the nature of agency or practical thought. Understood in this abstract way, ethical rationalism takes various forms. It might be Kantian: deriving standards of practical reason from formal constraints implicit in practical thinking. It might be recognitional: deriving standards of practical reason from the assumption that we act ‘under the guise of the good’. It might be instrumentalist: deriving standards of practical reason from the role of desire in the motivation of action. Or it might be cognitivist: deriving standards of practical reason from the role of selfknowledge in acting for reasons. I argue against all such views. The basis of the argument, and its claim to completeness, is a theory of intentional action defended in the first part of the book. This theory is minimalist: it offers few materials for the rationalist project. For instance, although it gives a role to desire and self-knowledge in intentional action, this role is insufficient to establish claims about what there is reason to do. Most importantly, the theory denies that we act under the guise of the good, or that we must see what we are doing as justified to some degree – assumptions that play a crucial role in Kantian and recognitional forms of rationalism. These doctrines mistake the sense in which one must take the reasons for which one acts as reasons for acting as one does: it is not that one must take them to count in favour of what one is doing, but as reasons that explain why one is doing it. This conception of taking-as-one’s-reason explains the connection, noted but left mysterious by Anscombe (1963), between acting intentionally and knowing what one is doing.