Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsLord, Errol. The Importance of Being Rational. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 288. $60.00 (cloth).Nathan Robert HowardNathan Robert HowardUniversity of Southern California Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreErrol Lord calls the thesis of The Importance of Being Rational “Reasons Responsiveness”(3). According to this, what it is to be rational is to correctly respond to possessed, objective, normative reasons. This is a natural view to hold. Rationality seems normative, especially given its role in grounding a certain kind of praise and blame. In many circles, reasons are the lingua franca of discussions about the normative. So reasons offer a natural starting place for understanding rationality. However, many of the questions that interest Lord rose to prominence precisely because reasons appeared unable to ground rationality’s normativity. Philosophers have thought this primarily because what is sensible from our perspective on the world can diverge from what the balance of all reasons requires when that perspective is deceived or less than fully informed. As a result, some (perhaps most influentially John Broome) came to doubt that rationality could be properly understood in terms of reasons; others (perhaps most influentially Niko Kolodny) came to doubt rationality’s normativity. Lord’s project is to dispel these doubts by offering an account of the reasons that fit within an agent’s perspective. The Importance of Being Rational stands out for its sophistication and systematicity, offering a new defense of a wrongly dismissed commonplace about rationality. It is certain to propel the recent wave in scholarly interest on rationality, also spurred by Benjamin Kiesewetter’s The Normativity of Rationality and Ralph Wedgwood’s The Value of Rationality.The book comprises four sections, each of two chapters. The first section gives a skeleton of Reasons Responsiveness, which subsequent chapters flesh out. Lord begins (chap. 1) by sketching the view, briefly contrasting it with its chief rival, the well-known view that being rational consists in satisfying various coherence requirements between attitudes, such as the requirement not to have contradictory beliefs. Lord continues (chap. 2) by arguing that adding the ideology of possession to a reasons-based view of rationality handles a wide range of otherwise challenging cases. For this reader, the second chapter was the most difficult chapter in the book, but it is certainly one of the most important, for it demonstrates the power of thinking as Lord does about reasons and possession. Readers discouraged by this early challenge should know that The Importance of Being Rational will reward their efforts.The second section, containing chapters 3 and 4, is dedicated to developing an account of what it is to possess a reason. For Lord, only possessed reasons bear on one’s rationality, and we behave rationally insofar as we respond correctly to the reasons we possess. Accordingly, much of the book is devoted to examining these two concepts, possession and correct response. Lord’s key claim is that an agent possesses a reason for an attitude just when and because they are in a position to manifest knowledge of how to use the reason to form the attitude. Lord explains possession through two conditions: an epistemic condition (chap. 3) and a practical condition (chap. 4). To satisfy the epistemic condition with respect to a reason, the agent must be in a position to know the fact that gives the reason. To satisfy the practical condition, the agent must be in a position to manifest knowledge about how to use that reason to form the relevant attitude.It’s hard to overstate the importance of Lord’s practical condition. Hitherto, theorists’ exclusive focus on an epistemic condition has led to both needless puzzles about reasons and groundless skepticism about reasons’ analytical power. This second condition receives the attention it deserves, and future theorists will be grateful for the care he takes in discussing it.The animating thought behind Lord’s practical condition is that an agent possesses a sufficient reason to φ only if there is a route they can take to rational φ-ing on the basis of that reason. Lord rejects various candidates for what it takes to have such a rational route, such as possessing certain beliefs about the reason or correctly desiring the right and the good, often rejecting these because they make possession implausibly intellectually demanding. Rather, Lord thinks, the best explanation of what makes certain routes from reasons to reactions rational is that, in taking those routes, we manifest knowledge of how to use certain facts as reasons. If we lack that knowledge, we lack the route, so we don’t possess the reasons. As a result, satisfying the epistemic condition relative to a reason does not suffice for possessing it.The third section is devoted to the second piece of ideology, correct response. Following a closely related distinction in epistemology between propositional and doxastic justification, Lord distinguishes between ex ante and ex post rationality. An attitude is ex ante rational just when an agent’s possessed reasons adequately support the agent’s formation of that attitude; an attitude is ex post rational just when the agent has correctly responded to those reasons in the formation of that attitude. Following Donald Davidson, philosophers typically characterize what it is to respond to a reason in terms of a nondeviant cause: an agent responds to a reason just when the reason nondeviantly causes the response. According to this nearly universally assumed theory, ‘acts for a reason’ expresses only one relation, a causal relation between agents, actions, and motivating reasons. What it is to act for a normative reason, on this picture, is to act for a motivating reason that is a normative reason. Lord finds fault with this view and offers an alternative.Lord’s alternative to the causal view is perhaps the most interesting part of the book. Lord belongs to a group of philosophers, including Julia Markovits, Nomy Arpaly and Timothy Schroeder, and Jonathan Way, who have recently become interested in achievements, a broad class of normative properties of reactions that are exemplified when a reaction’s motivation links up with its justification in the right way. For example, an act is a moral achievement, or morally creditworthy, just when the agent is motivated to pursue the act by its moral rightness, in some broad sense (168). Likewise, an act is a prudential achievement, or prudentially creditworthy, when the agent is motivated to pursue the act by its prudence. Since reasons explain both motivation and moral rightness, it is especially tempting to analyze moral creditworthiness along the following lines: an act is creditworthy just when and because its motivating reasons are sufficient moral reasons.However, this tempting analysis cannot be sustained when conjoined with both the causal theory of acting for a reason and the orthodox assumption that reasons are facts, propositions, or states of affairs (hereafter, simply “facts”). That’s because a fact can motivate a reaction in multiple ways, not all of which are compatible with moral creditworthiness (or prudential creditworthiness, epistemic creditworthiness, etc.). Here’s an illustration of the trouble. It’s tempting to say that if I’ve inferred the fact that Garfield is a mammal from the fact that Garfield is a cat, then my belief that Garfield is a mammal is ex post rational, or that it is an epistemic achievement. But if I accept deviant inference rules—for example, the rule that from any proposition whatsoever, infer that Garfield is a mammal—then my belief doesn’t achieve ex post rationality. Riffing on a well-known case from Kant, Lord describes two grocers who are each moved to return correct change during a transaction by the fact that the change is correct. The first is motivated to do so only prudentially, because he knows that his business will thrive if he gains a reputation for returning correct change. By contrast, the other grocer returns correct change out of purely moral concern. Both grocers do the right thing (return correct change) for a fact that gives a sufficient moral reason (because the change is correct), but only the altruistic grocer is creditworthy.Contemporary debates about achievements originate in disagreements about how best to address cases like these. Although Lord does not present things in this way, I think his view comes out most sharply when framed as a distinctive response to a trilemma:1. Each normative reason is identical to some fact.2. The causal theory of action is true.3. Achievements amount to nothing more than doing the right thing for the right reason.Most philosophers who have noted problems in this area, like those mentioned above, solve the trilemma by rejecting (3) as too weak. But one reason to like Lord’s theory of reacting for a reason is that it gives a distinctive way of resolving the trilemma by rejecting (2) instead. As a result, Lord’s alternative theory of reacting for a reason also appears to grant him a distinctive theory of achievement.The next division (chap. 5) offers this alternative, which Lord calls disjunctivism about reacting for a reason, where reacting for a normative reason is a different relation than reacting for a motivating reason, even when the motivating reason is also a normative one. For Lord, we react for a normative reason r to φ only if our reaction manifests an essentially normative disposition, a notion borrowed from Ralph Wedgwood, to revise our φ-ing when r ceases to be a normative reason to φ. For Lord, this disposition just is knowledge about how to use r as a normative reason to φ. Manifesting this disposition in the formation of an attitude via a sufficient reason for that attitude makes the attitude ex post rational. As a result, having a normative reason as one’s motivating reason doesn’t suffice for reacting for a normative reason on this disjunctive account. This permits Lord to deny that the egoistic grocer acts for the right reasons.Lord then expands the framework further still (chap. 6) to account for what it is to act for a motivating reason. Lord’s freestanding analysis of acting for a normative reason grants him an explanation of what it is to act for a motivating reason without inviting a perhaps worrying circularity. According to him, what it is for an agent to act for a motivating reason is for the agent to act that way in virtue of the fact that she conceives of that reason as a normative reason to so act. This vindicates the old and appealing thought, familiar from Davidson, G. E. M. Ascombe, and Jonathan Dancy, inter alia, that all action occurs, roughly, under the guise of normative reasons.The fourth section wraps up the book, beginning by addressing the new evil demon problem (chap. 7), to which Lord’s externalist account of epistemic justification appears vulnerable. Lord meets this challenge by arguing that facts about appearances sometimes offer objective, normative reasons. He then proposes a new variant on the new evil demon problem—you guessed it, the new new evil demon problem—addressing this problem as well. Lord concludes (chap. 8) with a defense of what he calls the full deontic significance of rationality. This is the thought that, in all cases, you ought to do what’s rational. Having spent the previous few chapters arguing that what’s rational is just what my possessed reasons require, Lord argues that only possessed reasons bear on what I should do, in a broad “deliberative sense” of the term (210). As a result, what I should do is what’s rational for me to do. Or, as he puts it, what you’re rationally required to do and what you ought to do are the same thing.The Importance of Being Rational is wonderfully clear and sensibly organized. One of its major strengths is its synthesis of some of the best insights in epistemology and metaethics concerning rationality. Lord is attracted to discussions in epistemology because those discussions often concern questions about how an agent’s evidence supports their attitudes taken individually, not collectively. Because the type of irrationality to be explained in these cases is that of a single attitude, claims about coherence relations between attitudes offer far less natural explanations of irrationality. Consequently, thinking about rationality as the epistemologist does gets a reasons-based account of rationality off on the right foot. Accordingly, Lord’s account steers closer to the epistemologist’s tack than the metaethicist’s, though Lord’s ambitions outstrip epistemology. As we’ll now see, however, this tack leads to rough water in areas where the epistemic domain is a poor guide to the rest of the normative.One such place is the difference between creditworthy belief and creditworthy action. Lord’s disjunctive view offers a twofold distinction between ways of reacting for a reason. These two ways map cleanly onto the familiar distinction in epistemology between properly and improperly based beliefs. As a result, Lord’s analysis of the achievement of ex post rational belief is simple and elegant: ex post rational belief is simply belief for a sufficient normative reason.By contrast, we need at least a threefold distinction between ways of acting for a reason if we want to maintain the parallel analysis for moral creditworthiness. That’s because there are at least two kinds of normative reasons for action: prudential and moral. Only moral reasons are relevant to moral achievements or what’s morally creditworthy; prudential reasons are relevant to prudential achievements.As a result, one reason not to go down Lord’s path is that his disjunctive theory of reacting for a reason immediately begins to proliferate once we accept that there are important differences between reasons for action. If we accept Lord’s disjunctive strategy, we must hold that one is morally creditworthy just when one acts for a sufficient moral reason, where the relation named by ‘acts for a sufficient moral reason’ differs from the ones named by ‘acts for a sufficient normative reason’, ‘acts for a sufficient prudential reason’, ‘acts for a motivating reason that is a sufficient moral reason’, and so on. In sum, while a twofold distinction in reacting for a reason perhaps suffices in epistemology, it does not suffice in the broader normative domain. As a result, Lord’s disjunctive theory of reacting for a reason has a great many disjuncts, not merely the two he mentions.This returns us to the trilemma. To find daylight between the grocers, we must appeal to more conceptual resources than (1), (2), and (3) provide. Markovits, Way, and Arpaly and Schroeder find daylight by rejecting (3) as oversimplified and by positing additional conditions on creditworthiness of various kinds. By contrast, Lord finds daylight between the grocers by rejecting (2), the causal theory of action, and offering additional ways of acting for a reason.Yet, because it is a trilemma, there is a third way of resolving the tension. The causal theorist could preserve her view and the intuitive picture of credit worthiness provided by (3) by rejecting the idea that reasons are facts, for then the theorist can deny that both grocers act for the same reason even though they act for the same fact. Indeed, the foremost causal theorist, Davidson himself, denied that reasons are facts. Davidson thought that reasons were belief-desire pairs instead. Because the egoistic grocer’s desires differ from those of his altruistic counterpart, Davidson can deny that they act for the same reason, and so he is not forced to conclude that the egoistic grocer acts for the right reason. This preserves both the causal theory and the intuitive idea that an agent is creditworthy just when they do the right thing for the right reason.Since Lord doesn’t present his view using the trilemma, he does not reject a solution in the Davidsonian vein, although Lord seems to accept an ontology of reasons that conflicts with the Davidsonian view (e.g., n. 9 of chap. 6). Because Lord doesn’t explicitly reject the Davidsonian solution, he can affirm it. But once he does, we no longer need disjunctivism about reacting for a reason. So there is some competition between solutions to the trilemma.Whether we want to accept Lord’s disjunctivism hinges on whether we want to locate the difference between the altruistic and egoistic grocer in their motivating reasons themselves or in how they treat those reasons. At first blush, we should expect a Reasons Firster like Lord to prefer the former approach over the latter. But Lord wishes to serve two masters. In the introduction, Lord avows two foundational commitments: to the Reasons First research program and to the Knowledge First research program. As Lord clarifies in a footnote, his commitment to the Knowledge First program extends only to the relative priority of the concept of knowledge over those of belief and justification, so it does not imply the contradiction that both reasons and knowledge are uniquely first. Nevertheless, it should not surprise us that these two commitments create a subtle tension in Lord’s view, for both knowledge and reasons have been thought to uniquely underlie a wide range of norms.Here’s a first pass at locating that tension: if we distinguish the moral way of acting for a reason from the prudential way of acting for a reason, reasons needn’t play a crucial role in Lord’s analysis of creditworthiness. We can simply claim that an agent is morally creditworthy just in case their act manifests the right kind of know-how, that is, knowledge of how to use some fact as a sufficient moral reason. Although one can manifest this knowledge only in the presence of a sufficient moral reason, we don’t need reasons to play the foundational role distinctive of the Reasons First program in this analysis of creditworthiness; knowledge alone appears to suffice.But I think there’s a deeper worry with appealing to know-how in order to supplement claims about reasons. According to Lord, agents must satisfy both knowledge conditions with respect to a reason in order to possess it; they must be in a position to know the fact that gives the reason (the epistemic condition), and they must know how to use the fact as the reason that it is (the practical condition). Lord is in good company when he argues that what we should do is partly a function of the facts that we’re in a position to know. But because his practical condition is novel, he is alone in thinking that what we should do is partly a function of the reasons that we know how to use. And I think we should resist being convinced here.If I don’t have a concept of law, then while I can act for motivating reasons that are legal reasons, I cannot act for legal reasons, in Lord’s disjunctive sense of ‘acts for’. For example, I can hardly be said to act for a legal reason in this sense if the reason why I cross streets at intersections is that, when I don’t, I am often harassed by a dislikeable person in a curious blue suit with a gun and a badge. Lord’s theory explains why. Given my ignorance of the law, there is no rational route from the fact that a particular act is jaywalking to my refraining from the act. I simply don’t grasp the legal import of concepts like ILLEGAL JAYWALKING, so I don’t even possess legal reasons for action, given my ignorance, since I’m not in a position to manifest the know-how necessary for acting for a legal reason.More generally, when we are deeply ignorant about a normative domain, we don’t know how to use the reasons particular to it. And on Lord’s theory, when we’re ignorant in this way, we don’t possess those reasons. So we’re exempt from obligations that originate in those reasons. But this exemption is too permissive: failing to know how to use a reason doesn’t eliminate its bearing on what we should do. For example, suppose that I am a deeply ignorant amoralist. I find others’ talk of moral requirement thoroughly confusing and confused. I am completely devoid of moral knowledge. I’m not in a position to manifest knowledge of how to use a fact as a moral reason. As a result, deeply ignorant amoralists do not possess moral reasons. Consequently, these amoralists are morally permitted to do anything; they lack moral obligations altogether.This is a bad result—an amoralist’s ignorance doesn’t exempt them from moral responsibility. Just as ignorance of the law is no defense against it, an amoralist’s ignorance of how to use moral reasons does not grant them carte blanche for a life of theft, lies, and murder. The problem comes from tying possession to moral know-how. Agents can fail to have such know-how, but they can’t fail to have moral obligations. So I think we should resist the temptation to tie possession to know-how. Lord’s competing commitments to Reasons First and Knowledge First pull him in the wrong direction here.This tension takes nothing away from Lord’s lucid, rich, and ingenious account of rationality. Along with Kiesewetter and Wedgwood’s recent contributions, The Importance of Being Rational marks a new moment in debates about the nature of rationality. It is absolutely compulsory reading for epistemologists, ethicists, and meta-ethicists alike. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 129, Number 4July 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/702980 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.