What Is Wrong with External Reasons?

What Is Wrong with External Reasons?Author(s): Mark SheltonSource: Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the AnalyticTradition, Vol. 117, No. 3 (Feb., 2004), pp. 365-394Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4321452 .

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MARK SHELTON

WHAT IS WRONG WITH EXTERNAL REASONS?

ABSTRACT. In this paper I argue that only a subset of the reason statements Williams defines as external must be rejected as false. 'A has a reason to b' is necessarily false when the ends and aims constitutive of A's good close off the deliberative route from her S to the conclusion she has reason to 4. But when less important ends are at stake, it seems that a person's needs generally provide reasons for action, contrary to Williams's internalist account. I suspect, however, that there may remain inexorable disagreement over these claims because people value things in two distinct ways. To support my suspicion, I explain how people's valuation can take either an agency-prioritizing or an end-prioritizing form. I then argue that resolving the disagreement over Williams's intemalist account of reasons depends on whether it can be established that the agency-prioritizing form is the rationally superior form of valuation.

You have a reason to read this paper. I would like to think so anyway. Famously, Bernard Williams has argued, beginning with his paper "Internal and External Reasons", that the reason statement I just made can be true only if there is a sound deliberative route from the sorts of things that motivate you, collected into what he calls your subjective motivational set, to the conclusion I assert. This is the central thesis of what he describes as his internalist account of reasons, and the account seems confirmed by the most natural interpretation of my opening claim. If I am thinking that you have a reason to read this paper, I must be thinking, one is likely to suppose, that you follow the internal/external reasons debate, or at least that you are a philosopher or interested in philosophy. I certainly must not be thinking that you care nothing for philosophy or hate it, for then my claim seems plainly false. Williams allows that the motivations from which you begin and the sound deliberative routes you may follow can take many different forms. But if you have no motivation that would point you toward a philosophy paper in the first place, Williams thinks, you will never arrive at a reason to read my paper.

La Philosophical Studies 117: 365-394, 2004. 1T ? 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.



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Williams takes his internalist account of reasons to threaten any ethical theory that seeks to make universal claims, for he doubts there is any way to explain how such theories' putatively moral injunctions link up with some motivation every human being is sure to have. Responses to this threat have ranged from attempts to defuse Williams's skepticism about universally valid reasons to outright defenses of external reasons. I have become convinced, however, that neither Williams nor his opponents have found the precise factor that makes an external reason statement false. I believe there is a class of external reason statements that are undeniably false, and because their falsity depends on the individual's motivations Williams always seems to have indisputable ground for defending his internalism. But I will argue that Williams's definition of external reasons picks out a larger class of reason statements than these undeniable ones. I therefore aim first to isolate this smaller class of reason statements by exemplifying the defensibility of Williams's internalist thesis in a paradigmatic case. I then seek to explain what precisely is wrong with external reasons in these cases to show why we are not compelled to reject all the reason statements Williams calls 'external' as false.1 I conclude that this more accurate analysis reveals how the disagreement over internalism may depend on the unnoticed possibility that, regardless of what people value, there are two distinct forms their valuation can fundamentally take.

I

I am going to use Williams's example of Owen Wingrave as the definitive representation of an external reason statement that is undeniably false.2 Owen's family thinks that he should join the army because of his family's strong tradition of military honor, but Owen hates everything about military life and therefore has no motivation to join. Williams points out that Owen's family might express themselves by saying that he has a reason to join the army, their reason being the necessity and importance of upholding the family tradition. Williams contends that if Owen's family says this, that Owen has a reason to join the army, they say something false. I think that Williams is correct here because there is something wrong, independently of the things family members do in the story, merely



WHAT IS WRONG WITH EXTERNAL REASONS? 367

with the family's persistent assertion that their reason must also be a reason for Owen.3 But there remains the question, is the falsity of the family's assertion as closely tied to Owen's lack of motivation to join the military as Williams's analysis would have us believe?

The first step in answering this question is to consider other possible scenarios in which the family might claim that Owen has a reason to join the military. Consider what we think of the family's assertion if Owen is merely indolent. He hates everything about military life, but he has in mind nothing whatsoever about what to do with himself. It is no longer immediately obvious that the family's assertion is false. So let us suppose that Owen does have something in mind: he has a passion to be an actor. Even now, though, what if Owen is a lousy actor but would be a good officer in the army? If this were plain to everyone except Owen, the family's assertion would again appear in a better light. So let us suppose also that Owen is good at acting. This is what he wants to do, and he is not utterly foolish for pursuing it. Under the conditions stipulated, I would agree with Williams that the family's assertion that Owen has a reason to join the army is false. But we have glimpsed the possibility of the assertion being true, and others have already come to question whether Williams's position properly accommodates those possibilities. So let us look at what the main responses to Williams's view of external reasons would seem to imply about the case of Owen Wingrave.

John McDowell argues that there may well be external reasons (McDowell, 1995). He contends that we can sensibly maintain a reason statement to be true in an external sense and understand a person to acquire a motivation by coming to believe that statement so long as we do not expect, as he thinks Williams does, that a piece of reasoning is what must lead the person to accept that reason statement. McDowell takes advantage of the Aristotelian point that a good upbringing (among other things) is necessary for acquiring all the facets of what we regard as correct deliberation. A person with a bad upbringing, McDowell suggests, may fail to acquire not only certain sorts of motivations we expect, but also the way of seeing things that (if it is justified) "involves considering them aright, that is, having a correct conception of their actual layout" (McDowell, 1995, p. 73). Since seeing things this way is partly constitutive of



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correct deliberation, reasoning with the badly brought up person cannot plausibly be expected to set her straight. But we can imagine her coming around, which McDowell likens to conversion because of the wholesale shift in character involved. The important point, McDowell contends, is that if this is a case of coming to see matters aright, the things she now sees correctly as reasons for acting in certain ways would seem to have been reasons all along. She has acquired new motivations by acquiring correct beliefs about what are reasons for action, and this seems to fit Williams's description of how one can make good on the claim that an external reason statement is true.

McDowell's account would therefore imply that Owen has a reason to join the army so long as his family has the correct way of seeing things. McDowell does not take lightly the demand to justify their claim that the family would face here. And while McDowell would not envision Owen being brought around by a line of reasoning, it is the correctness of his family's reasoning that Owen would ultimately come to see. This is what precludes thinking that Owen could be brought around to any point of view his family had merely by coming to believe what they do. Still, it seems to me that McDowell's account provides the wrong explanation of why it is false for the family to claim that Owen has a reason to join the army. For we must then be supposing that the family cannot come through with a justification of their claim, as if no one in Owen's circumstances should be persuaded by their reasons. I do not think we need to suppose this. Imagine that they live in a nation during an era in which the country needs military service from its citizens, the nation's policies and the military's conduct are honorable, and Owen has qualities which his family rightly believes would make him a good officer. These would be sound reasons for any number of people to join the military. So we can well imagine Owen's parents asking themselves, "Where did we go wrong?" since Owen has turned out to be a person who is not persuaded by all this. However, we need not think that anything went wrong in Owen's upbringing. Rather, we can simply think that while Owen's parents have good reasons for saying he should join the military, these are not reasons for Owen. Nor can McDowell's account be rescued by saying that we are in a territory where there is no one correct way of seeing




things. For if we are in this territory, we think that Owen is entitled to pursue what he wants. We therefore need to explain why his family's claims get set aside, and Williams's thesis about motivation seems an obvious candidate for this explanation.

Williams develops a response to McDowell which I think adequately answers any attempt, such as McDowell's or Michael Smith's,4 to make the possible truth of external reasons intelli- gible through the idea of a correct deliberator. Williams points out that McDowell's view conceives what we (correctly or most) have reason to do through an ideal model of a correct deliberator and takes it that each of us, which is really to say "anyone", has reason to do what this ideal deliberator would do.5 Calling this ideal deliberator the "phronimos" Williams contends, "But in considering what he has reason to do, one thing that A should take into account, if he is grown up and has some sense, are the ways in which he relevantly fails to be a phronimos" (Williams, 1995b, p. 190). If I know that I am not the ideal person I can conceive, Williams is arguing, I need to take that into account in my deliberation and surely this affects what I have reason to do. Nor can we, Williams contends, accommodate for a person's imperfections by loading them into the circumstances faced by the ideal deliberator. If we are really conceiving of the phronimos, the fully rational person, or any other appropriate description of an ideal deliberator, that ideal person cannot be in those circumstances (Williams, 1995b, p. 190). So, Williams is pointing out, there is an inevitable gap between the person who must finally act and any ideal deliberator being conceived, and this gap can only be closed from the agent's point of view which finally specifies that agent's reasons. To Williams, the extemalist account represents reasons as relating types of actions to types of circumstances in an impersonal fashion, whereas the intemalist account properly represents reasons as relating actions to persons (Williams, 1995b, pp. 189-190).

One might object that a person's imperfections do not give her reason to be imperfect, and there is certainly something to this thought. But Williams is at least right to think that if there is an objection to be derived from this point, it is not generally valid. Suppose that what Owen knows about himself is that he could never get his heart into the tasks required of a military officer. He may



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well conceive this as an imperfection, thinking there must be others who initially find military life loathsome yet come around to doing something that is truly needed and being properly motivated so as to do it well. So he can construct an ideal type that he finds both comprehensible and desirable in whom the right effort brings the heart into line with what there is good reason to do. Owen may even see the realization of this ideal as possible for himself to the extent that he could, if required, exercise those qualities of character that would make him a good officer. But he knows that his heart would never be fully in the task, and he therefore believes that he would never do the job as well as those who do become motivated in the right way. It certainly does seem sensible, as Williams suggests, for Owen to take this self-assessment into account in his deliberations, and the consequence would appear to be reasons that are in some way uniquely Owen's. Of course, if you are thinking it is true that our imperfections do not give us reason to be imperfect, you are probably thinking of more basic things as imperfections than not being able to warm up to military life. But the depiction of Owen I have presented here confirms one of Williams's key suspicions: that ideal conceptions of what individuals might be all too easily exceed what is realistically possible for someone. Williams is convinced that when ideals do this, their reason-giving power runs out, and he believes that his intemalist account of reasons explains why.

Christine Korsgaard favors a different explanation (Korsgaard, 1986). She would contend that the reason Owen refuses to hold himself to the ideal set before him, even if he appreciates its lure, is because no substantive principle of morality or prudence requires that he hold himself to it. On this account, we are skeptical that Owen has a reason to join the army not because of the gap between the suggested ideal of character and Owen's motivations, but because of the content of the ideal itself. The strength of her explanation can be seen if we look to an unquestioned principle of reasoning as the basis for constructing the ideal. Korsgaard notes that even the obvious principle that a person should take effective means to his ends gives rise to a virtue of character insofar as some people, whom we might call "determined" or "resolute", respond more readily and definitely to this principle than others. Still, she indicates, we do not say that such people have more of a reason




to take the means to their ends; rather, we think that the reason provided by the principle is the same for all (Korsgaard, 1986, p. 18). This looks right. For if we observe someone failing to take advantage of an effective means to his end, we do not go in search of some peculiar motivation of his to explain why he didn't have a reason after all to use the means at his disposal. So if Owen has no reason to join the army, Korsgaard would argue, this will be due not to a failure to turn up the requisite motivation, but to a failure to turn up the requisite principle. Hence, Korsgaard contends, the real question is whether there are principles of prudential or moral reason that can be said to be in everyone's subjective motivational set. Williams is skeptical that any such principles exist. But, Korsgaard argues, this is simply skepticism about what the requirements of rationality are, in particular about whether they contain unconditional or universal norms of morality or prudence. Korsgaard therefore agrees with Williams's internalism, the requirement that an agent's reasons be motivating for that agent, but she contends that internalism provides no independent basis for being skeptical about the universal scope of the principles of practical reason (Korsgaard, 1986, pp. 19-23).

To test Korsgaard's position, let's suppose that there is a universal principle of morality that speaks against Owen's refusal to join the military. Think of any suitable principle of concern for others in society that would entail in certain circumstances that the citizens of Owen's country have a duty to serve in the military. Appeal to this principle could well explain why the indolent Owen appears to have reason to join the army. For if he has no idea what to do with himself and he would in fact be of service needed by his country, he owes others in society enough that he ought to serve even if he dislikes what this involves. But does this principle compel Owen to join the army when he aspires to be an actor? Much depends on how we are picturing Owen and his situation. We could be thinking that his country needs him so badly that duty overrides desire, or we could be imagining that Owen is utterly wrapped up in his own life and unconcerned about others generally. In both these cases, we are inclined to think that the principle does provide compelling reason for Owen to join the army. In contrast, if we imagine that Owen acknowledges his duty to society and, having



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thought through everything, concludes that society will be just as well served by others who do not have his antipathies toward the military, we may well be inclined to think that the principle is not compelling for Owen. Unless one thinks that the latter sort of reasoning can never be justified, we are seeing the same principle apply to the same individual in different ways depending upon the individual's motivations. Of course, other principles are playing a role in reaching these conclusions, but it appears all the same that some of these further principles are made operative by the individual's motivations. Hence, motivational skepticism can be conceived as distinct from content skepticism by tracing it to the exercise of judgment through which universal principles are trans- lated into reasons for particular actions. Williams need not claim (although he may well believe) that no principles of morality or prudence turn up in everyone's subjective motivational set. Rather, he can claim that even if there are principles that everyone takes into account in her deliberations, the soundness of the conclusions reached by reasoning in terms of those principles is dependent upon the individual's motivations.6

Korsgaard's aim was to defuse the apparent threat to universal laws of reason posed by the internalism requirement. Williams expresses "no basic disagreement" with her view since Korsgaard accepts the intemalism requirement and concedes the burden of showing something to be an unconditional law of reason (Williams, 1995a, p. 44, n.3). But the foregoing makes clear that Williams and Korsgaard are not thinking in the same way. I believe the difference to be the following. Korsgaard takes it that when a principle has been shown to be an unconditional law of reason and a person considers acting contrary to that principle, he must still ask himself, "Is my reason for doing this really good enough?" Williams takes it that when a principle has been shown to be an unconditional law of reason, an agent must still ask herself, "How much does this principle really require of me?" Within an agent's deliberations, these are different questions because they shift the burden of proof. The first demands the particular reason to be compelling over against the reasons expressed by the universal principle, whereas the second demands the universal principle to be compelling over against the agent's particular reasons. Although it seems possible to me to reach the same conclusion about what to do regardless of




which of these questions one has asked oneself, I see no grounds for thinking that one will always arrive at the same conclusions if one consistently asks oneself one of these questions rather than the other. Hence, it is clear that the threat posed by Williams's view remains. For if Williams is right about the significance of the first-person perspective in practical deliberation, agents may well expect universal principles to be compelling over against their particular reasons and therefore not arrive at all the reasons for action Korsgaard believes people have.

II

But is Williams right? So far I have drawn attention to apparent shortcomings in certain responses to Williams, leaving aside any consideration of what prompts these responses in the first place. A common feature of these responses is to dispute Williams's contention that only basic requirements of truth and logic can be included automatically in the conception of a 'sound deliberative route'. Williams allows that an agent's errors of fact and reasoning can always be corrected, even if by an external observer rather than the agent herself, for the purposes of saying what her reasons for action are. But to maintain an internalist account, Williams refuses "to adjust the agent's prudential and moral assumptions to some assumed normative standard" (Williams, 1995a, p. 36). In effect, McDowell disputes Williams's picture of "facts" and Korsgaard disputes Williams's picture of "reasoning" in order to suggest that a proper account of these things will warrant more normative adjustment than Williams supposes. Williams's own accounts of 'facts' and 'reasoning' depart significantly from a Humean model, and both McDowell and Korsgaard are arguing that non-Humean features of Williams's view should lead him away from his Humean take on internalism. On these points I am inclined to agree with Williams's opponents. Correcting errors of fact and reasoning, I will argue, is messier business than Williams portrays because in the process of correction we tend to assume normative standards of prudence and morality independently of the agent in question. If Williams holds to his refusal to make any such normative adjustments, he takes his internalism to an implausible pitch.



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Williams's example of a correctable error of fact and reasoning is a man who thinks he has reason to drink what is in a certain glass because he thinks it is gin and wants a gin and tonic, but what is in the glass is in fact petroleum set aside from a chemical experiment. Williams maintains that this man thinks he has a reason to drink what is in the glass, but does not have reason to do so. Williams claims, "This is because there is not a sound deliberative route from his motivational set to this glass of petroleum: what he wants is a drink of gin and tonic" (Williams, 1995a, p. 36). This reasoning is misleadingly simple. Suppose that instead of petroleum the glass contains vodka and the man hates vodka. We might conclude all the same that the man does not have a reason to drink what is in the glass since what he wants is a gin and tonic and it is not gin. So suppose I come upon the man about to mix the stuff with some tonic and knowing his hatred for vodka I cry out, "Wait! You don't want that. It's vodka". He then proceeds to mix the drink and down it. We may be mildly surprised at first, but our surprise goes away when we learn he has had a terribly frustrating day and was desperate for a drink. If, however, I had exclaimed, "Stop! That's from my chemical experiment. It's lethal", that stuff had better not go down the gullet unless he is suicidal. The man wants a gin and tonic and what is in the glass is not gin. But when we think that this fact should correct his belief that he has a reason to drink what is in the glass, we are making a number of robust assumptions about what the stuff will do to him and what exactly his motivations are. To show that we are also making normative assumptions, I will rework the example once more.

Suppose that the glass contains a petroleum by-product from a chemical experiment, but it is not lethal. The substance is toxic, causing digestive, muscular, and neurological reactions that are both painful and debilitating. However, these effects are temporary, lasting about a month, after which the affected person recovers fully. Suppose again that the man is about to mix this stuff with some tonic for a drink. We stop him and inform him of what it really is, including all the consequences of ingesting it I just described. The man responds, "Now I am intrigued. I think I'll drink it anyway". We press him for why he would do this. He responds that he is feeling adventurous, wants to know how it tastes and how it makes him feel, and does not care about the weeks of debilitation. We try every angle




and become assured that everything he says is true and he is fully clear-headed about it all. It seems that there is no route from his subjective motivational set to the conclusion that he has reason not to drink this chemical. On Williams's account we therefore cannot truthfully say that he has a reason not to drink it. But I am inclined to think that we very much believe nonetheless that the man has reason not to drink the petroleum.

The obvious reasons for not drinking the petroleum are the pain and debilitation it causes. Even if the man is fully informed about these and has realistic expectations of their severity, we can easily imagine him coming to regret his decision later because of the pain and debilitation. He may have thought that he could bear the pain - that it would be a unique experience of pain without cause for fear or a good test of his stoical resolve - but once the pain is upon him, he wishes only for its absence. Or he may have thought that his plans were set such that the next month was no loss at all, but now the unexpected has come up - a good friend of his has suddenly decided to get married, say - and his incapacity prevents him from doing something that he wants. If we offer these possibilities to him in advance and the man remains steadfast in his denial that such things matter to him right now, he will strike us as recalcitrant in the face of reason. But our perception of recalcitrance here depends on assumed normative standards. We expect the man to have qualms about bringing such severe pain upon himself, and we may even become morally apprehensive of him if we see no indications of any compunction about doing so. We assume that prudence requires making some allowance for unforeseen events. His failure to be responsive to these considerations seems to be a failure of the most basic sort, much like the failure to take advantage of an available means to one's end. This supports Korsgaard's contention that basic principles of morality and prudence give all of us the same reasons for action. Moreover, such unresponsiveness to obvious considerations tempts us to think that the man simply isn't seeing things the right way, as McDowell suggests. We might complain that the man's sense of adventure is misplaced, that whatever has struck his fancy about drinking the petroleum is not worth the pain and debilitation. And we may well think that on this point the man simply must come around.



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Doubts about Williams's internalist account seem to gain the strongest hold when the grounds for a reason statement are the person's needs. Williams explicitly avoids going into detail about the nature of needs, but he does note that we are tempted to think that a person's needs must be included in her subjective motivational set. Yet Williams insists that if a person is genuinely uninterested in pursuing what she needs after deliberating about the matter in question and without resting on any false belief, we must say in the internal sense that she has no reason to pursue what she needs (Williams, 1981, p. 105). Immediately, however, Williams betrays that this assertion is problematic by pointing out that the assumptions we make in saying that these needs of hers are not reasons for her are very strong assumptions that we are seldom likely to be sure are true (Williams, 1981, p. 105). Williams attempts to explain our lack of confidence in saying that a person's needs are not reasons for her by suggesting that we maintain the thought that she must at some level really want what she needs - in other words that we hold on to an optimistic internal reason statement that her needs are reasons for her (Williams, 1981, p. 106; 1995a, p. 40). But I find this explanation implausible. The most obvious things we need are those that allow us to avoid severe pain and physical and mental incapacitation, and we are not merely being optimistic that at some level the man-who intends to drink the petroleum really wants to avoid these. We think that he has reason to avoid them and find his denials of this recalcitrant. If we are supposed to concede that even basic func- tional needs do not have the force of reasons for him, as Williams would because of the man's consistent and clear-headed denials, we are not entitled to any such perception of recalcitrance. Rather, the recalcitrance would be ours alone for finding it hard to believe that his needs are not reasons for him. But the implication that we are the ones who need to come around, when pain and debilitation are the considerations being denied as reasons, is absurd.

III

A closer look at how needs provide reasons for action is warranted, but I wish to postpone this until later. For now I want to return to the case of Owen Wingrave because the arguments of the preceding




sections have generated something of a mystery. My argument in ?2 seems sufficient to establish at least the presumption that a person's needs generally provide that person with reasons for action even if the supposition to that effect requires making normative adjustments in the person's moral and prudential assumptions. So it appears we have found a class of reason statements - those that assert a reason based on needs the agent is unmotivated to pursue - that meet Williams's definition of external reasons yet seem plausibly to be true. If this is right, it follows that the absence of an appropriate motive alone does not falsify a reason statement about an agent. Yet in ? I it was precisely Owen's lack of motivation to join the military that proved crucial to explaining why it is false to say he has a reason to join, and this seemed to show the defensibility of Williams's internalism against his critics. If we are supposed to conclude from ?2 that the truth of a reason statement does not necessarily depend on the presence of an appropriate motive, why did Owen's lack of motivation seem to make such a crucial difference before?

I believe that the apparent plausibility of the internalist account in the case of Owen Wingrave derives from the explanatory role of Owen's conception of his good. We have been thinking, I want to suggest, not merely that Owen lacks the motive required to reach the conclusion that he has a reason to join the army, but that the route to this conclusion has been closed off because of the ends and aims that constitute his good. When his family persists in claiming that Owen has a reason to join the military, they are expecting him to pursue certain specific ends as primary aims, but in blatant disregard of Owen's evaluative determination to pursue aims that cannot encompass those ends. I maintain that it is the disregard for the individual's good that falsifies the reason statement. When a reason statement disregards the individual's good, it does not merely assume motivations that are lacking; it effectively denies that the agent has motivations she really does have and ones which she has self-consciously given priority to boot. If a reason statement satisfies this condition of disregard, it follows that it is external, but not all external reason statements under Williams's definition satisfy this condition. I contend that only this smaller class of external reason statements that imply a substitute conception of the agent's good in disregard of her own evaluative determination must be rejected as false.



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It is important to note that this smaller class of external reason statements must be rejected as false regardless of what we think of the individual's conception of her good. The ends and aims that constitute her good give her positive reason not to pursue certain other specific ends and aims, and it does not follow from knocking down the positive reasons derived from her good which speak against pursuing a specific end that she is thereby shown to have a reason to pursue it. The criticism of her conception of her good does imply reason statements she may not presently accept, but many of these will already be 'internal' by linking up with the motivations derived from that conception. Williams never maintains that internal reason statements cannot be false, only that external reason statements must be. I believe the latter claim is correct only in the more restricted class of cases I have identified. Since Owen's good speaks against joining the military, it is false to say he has a reason to join. But in the earlier case of the man who intends to drink the petroleum, there is no aim constitutive of his good that requires him to drink it. So to say he has a reason not to drink it can perfectly well be true even when his motivations have led him without factual or logical error to the opposite conclusion.

To clarify and confirm this analysis, I want to look in further detail at how it explains the crucial features of my earlier discussion of Owen Wingrave. We can immediately see the force of explaining Owen's lack of motivation on the basis of what his good is when we compare the indolent Owen to the Owen who wants to be an actor. We imagine the indolent Owen as lacking a conception of his good altogether. He insists that he hates the military, but we imagine he will insist he hates just about anything. On the supposition that he has qualities that would make him a good military officer if he would just use them, saying he has a reason to join the military is a way of suggesting something that could constitute his good. Since we think that a person should have a direction in life, the reason statement seems open to being true in spite of his current antipathies toward the military. In contrast, the Owen who wants to be an actor has a direction in life. Even if he could find his good in military life, he has found it elsewhere. Unless his pursuit of acting is thoroughly foolhardy, he has no reason to choose otherwise. His good has closed off the route to a military career, and this is why he has no reason to join.



WHAT IS WRONG WITH EXTERNAL REASONS'? 379

Attributing ends and aims to Owen that constitute his good also explains why the family's assertion is not made true merely by their having "the correct way of seeing things" when it comes to the questions of value. Let all the family's judgments of value be true: that their country's military is honorable, that military officers serve greater needs and accomplish greater things than actors, and that Owen's life in the military would be successful and worthwhile. Still, it does not follow that Owen has a reason to join the military. He has thought through all this and has determined that he will have a better life if he becomes an actor. His family may disagree with Owen's evaluation, but they cannot disregard it. They may persist in believing that Owen would have a fine life in the military, and they may be right about that. But their tradition of military honor cannot be a reason for Owen without a career in the military becoming his good in life. Once we think of Owen as having made the evaluation that this is not his good, we cannot think of the family's assertion as true.

I have been stressing the evaluation that determines the individual's good because only this evaluation closes off the route to reasons that are at odds with the individual's present motivations. Suppose that Owen is firm in his idea that he wants to be an actor, but based on features of his personality his family is convinced that acting will prove to be only a passing fancy. If the family is right about this, it does not seem necessarily false to say that Owen instead has a reason to join the army even before their prediction bears out. In this case the family's assertion rests on something that is implicit in McDowell's objection to Williams and explicit in Elijah Millgram's - namely, experience.7 The family expects that certain kinds of experiences inevitable in the pursuit of acting will quickly enough sour Owen's desire to keep at it. In general, Mill- gram points out, a person's ideas about what to do are open to correction by experience because until one goes through the practical experience one cannot know what one's evaluative responses will actually be (Millgram, 1996, pp. 206-207). Millgram argues convincingly that these evaluative responses cannot always be attrib- uted to already existing motivations and therefore concludes that practical experience can ground truthful external reason statements (Millgram, 1996, pp. 208-209). But it seems to me that others can appeal to practical experience to make a truthful external reason



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statement about an agent only when the agent lacks the requisite experience to form these evaluative responses.8 Once she has the requisite experience, there is no denying what her own experience is or what her evaluative response to it is.9 Therefore the experience of others to the contrary, even the experience of most people, cannot by itself nullify the evaluation she makes on the basis of these responses. So if the experiential ground of Owen's commitment to acting is adequate, the wealth of the family's military experience, even when combined with accurate knowledge of Owen's personality and the business of acting, cannot substitute for Owen's determinate evaluation and therefore cannot ground a true reason statement about Owen.

If we assume that the positive motivation derived from Owen's evaluative response to acting is the barrier closing off the route to his joining the military, it becomes clear why Williams would regard the family's external reason statement as requiring an adjustment in Owen's moral and prudential - that is, evaluative - assumptions. This makes clear why Williams insists that the requirements of morality and prudence must be judged from the first- person perspective. But plenty of the motivations within an agent's subjective motivational set do not derive from or even impinge upon the definite ends and aims that constitute her good. And it would be an extraordinary assumption to assume that every motivation an individual has takes on the same motivational significance as these higher priority ends, a significance that includes the putting up of barriers to reaching alternative conclusions about what to pursue. So it seems plausible to suppose that principles of morality and prudence need only accommodate the special character of the individual's good in order to give rise to universally valid reasons. Any remaining distance between Williams and Korsgaard would then be closed if only we could expect them to agree on how these principles leave room for the individual's good. I suggested earlier, however, that Williams and Korsgaard differ in their assumptions about whether the measure of a compelling reason rests with universal principle or particular considerations. Such a difference in fundamental assumptions is bound to result in divergent estimations of the significance of the individual's good and the extent to which it calls for latitude of judgment. In fact, I will argue, these assumptions




reflect what may be an inexorable discord in the ways people value things, and this possibility explains why there may be an intractable disagreement over the nature of practical reason.

IV

I argued against Williams in ?2 that it can be legitimate to make adjustments in an agent's normative assumptions when saying what she has reason to do and that the agent's needs appear to be the ground for making such adjustments. Accordingly, if an agent's needs were strictly separable from her good, no external reason statement grounded in an agent's needs would meet the falsifying condition of disregarding the individual's good. The resolution of the issue over internalism would be quick and easy: external reason statements about a person's good are necessarily false; external reason statements about a person's needs may be true. This quick and easy resolution is unavailable, however, because a person's 'needs' and a person's 'good' are not strictly separable categories of considerations. In determining what one needs, one will undoubtedly reflect on what one needs thingsfor, and much of the time the answer will come to rest in ends that constitute one's good. Even all-purpose needs are typically sought for a specific purpose, not on the grounds that they serve all purposes. To the extent one may forswear apparent needs that do not serve the ends constitutive of one's good, 'needs' generically conceived will not always provide one with reasons for action. I suspect that some such thought underlies Williams's adamantly internalist claim that an informed, clear-headed person who remains unmotivated to pursue something she needs really has no reason to do so. Nonetheless, we do not think of 'needs' as merely particular to the individual. There do seem to be needs that we think any person must at least take into consideration whenever engaging in practical deliberation. Precisely because these needs must not be overlooked, they always seem available to provide reasons for action even though a person may occasionally refuse to satisfy some of them. The needs that meet this description, I contend, are needs that derive from the conditions of human agency. 10 My suggestion is that whenever a person values anything in particular, whether as 'needed' or as 'good', the person's



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valuation must always be responsive to agency-derivative needs, but her actual response can take one of two forms. The two forms of this response are the two fundamentally opposed forms of valuation I have mentioned from the beginning. Let me explain.

When we reflect on the conditions of human agency, a number of basic needs immediately come to mind. We need to be alive and healthy. We need to avoid impediments to and interference with our actions. We need to have opportunities to pursue desirable courses of action, to have things at our disposal when they serve as means to our ends, and so forth. In part because such needs are generic types that encompass a broad range of more specific considerations of varying degrees of stringency, I propose that we do better to think of these agency-derivative needs as interests. The sense of 'need' that implies that we must not overlook these types of considerations in our deliberation can be expressed, I believe, as a normative requirement of rationality that attaches to these interests. That is, I believe it can be argued that these kinds of agency-derivative needs are interests it would be irrational for an agent not to have. I call such interests essential interests of rational agency or essential interests for short. l 1

When we reflect on the actual choices we make regarding such interests as self-preservation, liberty, opportunity, and the like, we quickly realize that we are constantly risking and compromising the satisfaction of these interests to varying degrees for the sake of various purposes. Sometimes we are merely balancing these interests against each other due to conflicts between them, but sometimes we are compromising them for the sake of ends that are important to us. We can even be willing to put our lives on the line in the pursuit of a chosen endeavor, as in dangerous activities like mountain climbing or auto racing. Presumably, the more one puts one's agency at risk for the sake of a given purpose, the more important that purpose is to oneself. Since by definition we can take concern for essential interests to represent the concern one has for one's agency, we can use essential interests as a measure of the importance of one's ends by examining whether and to what extent one places the pursuit of an end on a par with the satisfaction of essential interests. I propose to define the good of the individual in terms of the ends that are shown to be most important by this




measure. When a person is willing to risk or compromise to a significant extent the most compelling of essential interests such as life or liberty, the end for which the person is willing to do this has become a constitutive part of that person's good. Obviously, there will be no hard and fast line between ends that constitute a person's good and those that don't, but certainly some ends will prove more central to a person's good than others.12

Once we have observed what an individual places on a par with essential interests, we can look to essential interests themselves to identify the particular needs of the individual. If a person is willing to compromise an essential interest to a specifiable extent for the sake of an end constitutive of her good, it is reasonable to expect that she is also unwilling to compromise that interest to any significantly greater extent for similar purposes or to the same extent for any lesser purposes. A person will therefore be concerned to ensure the satisfaction of essential interests to the extent defined by the point of her willingness to compromise them. Since it would be irrational for her not to have these interests and nothing further moves her to compromise them, she will now say she "needs" these interests to be satisfied. Since the point of her willingness to compromise these interests is dependent upon her own aims and purposes, the more specific determination of what she needs is dependent upon them as well. She may even deem some specifiable interests that fall within the general types of interests essential to rational agency irrelevant to her good and therefore be unconcerned to satisfy those specific interests. But she will disclaim these interests precisely because she has committed her agency to the pursuit of the ends constitutive of her good, and she cannot sustain any such practical commitment while ignoring all interests essential to her agency. She must therefore continue to be responsive in general to these types of interests in order to gauge the extent to which she needs them to be satisfied.

So far, then, I have defined the good of the individual as the ends for the sake of which, relative to other ends, the individual is willing to risk or compromise essential interests to a greater extent. But the actual extent to which the individual is willing to compromise these interests, which constitutes the individual's estimation of what she specifically needs, depends on the dispositional attitude toward agency the individual assumes when placing particular ends on a



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par with essential interests. That is, one can be thinking either that essential interests are worth satisfying in order to be able to do the things one chooses to do, or that the things one chooses to do should be worth the sacrifice of essential interests one is prepared to make for them. On the first way of thinking, one assumes that the ultimate point of agency is to accomplish one's ends, so one is more unwilling to relinquish the pursuit of an end and compromise the prospects of attaining it than to compromise the prospects of pursuing other things. Accordingly, one treats one's most important ends as the benchmark of the value of anything else, gauging the value of other things by how comparable one finds those things to what one finds valuable about one's most important ends. On the other way of thinking, one is more unwilling to compromise the prospects of pursuing valuable things one has the capacity to pursue, so one tries to make sure that committing to a particular course of action is worth the things one is giving up for it. Since any compromise of essential interests affects in some way one's capacity to do things, treating essential interests as the benchmark of value is a way of representing the value of what one is or may be giving up, providing a tangible gauge of whether one's choices are worth the sacrifices one makes for them. Hence, these different attitudes toward agency result in distinct ways of valuing things, what I am calling 'forms of valuation', which will be manifested in the structure of the individual's choices. The priorities of an individual who treats essential interests as the benchmark of value will be oriented toward a greater concern for agency itself, whereas the priorities of the individual who treats chosen ends as the benchmark of value will be oriented toward the satisfaction of those ends. I will therefore call these two forms of valuation respectively the agency-prioritizing orientation and the end-prioritizing orientation.

To see the difference between these more vividly, consider how an individual might view a career in auto racing under these two forms of valuation. In the first place, it seems clear that an individual will be more likely to choose a career in racing if he assumes that a person should devote himself to his passion in life and his passion is the thrill of danger than if he assumes that a person is capable of any number of valuable pursuits and asks whether racing cars is worth the risk to all that. Of course, he may decide all the same that racing




cars is worth the risk, but his way of valuing things will be evident in his further deliberations and choices as an auto racer. To the agency- prioritizing racer, the thrill of racing must be worth the possible loss of his capacity to do anything else, so too great a danger will seem imprudent to him. He will favor rules and provisions that make the sport safer even at the expense of some of the thrill and the fun. And he will have all the more reason to favor such rules if he has dependents or if his family does not like racing and wishes he would stop. In contrast, since for the end-prioritizing racer the exhilaration of the speed and the danger is the point of what he does, he will think that prudence speaks against only the most excessive dangers. So long as the probability of surviving a career in racing is reasonably high, he may be unwilling to compromise any of the thrill. And even if his family stands opposed, he may judge his own stance to be morally justifiable so long as he is not ruining their lives or leaving them destitute in the event of his incapacitation or death.

Opposite assumptions about the benchmark of value would therefore account for the different presuppositions Korsgaard and Williams appear to make. General principles of morality and prudence unquestionably serve to protect and enhance the agency of both oneself and others in different respects. So if agency and its essential interests are assumed to be the benchmark of value, these principles will seem to set, no matter what the agent's ends are, a limit to what those ends can motivate the agent to do. Conversely, if particular ends are assumed to be the benchmark of value, these general principles will seem to need qualification that makes them particularly relevant to the agent's ends in order to issue instruc- tions the agent has reason to follow. We have already seen that these different forms of valuation can result in different conclusions about what the agent has reason to do. The question arises, accordingly, whether one of these sets of conclusions is more rational than the other. I submit that disagreement over external reasons reflects divergent intuitions on whether rationality favors one of these two forms of valuation. If one thinks that end-prioritizing agents are fully rational, it may well seem that there is no route to any conclusion about what the agent has reason to do except through the agent's own moral and prudential assumptions which depend on the agent's ends. A reason statement contrary to an agent's error-free



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conclusion would then seem incapable of explaining anything the agent does without presupposing a change in her ends, and so an alteration in the elements of her subjective motivational set, just as Williams argues. In contrast, if one thinks that rationality favors the agency-prioritizing orientation, it will seem that rationality demands much more than factual correctness and logical inference and that a rational agent must be responsive to these demands. An agent's coming to act on any reasons that follow from these demands will then seem fully explained so long as the agent's exercise of her rational capacities can lead her to the stated conclusions. This would imply, as Williams's opponents argue, either that his internalism rules out the truth of no reason statements at all or that external reason statements can be true. If it turns out that there is no way to resolve the question of the superiority of a form of valuation, disagreement over the nature of practical reason will prove intractable.

Further support for my claim can be found by examining Mill- gram's contention that instrumentalism is the hidden ingredient in the arguments for internalism. Millgram argues that Williams appears to presuppose that all practical reasoning is directed toward the satisfaction of elements of one's subjective motivational set, a picture of reasoning that leaves no room for being wrong about what one is pursuing, only about how one is pursuing it or whether to pursue it taking other pursuits for granted. This picture makes it seem that one must already be motivated by a satisfaction- demanding sort of motive that itself demands 0-ing or connects to 0-ing if one is to have a reason to 0. But this picture, Millgram believes, does not adequately account for the ways we learn from and are corrected by experience (Millgram, 1996, pp. 211-215). I am inclined to agree with Millgram, but the rejection of instrumentalism would seem to depend on assumptions contrary to those of an end-prioritizing agent. For on the end-prioritizing orientation, one's reasons become definite only by gauging the value of all other things by the benchmark of one's most important ends, so it will seem that all practical reasoning ultimately traces back to the satisfaction of these ends. Hence, if a person does not fail to be rational merely by virtue of having the end-prioritizing orientation, a broad, nuanced instrumentalist picture of reasoning, like




the one Williams paints, may seem the only picture that does not brand reasonable people with a charge of irrationality. Moreover, in following Millgram's suggestion to focus on patterns of practical inference to resolve the issue over internalism (Millgram, 1996, p. 216), it must not be overlooked that the form the individual's valuation takes is partly constitutive of these inferential patterns. This is because even the individual's responsiveness to experience varies according to the two dispositional attitudes I have described. The auto racer involved in a serious crash while suffering only minor injuries may respond with renewed caution thinking himself lucky to be alive, or he may come away with renewed exhilaration thinking himself lucky to have had such a thrill. If people tend to respond to experience in accordance with the valuational attitudes they already have, the question becomes whether experience can prompt a person not merely to value new things, but to value everything in a new way. If experience cannot do this or it does only in the rarest cases, it will seem patently false to claim that a person has a reason to do something when that reason presupposes a response to experience he himself never has.

v

The strongest counter to Williams's internalist account of reasons would therefore depend on establishing the rational superiority of the agency-prioritizing orientation over the end-prioritizing orientation. If such superiority can be established, we can specify what the rational relation is between the agent's existing motivations and the new motivation acquired by coming to believe an external reason statement that does not fit Williams's model of what such a relation can be. Williams conceives of the deliberative processes that result in the agent recognizing new (internal) reasons for action as processes that begin from some element or elements of the agent's subjective motivational set and lead to adding further elements to or subtracting elements from that set (Williams, 1981, pp. 104- 105). But the difference valuational attitudes make to the structure of the agent's priorities suggests that a subjective motivational set should be viewed not merely as a collection of elements, but more as a system. The superiority of the agency-prioritizing orientation



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might then be found in the way the agent's motivations are brought together into a system, and the recognition of that kind of superiority cannot be explained sheerly in terms of what the elements of S are. So if any agent, no matter what her motivations are, can come to recognize the superiority of the agency-prioritizing orientation on grounds of systematicity, she can rationally arrive at, if it is called for, a new way of valuing things that would reshape the deliberative routes she follows to arrive at reasons for action.

Since rationality itself would demand this shift to treating essential interests as the benchmark of value, there would be grounds for adjusting the agent's moral and prudential assumptions to coincide with the priorities that follow. On the basis of these adjusted assumptions, an external observer could specify what the agent's needs are differently from the agent herself without disregarding what her good is and therefore be able to make truthful claims about what these specific needs give her reason to do. It may even be viable to contend that she ought to be open to certain avenues of experience if a broader range of experience could alter her priorities appropri- ately. Given a steadfast commitment to certain ends, the agent could find such openness to novel experience anathema, making any such claim unquestionably external. It is plausible to suppose, accordingly, that Williams would be convinced that the rational superiority of the agency-prioritizing orientation cannot be established. If there are no demands of rationality the end-prioritizing agent cannot meet, the proper account of reasons must admit a considerable degree of relativity of the agent's reasons to the agent's ends. Williams's internalist account may not then be too far off the mark, especially if he were to find a way to correct the apparent implication that even unimportant ends can give the agent reason to ignore her needs.

The difficulty of establishing the rational superiority of the agency-prioritizing orientation should not be underestimated. Even if successful, recent attempts to establish that self-conscious reflection constitutive of autonomous agency is the source of all reasons do not suffice for the task.13 At first glance it appears that they might. For on these arguments the reasons provided by the agent's more particular ends and desires depend on a reflective structure of endorsement that allows the demands of being a reflective agent to give rise on their own to reasons for action. So merely in the




course of reflecting on what she is doing, an agent may be brought to pay greater attention to considerations deriving from agency itself, either making it possible for these considerations to provide external reasons or guaranteeing that agency-derivative reasons are internal. But there is nothing about the end-prioritizing orientation that makes it unfit to survive the agent's reflective scrutiny. One thing reflection makes plain is that there is little point to having the capacity for agency if one doesn't bother to do much of anything with it. So the agent may come to see the value of agency through the lens of what she chooses to do with it and to maintain this form of valuation explicitly on fully self-conscious reflection. If she would do better to value things differently, the demands constitutive of reflective agency do not reveal why.

Although a fully adequate argument to establish the rational superiority of the agency-prioritizing orientation over the end- prioritizing orientation is beyond the scope of this paper, I want to close with a couple more modest arguments to this effect based on the case of Owen Wingrave. I mentioned some time ago that if we see Owen as a selfish person, we are more inclined to discount his passion for being an actor as a reason for him not to join the military. Given my arguments that Owen seems entitled to choose acting over the military, why would his having a selfish character make any difference? I suggest that the paradigmatically selfish person is thoroughgoingly end-prioritizing, and we lack confidence in the judgment of such a person.'4 We see in all his choices a tendency to underweight the concerns of agents generally in favor of his own particular concerns. So even if it is legitimate for Owen to judge that society's needs are not pressing enough for him to join the military, we lack confidence that the selfish Owen's priorities will yield a proper judgment of what constitutes a legitimate reason. We are more inclined to regard his stated goal of becoming an actor not as his passion in life, but as a mere excuse to avoid the military. Since the corrective for the selfish Owen's questionable judgment depends on a shift in his evaluative dispositions, the result of such a correction would be the radical reorientation of character McDowell describes under the idea of conversion (McDowell, 1995, p. 74). But from the idea that what needs to turn around is the agent's fundamental attitude toward interests he cannot fail to have, we get



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a more tangible and practicable conception of such radical reorientation than the bare schema of "conversion" provides. Moreover, if we think the agent's judgment would be better on the agency- prioritizing orientation regardless of whether he has all the virtues of character we want him to have, we must be thinking there is something superior about just the form of valuation itself.

James's original story affords my second argument. In James's story Owen strikes us as heroic because of the moral stance he takes in opposition to war. Standing up to his family would take courage in any case, but there would be nothing heroic about doing so if he merely wanted to be an actor. What makes Owen heroic is that he stakes his good in life on the fundamental interests of humanity. One need not share Owen's impassioned pacifism to be moved by the miseries and horrors of war. So when Owen makes it his aim in life to be peaceful, there are unquestionable grounds for respecting his choice that go beyond its being his choice or even its being a laudable choice. Upholding the family's tradition of military honor would be a laudable choice for Owen, especially if the family's sense of honor were kept within all the appropriate bounds. But even if we remove the family's excesses from the story, their insistence that Owen should uphold their military tradition makes their priorities seem out of line. They appear to regard the nobility of a soldier's bravery and the glory of a nation's victory as the ultimate benchmarks of value without considering whether these are worth the price in human misery people inevitably pay for them. Their attitude makes them unable or unwilling to appreciate Owen's moral stand for what it is, and this strikes us as inexcusable. If we attempt to explain the tension between Owen and his family merely in terms of incompatible conceptions of the good, Owen's heroism and the family's inexcusability become unintelligible. Hence, the antagonism James puts before our eyes is the product of opposing forms of valuation, and we prefer Owen's way of valuing things regardless of whether we agree with his conclusions.

It must not be overlooked that the ends constitutive of a person's good are determined by that person's exercise of judgment. Indi- viduals differ in their judgments of what specific ends are worth significant sacrifices of the interests essential to rational agency even when they share the agency-prioritizing manner of judgment. So if an individual has deemed an end worthy of the requisite commit-




ment of her agency, and there are no grounds for complaint about her manner of judgment, it is false to say that she has a reason to do anything that requires a contrary judgment of her good. Some external reason statements are undeniably false. But since I believe the agency-prioritizing orientation to be the rationally superior form of valuation, I believe that some reason statements Williams defines as external are true. It seems sufficiently comprehensible to me to claim that a person may stake her good on ends that are plainly not worth the sacrifices she says she is prepared to make for them. I also suspect that frequently enough the person may herself face an experience that confirms this very claim. The reason statement based on these estimations that are presently not her own does not imply that her good lies elsewhere, for she may reshape her priorities without revising the ends that constitute her good. But the need for reorientation does imply that she has a reason to reach conclusions about those ends toward which her current motivations do not lead. You may disagree. You may be unpersuaded that there is any normative requirement to have the agency-prioritizing orientation. So you may think that I have overstepped the bounds of what we can say a person has reason to do and believe that Williams's internalist account comes closest to the correct account of reasons. I certainly owe you more to convince you that the one form of valuation is better than the other. But if I have at any rate found the source of disagreement about these issues, you still had a reason to read this paper. 15

NOTES

1 In this paper I hold on to Williams's original formulation by consistently framing the issue in terms of reason statements. I do this in part because I agree with Velleman that we shouldn't be thinking in terms of classifying reasons as internal or external (Velleman, 1996). When we think in terms of classifying reasons, we start thinking of reasons as the considerations the agent takes into account, whereas in Williams's original paper we are supposed to be thinking about what the agent concludes she has a reason to do from the considerations she takes into account. For example, it is one thing for a person always to count pain as a consideration that speaks against taking actions that cause it and quite another thing for a person to conclude that she has reason not to take an action because of the pain it will cause to herself or to someone else. If we are thinking of reasons as considerations, we unhesitatingly classify pain as something that cannot fail to be motivating and so as an internal reason; but we differ considerably in what we



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think outweighs pain, which opens the possibility that we will be moved in quite different directions when drawing conclusions about what pain gives us reason to do. 2 Williams draws the example of Owen Wingrave from the title character of a story by Henry James (Williams, 1981, p. 106). In my discussion of Owen, I have no intentions of being faithful to the original story and will be manipulating the example as needed for the purposes of testing what we think about external reasons. Notably, I will not be assuming in my permutations of the example that Owen's rejection of war is based on the passionate pacifism he expresses in James's story. I allow that his antipathies to military life include opposition to war, but I think that we must avoid making Owen's key motivations exclusively moral precisely because one thing Williams means to be investigating is the extent to which general moral conclusions make claims on individuals to have certain reasons for action. 3 Elijah Millgram thinks that the family's assertion is too obviously false for the example of Owen Wingrave to be helpful in the exposition of Williams's view (Millgram, 1996, p. 205). But I think that Williams chose exactly what he needed: a case in which someone is being said to have a reason when he really does not, under conditions where an optimistic internal interpretation of the reason-claim is unavailable. More significantly, I hope to demonstrate in this paper that the example is not merely rhetorically effective, but instructive: we can pin down what is wrong with external reasons (and what is not wrong with them) if we explain precisely why it is false to say that Owen has a reason to join the army. 4 Smith, 1994. For Smith's theory of normative reasons, see Chap. 5, pp. 130- 181. For his specific response to Williams, see pp. 164-174. 5 Smith's view makes the same move in that he says that one has reason to do what one would do if fully rational, and he conceives one's fully rational self as one's counterpart self in the possible world in which one is fully rational (Smith, 1994,pp. 151-152). 6 The appropriateness of placing Williams's motivational skepticism at this level is confirmed by his account of blame. Williams contends that blame is best under- stood as a distinctive ethical reaction if it has some way of engaging the agent's actual motivations and thereby comes to be included among the agent's reasons as the internalist account describes them. But if moral principles could yield sound general conclusions by which individuals should straightway come to be motivated, blame would be warranted in every instance of moral failure, and we would have only what Williams describes as "the condition of moralism". See Williams ( 1 995a). 7 The appeal to experience is implicit in McDowell's example of coming to appreciate twelve-tone music (McDowell, 1995, p. 78) and is given explicit and thorough development in Millgram's example of the badly insensitive man named Archie (Millgram, 1996, pp. 203-204). 8 There are deeper issues lurking here, some of which Millgram himself identi- fies, that I intend to address later in the paper. But an initial confirmation of my claim can be found in Millgram's own example of Archie. Archie lacks experience




of the rewards of sensitivity because of how badly insensitive he is. It would be different if he had the experience of the sensitive person and rejected the value of sensitivity. 9 I am not suggesting here that one cannot be wrong about one's own experience. If I swear that I am not annoyed by the barking dog next door but everyone around me reports that I have had an unusually quick temper dating precisely to the day the neighbors bought the dog, I am wrong about my own experience. But the correction of my beliefs in this case is merely a correction of matters of fact, so reason statements based on this correction remain internal in Williams's sense. What cannot be denied is that it is possible for me to be annoyed by dogs and for you not to be, and the corresponding difference in our respective judgments of the value of owning a dog cannot be disregarded. 10 If what makes a consideration a reason is, as Velleman argues, its relevance to the constitutive goal of action (Velleman, 1996, p. 719), this would explain why needs that derive from agency itself occupy a special place in our deliberation. 1 I believe that there are a number of advantages to this notion of essential interests, but I cannot defend such a claim in this paper. For my present purposes it suffices to regard 'essential interests' as a convenient substitute for 'generic agency-derivative needs' since I will be contrasting such generic needs with the more specific needs of particular agents. 12 Although my description of the individual's good is primarily subjectivist, it is not devoid of objective content. For example, it does not follow from the fact that the heroin addict does risk and compromise life and liberty that he is willing to do this, since the physical addiction alters the psychological conditions normally required for taking action willingly. Hence, we need not be committed to saying that scoring heroin is the addict's good, but without question we can say that he is acting as if it is. I am indebted to both Henry Richardson and Elijah Millgram for pointing out the necessity of clarifying my view of the individual's good in a case like this. 13 Attempts I have in mind include Korsgaard's argument that valuing one's practical identity as human is partly constitutive of valuing anything at all (Korsgaard, 1996, pp. 120-124) and Velleman's argument that an inclination toward conscious control of one's actions is the source of the distinctive influence exerted by reasons (Velleman, 1996, pp. 719-726). I am not suggesting that Korsgaard and Velleman are aiming to establish the superiority of the agency-prioritizing orientation and then fail in their efforts. Rather, my point is that if their accounts seem to run counter to Williams's, it is because the agency-prioritizing orientation is being assumed in the background, not because their arguments establish the superiority of that orientation. 14 I do not mean to suggest that all end-prioritizing agents are selfish. Nor am I suggesting that it is impossible to be selfish in seeking the satisfaction of one's own essential interests. But I am inclined to think that because essential interests are interests no one can rationally fail to have, the universality of one's concern takes some of the edge off the selfishness. If for example my sole concern is to get a certain liberty for myself, it may well be that the only effective way to secure



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this liberty for myself secures it also for others. I then do not seem particularly selfish to want the liberty for myself by wanting it for everyone. This cannot be the typical case when my interest is an end that others may perfectly well not have, so the paradigmatically selfish person will be end-prioritizing. 15 I am indebted to Henry Richardson, Elijah Millgram, and Dale E. Miller for their many helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

REFERENCES

Korsgaard, C.M. (1986): 'Skepticism about Practical Reason', The Journal of Philosophy 83, 5-25.

Korsgaard, C.M. (1996): The Sources of Normativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McDowell, J. (1995): 'Might There be External Reasons?', in Ross Harrison and J.E. Altham (eds.), World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams (pp. 68-85), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Millgram, E. (1996): 'Williams' Argument Against External Reasons', Nous 30, 197-220.

Smith, M. (1994): The Moral Problem, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Velleman, J.D. (1996): 'The Possibility of Practical Reason', Ethics 106, 694-

726. Williams, B. (1981): 'Internal and External Reasons', in Moral Luck (pp. 101-

113), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. (1995a): 'Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame', in Making

Sense of Humanity (pp. 35-45), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. (1995b): 'Reply to McDowell', in World, Mind, and Ethics (pp. 186-

194).

Department of Philosophy Central Michigan University Mt. Pleasant, MI 48859 USA E-mail: [email protected]



What Is Wrong with External Reasons?

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