The Importance of Being Rational

Description

The Importance of Being Rational systematically defends a novel reasons-based account of rationality. The book's central thesis is that what it is for one to be rational is to correctly respond to the normative reasons one possesses. Errol Lord defends novel views about what it is to possess reasons and what it is to correctly respond to reasons. He shows that these views not only help to support the book's main thesis, they also help to resolve several important problems that are independent of rationality. The account of possession provides novel contributions to debates about what determines what we ought to do, and the account of correctly responding to reasons provides novel contributions to debates about causal theories of reacting for reasons. After defending views about possession and correctly responding, Lord shows that the account of rationality can solve two difficult problems about rationality. The first is the New Evil Demon problem. The book argues that the account has the resources to show that internal duplicates necessarily have the same rational status. The second problem concerns the deontic significance of rationality. Recently it has been doubted whether we ought to be rational. The ultimate conclusion of the book is that the requirements of rationality are the requirements that we ultimately ought to comply with. If this is right, then rationality is of fundamental importance to our deliberative lives. Cover The Importance of Being Rational Copyright Dedication Preface Contents PART I: Initial Motivations 1: Introduction: Reasons Responsiveness, the Reasons Program, and Knowledge-First 1.1 An Ideological Primer 1.1.1 Rationality, what 1.1.2 Reasons Responsiveness as a real definition 1.1.3 Objective normative reasons,what 1.1.4 Possessed normative reasons, what 1.1.5 Correctly responding to possessed normative reasons, what 1.1.6 The requirements of rationality 1.2 The Reasons Program and Knowledge-First 1.2.1 The Reasons Program 1.2.2 Knowledge-first 1.3 The Plan 2: The Coherent and the Rational 2.1 Introduction 2.2 The Debate as it Currently Stands 2.3 Broome’s Challenge 2.4 What about Coherence? 2.4.1 Closure 2.4.2 Narrowly inconsistent intentions 2.4.3 Broadly inconsistent intentions 2.4.4 Means-end incoherence 2.4.5 Akrasia 2.5 Practical Condition Failures, High-Order Defeat, and Rational Incoherence 2.5.1 Practical condition failures 2.5.2 Higher-order defeat 2.6 The Myth of the Coherent 2.7 Back to the Beginning PART II: Possessing Reasons Summary of Part I and Introduction to Part II 3: What it is to Possess a Reason: The Epistemic Condition 3.1 Introduction 3.2 A Taxonomy 3.3 Against Holding Views 3.4 Against Low Bar Views 3.5 Against Non-Factive Views 3.5.1 For (2) 3.5.2 Back to (1) 3.6 Against PTEAR 3.7 Conclusion 4: What it is to Possess a Reason: The Practical Condition 4.1 The Insufficiency of the Epistemic Condition 4.2 The Counterexamples: A Diagnosis of What’s GoingWrong 4.3 Filling the Gap 4.3.1 First attempt: missing beliefs(ish) 4.3.2 Second attempt: attitudinal orientation towards the right and good 4.4 The Practical Condition and Know-How 4.4.1 Inferring desires from knowledge 4.4.2 Generalizing 4.5 Is Possession Composite? PART III: Correctly Responding to Reasons Summary of Part II and Introduction to Part III 5: What it is to Correctly Respond to Reasons 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Acting for Motivating Reasons, Believing for Motivating Reasons, and Being Deviant 5.3 Reacting for Normative Reasons 5.4 Reacting for Normative Reasons, Essentially Normative Dispositions, and Know-How 5.4.1 Essentially normative dispositions and deviancy 5.4.2 Essentially normative dispositions and know-how 5.4.3 Why this is, alas, not enough to get all that we want 5.5 Further Upshots 5.5.1 The relationship between ex post and ex ante rationality 5.5.2 Speckled hens and the epistemology of perception 5.5.3 The causal efficacy of the normative 5.6 Conclusion 6: Achievements and Intelligibility: For Disjunctivism about Reacting for Reasons 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Reacting for Motivating Reasons and Reacting for Normative Reasons 6.2.1 Reacting for motivating reasons 6.2.2 Reacting for normative reasons 6.3 The Univocal View and the Argument from Illusion 6.4 Against the Univocal View 6.4.1 Part I: against the Normative Reasons-First view 6.4.2 Part II: against the Motivating Reasons-First view 6.5 What it is to React for Motivating Reasons 6.5.1 Reintroducing deviancy 6.5.2 Conceiving of motivating reasons 6.6 How Disjunctivist is This? 6.7 Conclusion PART IV: Two Problems Solved Summary of Part III and Introduction to Part IV 7: Defeating the Externalist’s Demons 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Preliminaries and a Statement of the Problem 7.3 A Solution to the New Evil Demon Problem 7.4 But Wait, There’s More:The New New Evil Demon Problem 7.5 Solving the New New Evil Demon Problem 7.5.1 The inferential case 7.5.2 The non-inferential case 7.6 Conclusion (with a Reason to Reject PK) 8: What You’re Rationally Required to Do and What You Ought to Do (Are the Same Thing!) 8.1 Introduction 8.2 Why Be Rational? 8.2.1 Preliminaries 8.2.2 Coherence, rationality, deontic significance 8.3 A BetterWay: Reasons Responsiveness 8.3.1 Initial motivations 8.3.2 Reasons responsiveness and deontic significance 8.4 Ignorance and Obligation 8.4.1 Ignorance and envelopes 8.4.2 Ignorance and acting for the right reasons 8.5 Summary of Results (Or: Why You Ought to Be Rational) Bibliography Index of Cases Index of Principles & Requirements General Index