Reason and Action - I11

JOHN McDOWELL, University College, Oxford.

Explanations of action in terms of reasons work by revealing the favourable light in which the agent saw what he did (or at least what he attempted). In the article which H. 0. Mounce and Donald Evans discuss, I distinguished between cases in which this is achieved only by citing, or taking for granted, a desire, and cases in which the mention of a cognitive state (the agent’s conception of the situation) sufices to show the favourable light in which the agent saw his action. (I took the distinction from Thomas Nagel:’ he makes the point in terms of the capacity of reasons to motivate, rather than the capacity of reason explanations to explain, but given the uncontentious thesis that reason explanations explain by reveal- ing motivation, the difference seems inessential.)

Now Mounce, in his interesting defence of the ‘Humean’2 thesis that all reasons for action belong to my first category, seems to me to make things easier for himself by misconstruing the point that is at issue. Mounce takes it that the distinction which Nagel and I were trying to make out turns on the question whether or not an agent who acts for a reason has ‘any special feeling of desire’- whether or not his action is ‘prompted by some occurrent state of desire’. It is not difficult to make it plausible that there need be no occurrent state of excitation in a case of the sort I chose in order to illustrate reasons of m y j r s t category (what might be called the ‘Humean’ category), namely the case of taking an umbrella because of the belief that it is likely to rain (where I claimed that the explanation is elliptical: it works because a desire not to get wet is

’ The Possibility of Altruism, (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1970). ch. V. 21 put ‘Humean’ in ‘scare quotes’ in order to leave room for the suggestion that

this formulation is an over-simplification of Hume’s own position: see Bernard Williams, ‘Internal and External Reasons’, in Ross Harison, ed., Rational Action, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979). pp. 17-28.

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to miss the tension between Kant and Iiume altogether. Insofar as Mounce's proposal resolves this tension, I support it wholeheartedly, for it is a tension which arises out of confusions on both sides. My fear, however, is that Mounce considers that he has salvaged the one account at the expense of the other-i.e. he has confirmed reason as the slave of the passions as opposed to its being master. My view is that properly seen reason is neither slave nor master, for to talk of reason or desire in isolation is a confusion.

Perhaps this can best be brought out by considering the notion of having a reason for acting. Consider the case of the soldier who flees from the advancing enemy. If we ask him for an account of his action he may well give his reason for running simply that he saw the enemy approaching. But the other more experienced soldier also saw the enemy approaching, yet held his ground. How can what was a reason for the one to act not be a reason for the other? Mounce's answer is that the one was disposed to run by the sight of the enemy. The other was not. This difference in disposition is accounted for in terms of prior dispositions, the one having long experience of such situations had developed certain responses as a consequence. He was disposed not to be disposed to run, whereas the other was simply disposed to run. And why, we might ask, should they have reacted in this way to their respective pasts? Presumably because each was disposed to-maybe this is what Mounce means by an appeal to their general physiological and psychological make-up. I t seems rather strange to be calling disposition, when pushed as far a this, passion, as opposed to reason. Both descriptions seem equally out of place. Such make-up may be thought to be a ground of both passions and reasons but can hardly be identified as either passion or reason.

Now it is true that Hume himself was not unaware of the difficulties involved in radically distinguishing reason from pas- sion. His distinction between calm passions and others and his talk of judgements prompting some passions and eliminating existing ones each show that he was wont to introduce other notions than passions as normally understood. In the latter case he resorts to, 'natural impulse' or 'instinct' from which direct passions arise and these, he says, are unaccountable."' Maybe these are what Mounce is concerned with, but it would clearly be strange to call them

"'David Hume, ,4 Trearise qf Huritau hhtitre,Everyman. Vol. 2, p. 148

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Occurrent passions are neither here nor there: they may be present or absent on either side of the divide. Mounce’s picture of my dichotomy is wrong on both sides: not only am I not wedded to describing the ‘Humean’ cases in terms of the presence of occu- rent passions, but also the picture of my ‘non-Humean’ cases as necessarily wholly dispassionate corresponds to nothing that I wrote.5

Mounce formulates ‘Hume’s basic view’ as follows: no man has a reason for acting one way rather than another unless he can be disposed to act in some way without requiring a reason. Reason, in short, rests on causes; rational rests on non-rational ground. Our dispositions form, as it were, the rails along which our reasons run.

Now there is an interpretation of these words on which I have no wish to dissent from what they say.’ According to this formulation, a position is counted as Humean so long as it stands opposed to the idea that reason (or better, Reason), construed as some cold, bloodless faculty wholly distinct from ‘character or disposition’, has an autonomous efficacy in generating action; and the upshot is that anyone who dissents from a ‘Humean’ position must be taken to embrace that idea. But in terms of the formulation I have quoted, I think I am as good a Humean as Mounce is. What I was concerned with was a much more specific ‘Humean’ thesis: one which poses an issue still needing to be discussed long after the question which is Mounce’s primary concern-‘Can reason initiate action independently of character or disposition?’-is answered in the negative, as I agree with him it should be.

This issue is the issue whether reasons for action all fall into the first of the two categories distinguished above. And it is a confusion to suppose that if one sets one’s face against the efficacy of a pure dispassionate Reason one commits oneself to the conclu- sion that they do; for there is room for a position-the position I wish to occupy-according to which there are reasons for action falling into the second category as well, but the acquisition of the quality of vision that is operative in being moved by such reasons is essentially a matter of the moulding of character and disposition.

I did not in fact claim it as an advantage of this ‘non-Humean’

5See especially the end of 97 of my article. 6This should be clear from my ‘Virtue and Reason’, The Monist, lxii (1979), p.

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view that it supports the doctrines about what is often loosely called the ‘over-ridingness’ of (some) moral considerations which I briefly propounded a t the end of my article.’ Nevertheless, I sus- pect that some such connection could be made out. And I confess that I am at a loss to understand Mounce’s confidence that those doctrines can be straightforwardly underwritten by the apparatus of his ‘Humean’ position. It is not typically the case that one of a pair of differently directed dispositions both of whose triggering conditions are satisfied will cancel out the other; and it is surely just false to say, as Mounce does, that if one is disposed to pursue one’s own interest, one finds that the interests of others count for nothing-the clash of such dispositions is just the stuff that prac- tical dilemmas are made of. Just when, and why, does one of the dispositions simply bow out? I cannot see that Mounce has said anything to show that this question is an easy one for him.

I hope it is clear why I have not felt it necessary to comment in detail on Evans’s article. I applaud his call to abandon the idea that what matters is a pitched battle between the proponents of Reason and the proponents of Passion, and wish he had not followed Mounce in enrolling me among the former. My suspicion is that it is only because Mounce’s conception of the nature of reasons for action is knocked askew by his eagerness to take a stand on that ( I believe) unprofitable issue that he can be happy to say that a properly just or generous action is ‘without reason’; and again, to say that someone who is disposed to pursue his own interest ‘has no reason’ to act virtuously, and leave it at that (suggesting that that is the end of the matter). These remarks (the first explicitly, the second by the suggestion that there is no further question to raise about whether-to put it in the terms in favour-the person is blind to something) constitute an expression of what seems to me a defeatist position about the rationality of virtue. Deploring its defeatism need have nothing to do with the ludicrous view that a philosopher (of all people) can somehow, by mere argument, put any rational man on the right track.8 The idea that we have to choose between the defeatism and the ludicrous view is the same as the idea, which I have rejected, that the only alternatives are either to see all reasons for action as belonging to my first category or else

’This contradicts something Mounce suggests. See the beginning of 99 of my

‘See %%6 and 7 of my article. article.

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to attribute motivational efficacy to a pure faculty of dispassionate Reason. Mounce’s mistake is that he has failed to see the difference between rejecting the latter of these and embracing the former.

John McDowell, University College, Oxford.