Deliberation and Acting for Reasons

Datos Bibliográficos

ID10697154
AutoresNomy Arpaly, Timothy Schroeder (The Ohio State University)
Año2012
Volumen121
Número2
Páginas209-239
Fecha de publicación2012-04-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe Philosophical Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0031-8108 • E-ISSN: 1558-1470
EditorialDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00318108-1539089
OpenAlexW2118618473
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas20
Referencias citadas24

Theoretical and practical deliberation are voluntary activities, and like all voluntary activities, they are performed for reasons. To hold that all voluntary activities are performed for reasons in virtue of their relations to past, present, or even merely possible acts of deliberation thus leads to infinite regresses and related problems. As a consequence, there must be processes that are nondeliberative and nonvoluntary but that nonetheless allow us to think and act for reasons, and these processes must be the ones that generate the voluntary activities making up ordinary deliberation. These nondeliberative, nonvoluntary processes by means of which we are able to deliberate for reasons are the fundamental processes by means of which we can think or do anything for a reason: once it has been seen that they must exist, it can be recognized that they are ubiquitous. As a result, the usefulness of deliberation to rational belief and action is intermittent, contingent, and modest. Deliberation is a tremendously valuable tool for increasing human capacities to think and act for good reasons in challenging contexts, but in the end it is merely a tool, wielded by people through the same nondeliberative, nonvoluntary capacities to think and act for reasons that they are enhancing the effectiveness of by deliberating

Action (physics) · Deliberation · Epistemology · Law and economics · Perception · Political science · Politics · Process (computing) · Sociology · Virtue · Voluntary action · Computer Science · Embodied and Extended Cognition · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Law · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy · Psychology