There are no irreducibly normative reasons

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Where do normative reasons come from? Nowhere. Philosophers often argue about whether desires give us reasons or whether facts about what’s morally right or wrong can give us reasons independent of our desires. But I think both views are mistaken. Reasons don’t come from anything. Talk of reasons is just that: talk. I don’t think there literally are reasons and that minds “give” them to us or “generate” or “provide” them in any literal sense. I think this is a mistaken bit of reification, where people inappropriately imagine that there literally are reasons independent of the phenomena which purportedly give rise to them (minds, nonmental facts, etc.). I think this is a mistake. Instead, I think we should think of talk of reasons as just being a way of referencing various descriptive facts. Some uses of the term “reason” involve explanations or other non-normative notions, e.g.:

Alex: What’s the reason why the ground is all wet?

Sam: Because it rained.

This is not the kind of reason we’re talking about. Instead, we’re talking about normative reasons. Normative reasons are associated with evaluating or prescribing courses of action in various ways, and are often associated with what one “should” or “ought” do or not do. For instance, we might say:

She has a reason to avoid going to that dangerous neighborhood.

The main reason to avoid harming others for personal profit is that it is wrong.

…and so on. What does “reason” mean in these contexts? I don’t think words have fixed meanings. They mean whatever the person using the term intends for them to mean. So what do people intend for normative use of the term “reasons” to mean? I don’t know. That’s an empirical question. But if I had to guess, I think they probably mean something that is very theoretically thin: something that does not determinately commit them to realism or antirealism. In that respect, I endorse what you could call folk reasons indeterminacy, which is closely related to the broader notion of folk metaethical indeterminacy: the thesis that, as a matter of empirical fact, most people neither explicitly endorse moral realism or antirealism, nor would our best accounts of what people are implicitly committed to, or what they mean or think by what they say, be best explained by realism or antirealism in particular. For comparison, most people do not have explicit views on how best to interpret quantum mechanics, so it would be absurd to interpret claims like “The sun will rise tomorrow,” in accord with the Copenhagen or Many Worlds interpretation of quantum events that would inevitably unfold between now and tomorrow. People simply don’t need to take a stand on such matters to talk about the future. Likewise, people don’t need to endorse a metaethical position, or to speak or think distinctively like moral realists or antirealists, in order to make moral claims and engage in moral judgment.

So what are reasons? On my view, there are, in a literal sense, no reasons per se. This might sound absurd. Does it mean I would agree with the following remark?

There is no reason for me to avoid being set on fire.

No, it does not. I would disagree with this statement. There is a reason for me to not be set on fire: I don’t want to be. Is this a contradiction? No, it is not. When I say that there are, in a literal sense, no reasons, what I mean is that there is no such thing as a reason simpliciter, or a reason as such. Reasons are not things-in-themselves. Reason-talk is just a shorthand for specifying what the reason is. For comparison, consider the word “thing”. Do things exist? Well, what does this mean? Here are two possible interpretations:

• Reducible things
  Things exist, in the sense that there are objects that exist: tables, chairs, trees, apples, xylophones, and so on. These are things, insofar as the term “things” refers to various unspecified objects.

• Irreducible things
  Things exist simpliciter. There are things that exist, but these things aren’t anything in particular. They’re just things, but they are not tables, chairs, trees, apples, xylophones, or anything else in particular.

Now, given these possible interpretations, should we judge this statement to be true or false?

Things exist.

In any ordinary conversation, I’d readily say that this statement is true. Of course things exist. There are tables and chairs and trees and such. I can point to them. Lots of things exist. But philosophers often use terms in ways that depart from what I believe their ordinary uses are. They redeploy these terms outside their ordinary contexts. In such cases, they sometimes explicitly hold that their use is highly theoretical or may not represent ordinary usages. In other cases, they insist (often with little or no supporting evidence) that they are using the term in its ordinary sense. Now imagine there were philosophers who thought that there were irreducible things. They thought there were objects out there that were simply things, but not anything in particular.

I would conclude that these philosophers were confused. I’d judge them to be confused about the ordinary meaning of the term “thing.” The term “thing” is simply a placeholder for not specifying some object or other, but there is a presumptive promissory note that the thing in question is some particular thing, even if we aren’t specifying what it is (for whatever reason, e.g., because we don’t know or don’t think it’s important).

I believe something like this is going on with contemporary analytic conceptions of “reasons.” Reasons are being treated as irreducible reasons, as reasons simpliciter. Reasons are, on this view, somehow distinct from, and not fully reducible to, the facts or values that “give,” “generate,” or “provide” us with those reasons, all of which are common terms associated with this characterization of reasons. Sometimes they talk of the facts or desires as being the reasons themselves. They might say:

The fact that torture would violate someone’s rights is a reason to not perform that action.

Here the fact is treated as the reason itself. But you might also see remarks like this:

The fact that torture would violate someone’s rights gives you a reason to not perform that action.

The former notion, where a fact “is” a reason, faces its own set of problems, but I want to focus on the notion of facts giving reasons. If this were meant in some nonliteral or metaphorical way, speaking this way may be benign. But in the context of philosophical conversation, such language alludes to reasons being something distinct from the things that give rise to them. This way of speaking suggests a similar distinction to reducible and irreducible conceptions of “things”:

• Irreducible (normative) reasons
  Reasons as things-in-themselves, as autonomous properties or phenomena which one may “have” in a literal sense.

• Reducible (normative) reasons
  “Reason” talk is like “thing” talk. All such talk serves as a placeholder for some unspecified facts themselves. The facts don’t give, provide, or generate reasons per se; there just are the facts themselves. In any given instance in which one references a normative reason, such talk could always (in principle) be replaced with reference to some descriptive fact or other.

Suppose, on the latter view, we said that:

Alex had a reason to avoid being set on fire.

On this view, Alex does not literally have a reason simpliciter that has been given by some other fact about the world, such as the fact that Alex desires not to be set on fire, or that pain is intrinsically bad and that this fact gives reasons to avoid it. Rather, we could only meaningfully speak of Alex “having” a reason by literally replacing talk of having reasons with the facts themselves:

Alex desires not to be set on fire.

Being set on fire would cause Alex a lot of pain.

The fact that being set on fire would cause Alex pain, and the fact that Alex desires not to be set on fire, don’t give Alex reasons, they just are the prospective reasons. And to be clear, I am not suggesting that reasons are a certain kind of thing that can be described in terms of the fact. I’m saying something more deflationary than this: that talk of “reasons” can always be either meaningfully discharged in terms of some non-reason facts, or it can be meaningless, insofar as one mistakenly takes there to be reasons-in-themselves, or reasons simpliciter, much as it would make no sense to think that something is a thing simpliciter. In other words, if you think it’s weird to speak of something being a thing simpliciter, then you may also find it a bit odd to think that desires or facts can “give” us reasons, and these reasons aren’t the desires or facts themselves, but something distinct and ineliminable: a reason-in-itself. I don’t take this to be an especially extreme claim. I just think that talk of reasons results in us saying that we “have reasons” in the same way we could say that we “own some things.” Neither requires positing any special features of our ontology to make sense of what’s being said. If this isn’t weird or objectionable for talk of things, why would it be weird or objectionable for talk of reasons?

So there are reasons, and there are things. But we should not mistake these terms to mean that there are reasons-themselves or things-themselves. These are just parts of speech that allow us to speak without complete specificity.

Critics of this way of framing things often make a very serious mistake, which I outlined in my dialog about Jack and the Magic Beans. I’ll give a similar account here. Essentially, people will conflate their personal account of a phenomenon with the phenomenon itself, and then take any denial of their particular account to be an outright denial of the phenomenon. Roughly, this would be a bit like if you insisted that all birds were sacred. Then, if anyone denied that birds were sacred, you reacted as though they denied the existence of birds altogether. Something a bit like this:

Alex: Do you believe in birds?

Sam: Yes, of course.

Alex: But I thought you were an atheist and didn’t believe in the sacred?

Sam: …What? Yes, I am an atheist. And I don’t believe in the sacred.

Alex: But you believe birds exist.

Sam: …Yes, and?

Alex: Birds are sacred.

Sam: I know you think that, but I don’t.

Alex: Oh, so you believe birds don’t exist. But that’s silly. There’s a bird right over there, in that tree.

Sam: I agree there’s a bird there. I just don’t think it’s sacred.

Alex: That makes no sense, birds are sacred by definition.

Sam: I don’t think that they are.

Alex: This isn’t a matter of dispute. I’m stipulating that what I mean by “bird” just is a sacred animal. So either you believe birds are sacred or you don’t believe in birds.

Sam: Alright, well if by the word “bird” you just mean sacred avians in particular, then yes, I don’t believe in “birds,” where “birds” refers to sacred avians.

Alex: I knew it! So you admit you don’t believe in birds.

Sam: I do believe in birds, I just mean something different from you when I talk about “birds.”

Alex: Right, so you don’t believe in actual birds. Your position is ridiculous.

This is often how critics are disposed to react to me about talk of “reasons.” They’ll bake their preconception of what a “reason” is into some claim, like:

We have reasons to avoid pain.

But note that the term “reasons” here doesn’t specify whether it is meant in the sense they mean irreducible or reducible reasons. I believe in reasons_reducible but not reasons_irreducible. I would say that I “have a reason” to avoid pain: namely, that I desire not to be in pain. But if I say “yes,” they’ll declare victory and insist I’m conceding to their position. I am not. Because I believe in reasons_reducible, not reasons_irreducible. Conversely, if I say “no,” they will leverage the unresolved ambiguity between the reducible and irreducible meanings to make my position sound absurd:

Lance thinks he has no reason to avoid pain!

This makes it sound like I don’t desire to avoid pain, which is not true. And it does make me sound insane, if one doesn’t clearly disambiguate the sense of “reason” I deny from the sense of “reason” I don’t deny.

What I don’t think is that my desire to avoid pain literally gives me a reason to avoid pain. I just think I desire to avoid pain, period. And in English, at least, one way I might convey this is to say that I “have a reason” to avoid pain. This should no more be taken to mean that I literally have a reason than if someone says “Oh for Pete’s sake” that they think Pete literally has a sake, and that sakes are real. Rather, the notion of sakes is a quirk of language, a byproduct of the often idiomatic, metaphoric, and nonliteral ways speakers use to convey meaning. This point was stressed to a different end by Dennett (2012), who asked:

Are there sakes, as suggested by such familiar idioms as “for Pete’s sake” and “for the sake of —”? What are the identity conditions for sakes? How many sakes might there be? How do they come into existence? Can one still do something for FDR’s sake, or did it expire with him decades ago? Art for art’s sake shows that not only living things can have sakes. (p. 13)

These questions are likely intended to be a bit tongue in cheek, with the implication that there are no good answers to these questions. I believe we should treat talk of reasons the same way, and that philosophers have stumbled over themselves in a misguided act of idiomatic excess in characterizing normativity in terms of facts and desires giving us reasons. As the notion of sakes illustrates, along with dints and related terms that emerge in everyday language, there are at least candidate terms for potentially misguided reification. Dennett continues:

Quine gave us reasons to see the ontological candidacy of sakes as something of an accident of ordinary language (more specifically, of English, since there aren’t clear synonyms in all other languages), a sort of potential cognitive illusion frozen in a few idioms, waiting to be vivified by an unwary and profligate semanticist. The restriction to a few idioms (“for the sake of”, “on behalf of” and the like) which might rather gracefully be “fused” into unanalysed prepositions does suggest, as Quine proposed, that this noun is defective, and its putative referents need not be taken seriously from an ontological point of view. (p. 13)

We should take the same stance towards distinctively irreducible use of reasons. It is entirely fine to speak of sakes, dints, and so on, provided one appreciates that these do not refer to literal things-in-themselves, with their own ontological social security number, but rather can always be conceptually discharged in such a way that no indivisibly sake-ish or dint-ish residue is left over.

We should treat talk of reasons the same way. Irreducible reasons are a cognitive illusion that results from idiosyncrasies in ordinary English that have been given an artificial semblance of life by incautious ethicists.

A great deal of philosophy is used to paint one’s opposition as silly by failing to disambiguate between a meaning of a term that presupposes one’s own philosophical position from meanings that don’t presuppose one’s own view, then leveraging this ambiguity to give the impression that the person who denies your pet theory about the nature of some phenomenon denies the reality of the phenomenon in any respect at all.

This is how people often treat terms like “reason.” They presuppose their own conception of the notion in question, conflate this with how one might use the term in ordinary discourse, where there are pragmatic features of the use of the term that are not captured by or reducible to that person’s distinctive (and perhaps idiosyncratic) conception of the term, but then vacillate between use of the term in the ordinary sense and their specific use of it (though they may insist, often without any good evidence, that their use is the ordinary use). This is why people mistakenly think that I am somehow committed to going around saying things like:

There are no reasons to avoid pain.

I have no reason to object to someone punching me in the face.

I wouldn’t say these things. I would say that I have reasons to avoid pain and object to people punching me in the face. But in saying this, I am not obligated to mean what those who believe in irreducible reasons mean when they say these things. I’m not obligated to accept their definitions or conceptions of things. So, rhetoric aside, I don’t think proponents of irreducible reasons have much going for their accounts. It isn’t so much that they struggle to offer compelling arguments for the metaphysical status of the notion of an irreducible reason (though they might), but that once one diagnoses what may be causing the mistaken belief that there even is an intelligible notion of an irreducible reason, this can account for why these theorists would be prone to making this error.

Unfortunately, there may be no easy way to convince those who are convinced of the meaningfulness of their pseudoconcepts. From a first person point of view, they can feel as real and as compelling as anything else, so introspection may provide little succor. And from a dialectical perspective, the concept has so small a metaphysical footprint that some philosophers purport to establish realism without making any substantive metaphysical claims at all. If so, then there isn’t enough of a metaphysically robust position sticking its neck out to provide a target to strike at. Any further disputes will have to be waged on the grounds of intelligibility, who has the correct account of what’s going on with language, empirical claims about people’s psychology and historical claims about the etiology of their belief and concept formation, and so on. Those are challenging topics I cannot litigate from the armchair; they’d require considerable effort. And so for now, I will set them aside.

In short, I deny that there are any irreducibly normative reasons. This does not mean that I am so foolish and confused as to go around saying things like:

There are no reasons to believe anything.

I have no reason to avoid pain.

…and so on. I say all of these things, and don’t think I mean anything significantly different from what ordinary people mean when they say these things. What I don’t accept is a specific conception of “reasons” distinctive to academic philosophers.

People sometimes conflate their conception or account of a phenomenon with the phenomenon itself. And, as a result, they insist that if you don’t accept their account of the thing, you are denying the thing outright. But we don’t have to do this. We can use a term but not accept someone else’s account of what it means.

This is how I propose that we treat talk of reasons. We should treat reason-talk a useful way of speaking. Reasons are not things one can have. They are not given by facts or desires. Reasons are no more something one can have than one can have sakes, or put things, or discover a thing that isn’t anything in particular.

References

Dennett, D. C. (2012). Sakes and dints: And other definitions that philosophers really need not seek. TLS. Times Literary Supplement, (5683), 12-15.