TL;DR version of "Nothing Can “Give” You a Reason"

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Since my critique of Bentham’s post about normative reasons was extremely long and most people won’t read it, I will offer a tl;dr version.

Bentham wrote an article criticizing antirealist conceptions of normative reasons. He focuses on antirealist conceptions of reasons that hold that reasons are given either by our desires, our long-term desires in particular, or by the desires we’d endorse on reflection. Bentham repeatedly asks how this could be, i.e., why should we think our desires give us reasons to do anything? Bentham believes there are no satisfying answers to this question, because our reasons are not given to us by our desires, but by stance-independent facts.

On the one hand, Bentham is correct: there are no good reasons to endorse any of these antirealist accounts of reasons. Bentham also offers a solid objection to the reflective desire account: there may be no single, stable fact about what an ideal version of you would endorse, since there are “many possible idealization procedures,” which might lead to different outcomes depending on various factors, such as “the order on [sic] which you learn the facts.” I agree.

However, Bentham presents little by way of a positive argument for stance-independent facts “giving” us reasons, either. These positions are not mutually exclusive. Demonstrating that reasons aren’t given by our desires doesn’t show that they’re given to us by something other than our desires. There is a third alternative:

Nothing “gives” us reasons.

Bentham (along with many academic philosophers) speaks of reasons as something that are “given” by facts or desires, as though reasons are something one can literally have. I don’t believe this is the case. Instead, I believe talk of “reasons” in everyday English does not literally evoke any implicit commitments at all about reasons as something given by anything. Instead, talk of reasons in normative contexts is a contingent, idiosyncratic way of referencing real or hypothetical values that the specified course of action would promote. Here’s how my account differs from the analytic antirealist accounts Bentham critiques. Suppose someone says:

You have a good reason to avoid petting that tiger.

Analytic antirealist accounts propose that this statement means something like this:

Your desire to not be mauled by a tiger gives you a reason to avoid petting the tiger.

My own position, in contrast, is this:

It would not promote your values to pet the tiger.

This view cuts out the “giving” component, where desires “give” reasons, and simply interprets the statement as a direct remark about the relation between your desires and the act in question. Note that the statement could be false. The speaker may presume to know what your values are. Note, too, that I use the term “values.” This is to distance my characterization from the three “desire” accounts Bentham presents. This is because (as I detail more in the full article) “desire” is a folk psychological term that isn’t rich or detailed enough to support a psychologically accurate account of how human cognition actually works. A proper antirealist account should dispense with crude, psychologically naïve conceptions of “desires.”

I believe Bentham and the antirealists he criticizes share a common, misguided propensity to reify reasons, and that this mistake is rooted in their shared acceptance of the methods and preconceptions of analytic philosophy.

Finally, the main article stresses two other points. Bentham begins his post by claiming that our starting “datum” is that it seems we have reasons to do things. Bentham then claims that antirealism is unable to account for this datum.

This objection is trivial because, even if we grant that it “seems” that we have reasons, these will either be reasons consistent with antirealism, in which case antirealism can account for us having reasons, or they won’t be consistent with antirealism, in which case our “datum” consists of phenomena that are, practically by definition, inconsistent with antirealism. For comparison, this would be a bit like someone saying that the position that ghosts don’t exist is wrong because part of our “datum” is that we have ectoplasm that came from ghosts. If that were true, then obviously the claim that ghosts don’t exist is wrong.

Bentham follows this claim about the datum by repeatedly maintaining that antirealist accounts fail because they are inconsistent with Bentham’s personal intuitions. Bentham’s personal intuitions do not provide a strong rationale for rejecting antirealist accounts of reasons.

Finally, Bentham repeatedly refers to the kinds of reasons he and other realists endorse as “genuine” reasons, implying that the sorts of reasons antirealists believe in are somehow not “genuine.” This frames the dispute between realists and antirealists in a way that tendentiously labels the rival positions in a way favorable to realism. After all, why should antirealists grant that realist reasons are “genuine”, but antirealist reasons somehow aren’t? Antirealists don’t even think realist reasons exist, but many do think antirealist reasons exist. Why think the nonexistent thing is the “genuine” form of a reason, rather than the kinds of reasons you think actually exist? Bentham has never given a satisfactory justification for this misleading rhetorical framing of the dispute.

Oh, and I also discuss research on people’s preferences for how to cut a sandwich.

There you have it. I managed to summarize the main points in less than five percent of the length of the original article. If this entices you to take the plunge and read the full article, you can find it here.