Published Articles
Reasons for Non-Agents (pdf)
— forthcoming in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy
According to a standard picture, normative reasons do not extend beyond the boundaries of agency. If something isn’t an agent, then there can’t be normative reasons for it to do one thing rather than another. This paper argues that the standard picture is false. There are reasons for smoke detectors to alarm when exposed to smoke, and for Venus Flytraps to close around their prey when stimulated. I argue that the collapse of the standard picture has important implications for philosophical debates about reasons, and especially serious consequences for theories that analyse normative reasons in terms of the standards of good practical reasoning.
‘Reason’ En Masse (pdf)
— forthcoming in Philosophical Perspectives
We can use ‘reason’, with its normative sense, as both a count noun (“there is a reason for her to X”) and a mass noun (“there is plenty of reason for her to X”). How are the count and mass senses of ‘reason’ related? Daniel Fogal (2016) argues that the mass sense is fundamental: just as lights are merely those things which give light and anxieties are merely those things which give anxiety, reasons are merely those things which give reason. In this paper, I develop an opposing analysis of the mass noun ‘reason’ which puts reasons first. Just as the detail on the Mona Lisa is composed of particular details (brushstrokes and colours) and the crime in L.A. is composed of particular crimes (pickpocketings and speeding offences), so the reason for you to go to the dentist is composed of your reasons to go. Reasons stand to reason as parts to a whole. Such a picture makes reasons fundamental once more, but it has a cost of entry. In order to accommodate the behaviour of ‘reason’ in comparative constructions, you need to abandon the idea that reasons are facts we can count up. On the contrary: they’re not facts, and you can’t count them.
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(Title redacted for anonymous peer review)
Take a look at the following two popular and plausible principles. First principle: facts about what you ought to do are tightly bound-up with facts about what you have reason to do. For example, if you ought to watch Oppenheimer, then there must be more reason for you to watch Oppenheimer than for you not to watch it. Second principle: ought is ‘upwards monotonic’ – if it’s true that you ought to φ in some specific way, then you ought to φ. If you ought to wear red socks today, then you ought to wear socks today. This second principle is not only plausible on its face, but also follows from the widely-endorsed, standard quantificational semantics for ‘ought’.
I argue that these two independently plausible principles are, in fact, incompatible. Respecting the connections between reasons and ought requires giving up monotonicity, and so requires giving up the standard semantics for deontic modals. We need something new. I sketch a non-monotonic meaning for ‘ought’ which builds the ought/reason connections right into the semantics itself, but also explains why monotonicity looked so attractive in the first place.