tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4566162782467918402.post3951527386304736238..comments2024-03-29T04:33:56.046-07:00Comments on Wrestling with Philosophy : How To Turn An Assailant Into Your Friend: Internalism vs ExternalismAmitabha Palmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09302663284135239000noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4566162782467918402.post-7227709512152968862012-02-18T00:00:21.598-08:002012-02-18T00:00:21.598-08:00correction: in the last paragraph, I shouldn't...correction: in the last paragraph, I shouldn't have said "humans are actually very irrational..." . I simply should have said "humans are actually very poor at statistical reasoning"aphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06833922298250450324noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4566162782467918402.post-91231540863280385422012-02-17T23:58:47.609-08:002012-02-17T23:58:47.609-08:00@Mrs.BWeasley09. There's an important distinc...@Mrs.BWeasley09. There's an important distinction that you talk about, and that is the distinction between 'reasons' and 'reason' (i.e., rationality). It's actually quite a complicated issue because both of these concepts can mean different things to different people/contexts. Im not sure if there's consensus on the matter but here are a couple general ideas about these terms. 'reasons' can refer to either a explanatory or justificatory meaning. <br />So, in the first sense a reason doesn't have to the consequence of rational thought, it's just a causal explanation. Eg. The reason I ate all 100 cookies is because I have a weakness for cookies. It doesn't mean it was rational for me to do so, but it explains the reason for my action. The second sense, justificatory, is something where the reason should provide a reason that makes sense and (possibly) could be (but not necessarily) evaluated as good or bad. Why did you steal the money? Cuz I wanted it. In this case, "cuz I wanted it" is an explanatory reason but not a (good) justificatory reason. <br />Reason as in "rationality" is a very tricky notion. The simplest idea of it is something like choosing the most efficient way to satisfy a need or desire. But this gets complicated when you introduce moral situations. Sometimes the most efficient way for an individual to satisfy their needs/desires wont be what will be considered ethical. Is it rational to forgo your desires for others, especially if they're strangers? So, maybe we should include something about being moral in the notion of 'being rational'. <br />And then, when you get into describing economics in terms of a 'rational decider' things get even more complicated because humans are actually very irrational when it comes to statistical reasoning. So, in these cases, do we say being rational is doing what the average person would do given full information? or what someone who has run a statistical model would do? I have no idea...aphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06833922298250450324noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4566162782467918402.post-45524361614495388562012-02-15T22:28:40.963-08:002012-02-15T22:28:40.963-08:00@Mrs. BWeasley09. Thanks for the response. I thi...@Mrs. BWeasley09. Thanks for the response. I think I understand your point but I'm not sure I agree. While I agree people's desires aren't always rational, we can generally explain their actions in terms of trying to satisfy those desires. That is, their behaviour is rational in that it is directed at satisfying some desire. However, as I said earlier in the post, this line makes me uncomfortable because there's no way to falsify it. The only way (I can think of right now) to falsify it would be to show that the alternative is false; that is, external reasons don't offer a satisfying explanation of behaviour. I'm still neutral on the matter because I haven't done enough reading on it to have any sort of informed opinion. In this post I was mostly restating Williams' position in a way that I hope will be easy to follow...aphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06833922298250450324noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4566162782467918402.post-78396009190384546812012-02-15T21:17:10.336-08:002012-02-15T21:17:10.336-08:00Hey Ami,
This is a great post. I just wrote a pap...Hey Ami,<br /><br />This is a great post. I just wrote a paper on this topic, so I am very into this topic. I have a few comments. <br /><br />(1) Ethical non-naturalists are not committed to the claim that normative propositions "are creations of culture or expressions of attitudes," and it is not a "consequence of this view is that moral values aren't objective, they depend on and are relative to a socially/historically/personally created/learned moral framework." <br /><br />Most ethical non-naturalists think that morality is objective mind-independent truths which can be discovered a priori. See Moore, Huemer, Parfit, Portmore, McMahan etc. <br /><br />(2) Internalists are only committed to the claim that motivation is a necessary (not sufficient) condition for a agent to have a reason and externalism necessarily denies that claim. <br /><br />(3) Because internalists, like Williams, include constraints that rely on an agent being fully informed in order to be motivated to x, I think they are in no better a position to handle the motivational problem than the externalists. On both accounts, an agent can have a reason to x and not be able to be motivated to x. This is the downfall of internalism. <br /><br />(4) I don't understand your argument against externalism and being rational. If there are external reasons (and I argue that there have to be), then any *ideally rational* agent would in fact be motivated to x whenever they have most reason to x. That is just what it means to be rational. The fact that individuals might not, as a matter of fact, be motivated to x is irrelevant, since they are not ideally rational. <br /><br />As such, this paragraph is misleading. You write...<br /><br />"First is that the externalist has difficulty explaining the all-too-common human peculiarity of acting contrary to what one might think as objectively true (i.e., external reason statements). The only response an externalist can give is "they're acting irrationally". But plainly this is not true. The calculating criminal who devises all sorts of plans to avoid getting caught for his crime, is not acting irrationally. It's rational not to want to go to jail and to avoid it--despite the ostensibly objective reason statement "stealing is baaaaaaaaaad" which the criminal probably also acknowledges as true."<br /><br />There are two obvious responses available to the externalist. (a) It might be rational to steal under certain conditions. An agent could be acting in accordance with her external reasons in stealing and hiding from the police (b) Avoiding jail *might* be more choice-worthy than being punished, but those are not the only two options. Sometimes, the rationally and morally obligatory option is to not steal at all. Thus, in stealing, the agent acted irrationally. Now, she might have to pick the most rational choice given that she stole, which could very well be that she ought to hide from the police. But that's not an objection to externalism at all. <br /><br />To lay my cards of the table, I am an (ethical) intuitionist, ethical non-naturalist, objective moral realist, moral rationalist and hardcore externalist.Travis Timmermanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17662517213080357115noreply@blogger.com