Reason, Will, and Direction of Fit
Critical Reflections on the Objectivism of Derek Parfit’s On What Matters.
Truls Wyller
What then is the cause that determines his will? It is his judgment. And what is the cause that determines his judgment? It is his intelligence, his power of judging; the determining cause is in himself. Beyond that, I understand nothing. (Rousseau 1974, 243)
How should one live? In order for ethical discourse to make sense, there must be a rational, universally acceptable answer to this question, Derek Parfit claims. If ethical discourse makes no sense, nothing in our lives really matters, he further claims, and there will be no way to avoid nihilism. Thus in order to avoid nihilism one must take a resolute stand against moral subjectivism and moral psychologism, both of which make rational agreement on normative questions of ethics impossible. What are we to think of these claims?
If by “psychologism” we mean a theory according to which the validity of moral statements depends on the agent’s mental state, Parfit may be correct in rejecting it. But it is hard to see why anti-psychologism should entail anything like his own moral “objectivism”, i.e. the view that the validity of moral statements is given by objective facts. There may be a rational anti-objectivist alternative to psychologism, based on practical rather than theoretical knowledge, ignored by Parfit. Or so I will argue – beginning with a sketch of what seems to motivate his objectivist alternative to psychologism.
Non-natural normative facts
Take the following two statements. (1) It is wrong to torture children for fun. (2) Even if I have no desire right now to avoid being in a future state of agony, I do have a reason to avoid it. Who among us would not agree with both (1) and (2)? But in agreeing, according to Parfit, you do not merely express your own or describe some other person’s attitude. You make a claim whose correctness has nothing to do with psychological states or attitudes.
Or picture yourself as an extremely intelligent and well-informed person. If having considered your own deepest concerns and a consistent ordering of all relevant facts you conclude that torturing or long-term future suffering is what you prefer, these are still actions
that you have no real reason to perform. Rather, according to Parfit, as a matter of objective truth you have rational reasons not to perform them, and performing them would be irrational in a strong or “reason-implying” sense (Parfit 2011a, 73ff.; Parfit 2011b, 544ff.).
This view derives from his meta-rational notion of reasons for acting, as presented in his 1997 paper “Reasons and Motivation”: A reason is a non-psychological fact that counts in favour of some act or attitude. Therefore, whoever believes “X is what I have rational reason to do” is equivalent to “X is what after thorough self-examination and careful and consistent consideration of the facts I am most motivated to do”, does not understand what a statement about reasons for action means (Parfit 1997).
Thus to Parfit, for normative statements about ethics and rationality to make sense, there must be normative facts about reasons that just as much obtain independently of a subject’s attitudes and desires as any truth about objective matters of fact. They also obtain independently of a subject’s beliefs. A person may be ignorant about the healing effect of some medicine but still have a very good reason for taking it. And this twofold subject independence is what is meant by something being rational in a “reason-implying sense”.
Independently of a person’s particular motivation it follows from objective truths about reasons for action about which the person may be ignorant (Parfit 2011a, 45f.).
Among such truths about reasons we find ethical truths based on the value of life, well-being, autonomy, and other real goods to be promoted for oneself and other people.
These are not truths about a person’s subjective states but about the objects of one’s actions, which explains the strong element of consequentialism in Parfit’s theory. This also explains the cognitive content of an ethical statement like “Torturing children for fun is wrong”. In a world where suffering is not to be promoted but minimalized, it corresponds to an objective fact about values.
Combining his meta-rational view on reasons with the objectivity of values, Parfit presents his ethical position as a strongly anti-naturalist one. Objective facts about rational reasons for action cannot be natural facts, he argues:
Scientific identity statements about natural objects typically involve different properties (like “wet stuff” and “H2O”), whereas in ethics naturalists typically make claims about the identity of (normative and natural) properties (like “goodness” and “what promotes happiness”). Now any fact involving a natural property can be restated as a descriptive fact involving the same property. But an irreducibly normative fact cannot be restated as a descriptive fact. Therefore, normative properties cannot be natural properties, and we have to accept the existence of non-natural normative facts. (2011b, 338f.)
The basic motive behind the heavy machinery of arguments set in motion by Parfit against moral expressivism, prescriptivism, subjectivism, emotivism, quasi-realism, and what have you thus seems to be the menace of nihilism looming in a world without non-natural moral facts: In such a world norms and values would depend on states of the subject, which means any change in deep-seated attitudes would imply a corresponding change in values.
This leaves no room for rational discourse about right and wrong in ethics, and so in the end
“anything goes”.
But even granting the anti-naturalist import of Parfit’s argument, I believe at the heart of his intuition there may be an illegitimate identification of objectivism and anti- psychologism. Against this, I want to sketch a genuinely Kantian, non-psychologist alternative to objectivism.
Kantian will: reason or psychological state?
Much of what Parfit writes about Kantian ethics deals with apparent traits of psychologism in Kant’s stated opinions, traits that may seem to play an important role in the works of Christine Korsgaard and other recent interpreters. Take Korsgaard’s words on the theme of Kantian autonomy or self-legislation:
You might pay your taxes … because you think everyone should pay their share, or because you think that people should obey laws made by popular legislation. These would be, in an ordinary sense, examples of autonomy – of giving the law to yourself because of some commitment to it or belief in it as a law. (Korsgaard as quoted in Parfit 2011b, 684)
This does indeed seem to make the binding force of Kantian reason depend on psychological states of acceptance.1 It may even depend for its validity on a person’s wants (2011b, 688), or on what happen to be her interests. And, according to Parfit, Kant offers plenty of statements reducing the validity of moral norms to their causal or motivational force.
That is, he seems to equate normativity with what as a matter of fact contributes to moving all rational subjects to action (2011b, 713).
Parfit’s statements to this effect I find somewhat surprising however, as one would not expect Kant’s point to be what happens universally to move rational subjects to action but the
1 Whereas Kant, as I am going to argue, seems to have held that being committed to the law is “giving” it to oneself.
capacity of all such subjects to move themselves solely by rationality.2 Thus in one of his most telling statements about the moral law and its relation to moral motivation, Kant says:
This much only is certain: the moral law is valid for us not because it interests us (for this is heteronomy and the dependence of practical reason on sensibility, viz., on an underlying feeling whereby reason could never be morally legislative); but, rather, the moral law interests us because it is valid for us as men, since it has sprung from our will as intelligence and hence from our proper self. (Kant 1993, 60; Ak 4: 460-61)3
So, is Kant contradicting himself on what may be the most fundamental issue of his moral philosophy, viz. the relation between interests and duty? In order to present an answer to this, let me take a closer look at Kant’s notion of rational will, or Wille.
This concept may seem to be hopelessly confused, as signifying both a person’s psychological state and a rational standard of evaluation of states. Alternatively, it may coincide both with her factual choices and with what she counterfactually would have chosen if she were a purely rational being. In short, it seems to range from morally arbitrary decisions to pure, practical reason, and how could pure reason ever motivate bodily action?
No rational “moral law” ever could, Schopenhauer famously claimed, taking ethical norms instead to be imperative expressions of human or divine will. And about Kant’s categorical imperative he writes:
In our day, however, this imperative is often introduced under the name of ‘the moral law’, which is less ostentatious but smoother and more current. Under this name the imperative slips unobserved into the house after making a slight bow to the faculty of reason and experience; but when once in, there is no end to its orders and commands, without its ever being further called to account. (Schopenhauer as quoted in Parfit 2011b, 585)
The very same reason-will ambiguity may cast doubt on the formulation at the core of Kant’s categorical imperative:
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction. (Kant 1993, 30; Ak 4: 421)
2 In other words, one would expect Kant to defend what Parfit calls a Platonic view, not a case of Kant’s Moral Internalism (ibid.). On the other hand, in traditional Platonism, rationality is not conceived of as an active or practical principle. Such a principle easily explains the array of Kant quotes on (2011b, 717), without recourse to psychologism.
3 This is a central paragraph of Grundlegung part III, and as a matter of fact Kant postpones addressing the problem about empirical confirmation of moral motivation from part II, quoted at length by Parfit, to this part.
Furthermore, in part II the whole point of introducing “autonomy” is to conceive of a law binding rational subjects independently of any previously given interest possibly moving them to action.
Considering a maxim of not helping others in need, Kant appeals to the agent’s will – in case she were the one to need help. But there are masochists among us, and there are people too proud ever to want help. Therefore, making the maxim conditioned on a person’s will seems to dissolve its universality. And preserving the universality seems to call for objective facts of reason and norms of rational conduct with no obvious relation to what is normally called “will”.
I believe this dilemma cannot with any plausibility be ascribed to Kant. To Schopenhauer, no sense can be made of a genuinely practical, prescriptive reason, so there is an exclusive choice between reason and practical will. To Kant, however, reason is regarded as one faculty of a basically active or “spontaneous” kind. Thus even theoretical reason might be taken to fall within a wide sense of the practical, understood in the Leibniz-Wolf tradition as the ability to make objects correspond to ideas or representations rather than ideas correspond to objects. As far as I can see, such a notion of correspondence direction roughly coincides with the Anscombe-Searle distinction between “world to mind” and “mind to world” direction of fit (Searle 1985, 3).
Commitment and practical direction of fit
On the face of it, “direction of fit” is just a metaphor. But as derived from Elisabeth Anscombe, the meaning of the phrase should be clear enough if cashed out in terms of propositional truth. A list of goods at the store may represent things to buy for dinner, in which case it prescribes a course of action and cannot properly called “true” or “false”.
Alternatively, it may figure in an observer’s report of the customer’s actions, in which case it aims at truth, depending on whether the items listed fit the way things are. Correspondingly, I will distinguish between “active”, or practical, and “passive”, or theoretical, direction of fit.
In the work of important thinkers inspired by the late Wittgenstein, reason has active direction of fit. And since these thinkers are concerned not just with human behaviour but with the proper place of formal conditions of thought and meaning within such behaviour, let me call them formal pragmatists.
To Jürgen Habermas, understanding an assertion means understanding the “acceptance conditions” of a statement within the practice of giving and asking for reasons (Habermas 1984, 428ff.). To Robert Brandom, it means “keeping score” of linguistic entitlements and attributions (Brandom 1994, ch. 3). To Ernst Tugendhat, the meaning of “truth” is its role in the “verification game” of assertion (Tugendhat 1976, ch. 15). And to John Searle, making an
assertion is committing oneself to future acts of abiding by or changing one’s opinions (Searle 2001, ch. 6).
The “passive” or theoretical direction of fit then concerns only the verification part of what is pragmatically entailed by the act of making an assertion. In endorsing a move within a linguistic space of reasons, I respond to a challenge made by other people and invite their response in turn, taking cognitive responsibility for consistency and for providing evidence and further reasons. It follows then that even theoretical commitment has prescriptive or practical direction of fit (Searle 2001, 172ff.), and so just like in Kant, theoretical reason is a subclass of practical reason:
Theoretical reason is that branch of practical reason that concerns reasons for accepting, recognizing, believing, and asserting propositions. (Searle 2001, 120)
Not everyone will accept the central role played by external, linguistic behaviour in these theories. But the point about active direction of fit seems no less valid for mental counterparts of acts like asserting and describing. And what I take Kant to mean by claiming that it always be possible for an “I think” to accompany one’s representations (Kant Ak 3: B 132) is the active and reflexive nature of endorsing or committing oneself to some belief.
As living beings, we distinguish between consciousness of objects and reflexive consciousness of self. As rational living beings, we also have a notion of objective truth, and so we distinguish between an act of reflexive commitment to what we have reason to believe, and the objects of the belief. Therefore, concerning two thoughts A and B, thinking “I now observe in me an objective transition from A to B, so I believe B” makes no sense. I simply have to perform the act of endorsing B, thereby taking cognitive responsibility for its legitimation.
This act has practical direction of fit. Whereas the satisfaction conditions for “The boat is blue” are given by a situation of empirical verification, the satisfaction conditions for “I think that the boat is blue” are not supplied by me (or my “I”) as an object of description.
Rather, in conceiving of it as a rational response to reasons for holding the belief about the boat, I commit myself for the future to entertaining the same belief and what follows from it.
Therefore, being conscious of my own thinking is not a theoretical but a practical attitude.
And this I believe offers an answer to Schopenhauer’s polemics against Kant’s identification of reason and will.
Autonomy of reason…
Reserving the word Wille for “practical reason”, Kant wants to highlight certain aspects of his notion of reason, and one might suspect it is framed as a technical term indicating some vague connection as a substitute for real arguments. But let us take a closer look at the term’s normal meaning as well as at Kant’s possible arguments for identifying it with reason.
Talking about a person’s will, we mean something that can be “strong” or “weak”, and consider a strong-willed person to be someone who is able to act according to her own reason.
In this sense, we do not talk about will in animals or other beings that lack the capacity to behave in some definite manner because it accords with reason.
Reason in turn shares with will the practical direction of fit. As involved in apperceptive judgment (“I think…”), it shares the object-independent autonomy of thought in the first place. Furthermore, it operates independently of any relation to a world of objects. As the faculty of principles and inference and in its quest for coherence and unconditional completeness, reason wholly is and has to be its own judge.
In critically evaluating some particular logical transition, I do not refer to myself as an object or to states of affairs foreign to my conscious self. I have a reflexive awareness of myself as a subject, using my faculty of reason to correct my activity of reasoning. I may also reflect on general rules and principles as standards of correctness for the practice of using reason, and this may take the form of explicating truths of formal logic.4 As guiding mental or overt behaviour, such truths are reflexive prescriptions, testifying to the self-sufficiency of a reason autonomously “giving” itself its own laws.5
This means, in my role as a person endowed with reason, I prescribe principles and rules of rationality to myself as a bodily subject, and so the point of rational autonomy in Kant is not about freedom of construction or about choosing between reason and desire. It is about what governs choices and constructions.
After all, formal rationality is there to be discovered. But, firstly, the discovery must be the result of a subject’s free acceptance or conviction. Secondly, the practical nature of reason is still at play: Since there is no objective process underlying a logical transition, all I can do is exercise my ability to proceed from premise to conclusion. And, most important, these are not two separate steps, as I do not first discover theoretical truths about a transition and then perhaps continue by committing myself to accepting the conclusion. My discovery
4 As standards of correctness, principles of logic have a normative status shared with other morally neutral uses of reason. Kantian ”will” only applies to moral normativity, however, cf. my next section.
5 About the reflexivity of Kantian reason: O’Neill (1992).
consists in taking cognitive responsibility for proceeding from given premises, i.e. in an act with active direction of fit.
Generally, one might perhaps say that in listening to the voice of reason I listen to my own voice telling me what to do. Therefore, if someone asks, “Why should I tell myself to follow the requirements of reason?” the obvious answer is: “You already did, in understanding what reason requires”.6 Which means, reason is “practical”, in the wide sense of the word. So we are on the verge of identifying reason and will. Still, they are not coextensive, as this trait holds for reason simply in virtue of its direction of fit, i.e. for theoretical reason too.
…and of will
As practical in the wide sense, reason is involved in games and simulations, in public acts of reasoning about practical arrangements and theoretical opinions, and in the formal business of logical inference. In all such contexts, we speak about endorsing acts and beliefs, of commitments, and perhaps of carrying cognitive responsibility. But we do not always speak of duties and obligations and moral responsibility. All principles of reason simply are not moral principles. And we normally do not talk about “willing” the conclusion of an inference or a particular move in chess.
So Kant’s identification of will (Wille) and practical reason is not meant to apply to just any use of reason in theory building and other non-moral disciplines but only to a narrow, moral sense of “pure practical reason”. In this sense, logic is not a practical discipline, he says, having nothing to do with human will (Cf. Tolley 2006). And formal principles of logic and rationality are perhaps better called constitutive rather than normative, defining as they do what activities like drawing an inference or making a move within a language game consist in.
Still, due to their common direction of fit, will and reason may be seen as partly coinciding. As matters of truth telling and of keeping promises, the language games of assertion and appointment are of moral import, and so is the question of will: “Is that (lying;
breaking a promise) really what you will?” In taking a position on that, one has to consider conflicts with other wants one might have. Accordingly, Kant conceives of the moral law as not only formally constituted by reason but as governing conflicts between reason and pre- given interests as well.
6 Which is exactly what Parfit is unwilling to accept (2011b, 682).
Having as its supreme principle the preservation of reason, the moral law rules by a necessity different from the one to be found in laws of nature: Regardless of what other interests you might have, this is what you ought to do! That means, when confronted with interests foreign to reason, I still tell myself what is required by rationality.
We thus have a clear notion of a morally autonomous will: If in choosing between norms of reason and other interest my will is identical with reason, then, in respecting a morality of reason, will obeys itself. As for the possible reality disclosed by the same notion, it comes quite naturally to say that in prescribing actions I express my will. Therefore, identifying reason with will has at least the appearance of being more than a verbal trick, and the real issue probably is about the active or practical nature of reason.
On a phenomenological level, this notion of autonomy also captures a distinction central to human consciousness of free will. As moral subjects, we have some awareness of what willing, and doing, the right or rational thing would amount to. And so we have a notion of freedom of choice (Willkür) in obeying or not obeying the dictates of our own rational will (Wille). Therefore, on the one hand, Kantian “will” seems to be psychologically real. On the other hand, it contains a non-psychological standard of evaluation about which one may also be ignorant.
Reflexive, non-psychological truths
To Parfit, reasons about which one may be ignorant are objective facts, for example about the properties of some particular medicine. But one may also be ignorant about principles of action with practical direction of fit.
Take the game of chess. There may be rules that one was never told about; one may be mistaken about the best thing to do on the chessboard; and given a possible configuration of pieces, there may be countless rational things to do about which no human being has ever entertained a thought. The rules and moves are independent of the mental states or attitudes of players, and the rationality of their content is there to be discovered. This may very well be brought out by formulations of “truths” about rules and acts of chess. But then we are not dealing with theoretical truths based on objective facts but on actions that are neither true nor false.
Discovering reasons for taking a medicine is based on objective facts obtaining independently of rational agency, whereas reasons for performing a move in chess wholly depend on it. Just like a person misconstruing transitions from premise to conclusion in logic
as an objective process, so a bystander to chess who is not in the first person able to consider
“what to do next” cannot be said to understand a truth about what goes on. The reason for this is that knowing truths about the game basically means knowing a practice. “This is how the bishop moves” is not a description but an instruction: “Move the bishop like this!”
Accordingly, “I now move the bishop to x” is not a description but a statement of intention. It may, however, be rendered as a truth about the figure too: “The bishop moves to x”. But such “truths” of chess are second-order objectifications of reflexive agent knowledge – with practical direction of fit. And any truth with practical direction of fit may be considered the same way. So taking the moral law to be a practical principle of rational will with the same direction of fit as rules of chess, does not mean deriving its content from psychological states or attitudes, or from liberties in choosing what to do – at least not more so than in general statements of what to do in rule-governed behaviour.
There is of course the difference that chess is just a game without universal application. But universality does not mean theoretical objectivity, and the question is why the practical nature of a principle should make its validity any less strict or more psychology- dependent than a theoretical truth. At the same time, the parallel with ethics is clear enough.
Making up my mind about a rational move in my role as a chess player is not an intermediate step taken before performing the act of committing myself to it. I just cannot but tell myself what I ought to do with the figures. Similarly, in my role as a subject endowed with reason, I cannot but tell myself how I ought morally to act.
One may not be wholly convinced by every argument offered by Parfit against Blackburn, Frankfurt, and other “subjectivist” opponents. But for the sake of argument, let me accept them all as valid against psychologism in moral philosophy and theories of rationality.
As we now see, that does not make them valid arguments for Parfit’s objectivism as a theory of objective truth. Becoming conscious of one’s practical reason or rational will at the foundation of the moral law may be a real discovery of truth too, albeit of a practical kind.
Furthermore, turning from meta-ethics to normative ethics, this may contribute to clarifying the distinction between moral consequentialism and deontology.
Categorical imperatives
What is meant by a person being able to “will her maxim” as a general law? As already mentioned, Kant, in one of his explications, points to problems with willing a maxim not to get help in situations of need. And this, as Parfit points out, seems to depend on character
traits or psychological characteristics of the agent. But including practical but psychology- independent truths of rationality in the notion of will yields a different picture.7
Acting according to a maxim of respecting one’s will means following a policy of only satisfying given wants on the condition of preserving one’s own rationality. Furthermore, ethics has to do with treating others according to a principle of formal equality. Combining this principle with a principle of rational self-preservation, one gets a maxim of helping others in need: As generalized, a maxim of not helping might destroy one’s own rational will. So it would amount to a practical contradiction: of preserving and not preserving one’s will.
For similar reasons of rational self-preservation, not only would a generalized maxim of truth telling and promising conditioned on non-moral interests represent a contradiction in the conception of such acts. And Kant’s point is not about general, bad consequences for people living in a society without the praxeis of what may properly be called “assertion” or
“promising”. He is concerned about the disastrous consequences for the agent herself:
Without the possibility of performing assertions or promises, one’s rational capacities would be seriously thwarted – and so the corresponding duties are labelled “categorical”, as opposed to the “hypothetical” ones conditioned by further effects on oneself or other people.8
Kant’s notion of rational will obviously has a bearing on his concept of moral autonomy too. Parfit is not the first one to ask what the will’s power to “bind oneself” really amounts to. As Thomas Hobbes pointed out, a person with the physical power to bind has the power to release, and this also seems to hold for the same person’s power to bind and release oneself morally.
But again, as far as the autonomy of will is partly identical with the autonomy of reason, the notion of self-binding makes perfectly good sense. It is not a question of a will conditioned by given wants deciding to “bind” itself to some externally given norm or instrumental rationality. It is about a person’s capacity to act in accordance with her own faculty of reason telling her which wants to accept and not accept. As listening to such dictates, one is perhaps free to accept them or not as guiding one’s behaviour. But the choices of acceptance are about one’s own rational prescriptions about which one has no choice.
Conceiving of the categorical imperative in this way very much depends on my claim to the effect that statements about reason and rationality, just like human will, have active
7 In what follows I am indebted to Seiriol Morgan. Cf. Morgan (2009, 31ff.).
8 Perhaps one might see in this a parallel to the reason given by Kant for the duty of entering a modern state, leaving behind the state of nature: In that state, the rationality of acting morally is conditioned by the will of other people, wherefore one’s moral and rational capacities are thwarted.
direction of fit, immediately prescribing action. Now let me present some further remarks to bolster this claim.
Rationality as object of assessment
The central fact, I believe, concerns the attitude and action of taking a position on something, or assessing or evaluating a judgment or opinion: Rationality is something about which one can make up one’s mind as an object of critical assessment.
This of course we do all the time. We make up our mind about the attitudes or opinions of other people, about what we ourselves thought yesterday, or about the thought content of some possible truth (like “that it is snowing now”). What makes no sense however is making up one’s mind about cars and trees, rivers and earthquakes, numbers and formulas
… i.e. things or events referred to by first-order singular terms not already containing some thought content.
For example, we cannot possibly take a position on a car itself but we can assess the attitude of other people towards it or the content of a possible truth about it, as expressed by
“that it is black”. In the first case, we are engaged in a real or virtual dialogue with other thinking subjects; in the second case we consider abstract thought content.
Concerning the latter case, there are principles and norms and practical reasons about which one is ignorant or motivationally unmoved. But as “laws of thought” and action, even such principles have practical direction of fit. How else could we try making up our mind about them as more or less rational? Bringing principles of logic to consciousness, one immediately accepts them as rational, and that one could not do were they objects of theoretical truth – at least not on the presumption of some modest truth-theoretical realism.
Taking a position on an opinion or on some abstract thought content (“that it is black”) means taking a position on it as true or false; as rational or irrational. For that very reason one cannot take a stand on that in virtue of which a truth is true and not false, i.e. its truth maker.
Parfit writing On What Matters presumably is the truth maker of “Parfit wrote On What Matters” as uttered by me now. But facts are known to be stubborn things, and if facts or existing things or states of affairs obtaining are what make opinions true, they cannot be objects of assessment or evaluation.9
9 Alternatively, “facts” may be seen as equivalent to “truths”. But then they contain truth bearers and are not truth makers.
So it seems that rationality is no proper object of theoretical truth, and bearing this in mind let us take a look at the chapters on truth and ontology towards the end of Parfit’s magnum opus.
There are objective facts or truths about morality and rationality, he writes, but such truths are said not to be “ontological” in the existence-implying sense. Their objectivity consists in their – truth. So the notion of truth is at the core of his theoretical edifice: There are truths of logic and mathematics and about possible worlds and this is as objective as can be. Thus “objectivity” is defined by “truth”, making “existence” a derivative notion:
If nothing had ever existed in any ontological sense, there would not have been any stars or atoms, nor would there have been space, or time, or God. But it would have been true that nothing ever existed. As we can also claim, there would have been the truth that nothing existed in an ontological sense. This truth would have existed in a different non- ontological sense. […] There would also have been some irreducible normative truths.
(2011b, 485)
One the one hand, these are fascinating claims, with which I should very much like to agree. If on the other hand the direction of fit-distinction is in fact a basic one, one should ask oneself what kind of statements one is dealing with here. Talking about what could or might have been the case, perhaps one makes a move within a space of possible linguistic or mental action, with practical direction of fit. If that were Parfit’s position, he should be welcomed into the ranks of the great thinkers of transcendental philosophy, German idealism, and phenomenology. But it seems that it cannot be his position.
To be sure, the “direction of fit” terminology is not Parfit’s (and as far as I can tell, nowhere to be found in On What Matters). And as based on a distinction between “mind” and
“world”, it presupposes some ontology of truth makers or satisfaction conditions foreign to his notion of theoretical truth (2011b, 749). But his notion of normative truths cannot be said to have active direction of fit either. Consequently, in dealing with Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s polemics against “command theories” of ethics, he is eager to explain why he agrees that no imperative formulation of moral norms will do (2011b, 584ff.).10 Thus whatever one might think about his objective, normative facts, they are not practical or prescriptive.
Pain and practical reason
10 For more about this, see his entry on Normativity, “imperatival or prescriptive”, in (2011b, 820).
Now let me end by sketching an alternative to Parfit’s objectivist notion of reasons. We have reasons not to prefer some momentary present pleasure at the cost of later permanent agony, he says. And this he holds to be an objective fact. But is it really? I think we should raise the question whether there are objective truths about pain and other feelings in the first place, in which case, from an expressivist, more or less Wittgensteinian position, we get a rather different picture.
To me, my pain is not an object of propositional truth but a reflexive awareness of a spontaneous impulse to overt action. And otherwise, how could we recognize the pain of other people? Furthermore, knowing their pain is not a case of propositional truth either.
Since all we have to go on is their behaviour, the subjective nature of their pain evades us as an object of detached description. We have no access to it without some kind of engagement, be it a case of compassion, sadistic pleasure, or other experienced states – which in turn we
“know” as an urge to action.
It thus seems likely that knowledge of one’s own and other people’s pain essentially takes place within a community of action, with the corresponding truths having practical rather than theoretical direction of fit. To repeat, this does not make such statements desire- dependent. But it does seem to make truths about momentary versus long-term pleasure and pain reflexive and engaged expressions of rational ways of living rather than theoretical statements about objective matters of fact. And so it is with reasons for pain behaviour.
Knowing a logical transition from premise to conclusion consists in practically knowing a way of proceeding. In the same way, knowing why to avoid being in a state of agony consists in knowing a way of behaving. There is no intermediate step of theoretical knowledge about something “counting in favour of” a particular pain behaviour. Rather, what
“counts” is derived from a basic, rationally informed human practice.
*
In sum, what I find lacking in Parfit’s work, impressive though it is, is the reflexive turn of modernity. This turn may be prefigured by the Socratic gnothi s’auton as the foundation of ethics, in contradistinction to knowledge of objects. Important further steps along that road were taken by St. Augustine, Descartes, and Kant, all somehow contributing to the Enlightenment’s notion of autonomy: A valid moral reason is a reason whose corresponding action enhances the life of free citizens ruled by their own faculty of reason. And this is a
“truth” with active direction of fit.
References
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Kant, Immanuel. Ak. Collected Works. The Prussian Academy edition. (Volume: page)
Kant, Immanuel. 1993. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, transl. J. W. Ellington.
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