"Internal and External Reasons"
by Bernard Williams
in Moral Luck
pages 101-113
by Bernard Williams
1981
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
In this paper, Williams discusses the notion of a reason for action (though he might equally well have been talking about a reason to believe). An internal reason is a reason such that there is some rational progress from their current set of reasons / beliefs / desires / values / etc to that reason. An external reason need not have any such link. In brief, Williams argues that the notion of an external reason makes no sense, because it is part of the nature of reasons that they are linked to action.
In some ways, I am a rather unsympathetic person: I do not have a lot of sympathy for people considered in the abstract. I tend to be rather unforgiving of failings, moral and otherwise: if someone did something wrong, regardless of their reasons for it, they did something wrong. On the other hand, to follow Williams - in a way - I don't think there's any point in just telling people that, as it were. Just beating on people serves no point, unless one enjoys the feeling of righteous anger. Rather, the right thing to do is to try and show them the error of their ways. And if we want to show them the error of their ways, that means starting from what they believe now - from who they are now - and figuring out how they could come to see the truth - in other words, offering them internal, rather than external, reasons. There's no point in discussing a truth that they could never get to.
(It is also important to note that we are rarely in a position to understand what another can and cannot come to believe, and also that we are rarely in a position of certainty with regard to what is right).
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2 comments:
On my view reasons for action and reasons for belief could not be more different-- but you knew that.
"I tend to be rather unforgiving of failings, moral and otherwise: if someone did something wrong, regardless of their reasons for it, they did something wrong."
I want to say that the point is precisely that there is no list of wrong "things that happen" such that someone can "do" them, without our taking into account reasons-- no one can be properly said to intentionally do a thing except for a reason, and reasons are constitutive of the descriptions under which an action is intentional (namely, under which the "what happens" is an action at all). So reasons are "parts" of actions, and if we produce a list of bad actions, we'll also be producing descriptions which bear out the reasons for those acts being bad acts (murder is wrong, but killing in war is not murder; negligence has different consequences than deliberate misdeed, though the negligent act may "look the same as" the fully felicitously intentional one).
Things that look the same "on the outside" may be different actions depending on the reasons which are "on the inside," but in a fully-developed version of the view I'm espousing this distinction between inner and outer won't even make sense.
On my view this whole Williams paper fails to attend to some important distinctions. Check out that Elijah Milgram article in the SEP on practical reason-- search 'Williams,' and read that paragraph. You might have to read the whole Candace Vogler section.
I have so much action-theoretical stuff to say about the oral sex post that I'm going to wait until I've finished finals. Sex is a very fruitful topic for action theory, because we have such sophisticated and subtle ethical practices surrounding it. I am definitely behind your wanting to say that "the nature of actions is not written into the world," because of some of the things I've said above.
Preliminarily: sexual desire, as it is relevant to ethics, is not a feeling; and also that the presence and absence of feelings are not what we should be worrying about when thinking about the good or bad of this variety of sexual activity instantiated in this way.
I guess I should've noticed the ambiguity in what I was saying. I'm definitely behind you on the connection between actions and reasons: different reasons make different actions. What I meant was something different - something closer to explanatory reasons, e.g. "he had a bad childhood." In other words, I meant something closer to "excuse" than "reason."
Regarding Williams: I don't really mean to get behind canonical Williams. For example, the way I put things is consistent with thinking that there are, in fact, reasons which are universally valid. Indeed, while I am tempted to say that Millgram is right to say that Williams' position is psychologistic, I don't think mine is.
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