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    Carmelics

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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Psychologism about motivating reasons entails that we can never act for a good reason.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.To act for a good reason, one must act for a reason that is or could be a fact.
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    • 2.According to psychologism, motivating reasons are mental states.
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    • 3.A mental state can never be a fact.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.On psychologism, motivating reasons are belief-desire pairs, which represent the world but are not themselves worldly facts (Smith 1994).
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    • 2.A reason that merely represents a good reason inherits no normative force from what it represents, just as a map of gold is not gold.
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    • 3.Therefore, the psychological state qua motivator is normatively inert, meaning one never acts *for* a good reason but only *under the influence* of a representation of one.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Parfit's distinction between object-given and state-given reasons shows that states which cause action generate only state-given reasons, which are by definition not reasons grounded in the objective value of outcomes.
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    • 2.Good reasons, as Scanlon argues in 'Being Realistic About Reasons', must be grounded in facts about the world that obtain independently of whether any agent has a relevant attitude.
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    • 3.Psychologism collapses this independence by making the agent's mental state constitutive of the motivating reason, thereby severing the connection to mind-independent normative facts that 'good reasons' require.
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