The aim of this collection is to provide a comprehensive basis for
understanding the sources, nature and stakes of practical conflicts. As the
editors stress in their excellent introduction, this is a good way to make
questions about the scope of practical reason come into focus. They are,
without doubt, perfectly right about this.

Practical conflicts consist in the fact that the agent cannot act on all
of her reasons for action: the agent has a reason to do A, and has a reason to
do B, but cannot act on both of them. Given the diversity of the reasons in
question (moral and non-moral reasons, values, desires, preferences, commitments,
obligations, and so on), practical conflicts can take various forms. In other
words, they are not limited to the classical (and surely excessively
emphasized) opposition between moral and prudential reasons (by
"prudential reasons", one should understand reasons favoring our
well-being). To my mind, one of the strengths of this collection is precisely
to address, besides the conflict between moral and non-moral reasons (see the
contributions by Velleman, Korsgaard, and Chang), conflicts that arise inside
morality (White, Schaber, Elster), conflicts of desires (Richardson, Levi,
Baumann), the relations of conflicts to self-control (Mele) and to free will
(Guckes), and conflicts of reason in their most general forms (Raz, Betzler).
The other strength of the book is simply the overall quality of the various
contributions: most of the papers are of first-rate quality, and each of them
is highly stimulating.

The first two papers, by Velleman and Korsgaard, are written from a
Kantian standpoint. For Kant, the link between rationality and morality is
analytical. In other words, there can be no conflicts (or, at least, no
irresolvable conflict) between moral and prudential reasons: if one acts
morally, one is free from such conflicts. This thesis seems open to various
objections, or deserves anyway some clarification. For example, the idea that
being immoral utterly implies being irrational will appear counter-intuitive to
many people. In his "Willing the Law" (pp. 27-56), Velleman tackles
with this complex question and sets out what he labels a "concessive
Kantianism". Whereas Kant argues that wrongdoing entails irrationality
both in the agent and in the action, Velleman’s concessive Kantianism is only
committed to the first claim.

Korsgaard devotes her article "The Myth of Egoism" (pp. 57-91)
— the only paper already published — to an examination of the normativity of
moral reasons. According to the "egoistic principle", which is here
Korsgaard’s target, all practical reasons are instrumental and motivation is
grounded in desire. This principle appears plausible to many, probably because
it seems to explain how the practical reason has the capacity to motivate.

However, the existence of practical conflicts sets a problem to the
egoistic principle. Take for example a conflict between moral and prudential
reasons. The egoistic principle, as such, cannot weigh up these reasons:
practical reasoning must be based on a normative standard which is different
from the egoistic principle. In fact, it is the goodness of the reasons
promoting one’s project which determine its importance and exert motivational
force over our conduct. But these reasons can be of various kinds — and there
is at first sight no good reason to exclude moral reasons from them. In fact,
the egoistic principle tells us that we must treat a certain conception of the
good as having normativity over our conduct, but such a conception may be less
substantiated (and philosophically less neutral) than its adepts think.
According to Korsgaard, moral and prudential reasons display comparable
motivational structure; they differ only in the content of what they require on
us.

In "Thinking about Conflicts of Desire" (pp. 92-117), Henry
Richardson provides a critique of the Humean model of human deliberation. This
model forces us to think about our desires in a two-dimensional way, namely in
terms of their objects and their strengths. 
Richardson finds this model unconvincing and sets out his own
characterization of practical reasoning, which is inspired by Aristotle.
Richardson adds to the dimensions already mentioned (direction and strength of
desires) a third one, which he calls "place": "the dimension of place
indicates something about the location of the desire’s object within the
agent’s values or ends" (p. 103). The image of human deliberation
which emerges from Richardson’s analysis has much for it — much more, to my
mind, than its rivals. It consists in three "states": a belief that I
can do some thing, the perception that this thing is good and the desire of this
thing for the pertinent reason (that is, because it is good).

With Ruth Chang’s "Putting Together Morality and Well-Being"
(pp. 118-158), we come again to grips with the putative conflict between
morality and well-being. According to Chang, the conflict between prudential
and moral values can (in principle) always be solved by appeal to a more
comprehensive value (often nameless) that includes the conflicting values as
parts. This covering value provides a common evaluative standard that enables
the assessment of the relative goodness of the values in conflict.

Chang has clearly put her finger on a significant phenomenon: a third
term is often necessary for comparing and assessing two heterogeneous values.
However, I am not really convinced by her overall argumentation: the statute of
such covering values remains a bit unclear, and the "orthodox
approaches" criticized by Chang (this label includes thinkers as diverse
as Griffin, Kamm, Nagel, Parfit, Raz, Korsgaard and Scanlon) are not without
resources to deal with the problem at hand.

In a very dense paper ("The Second Worst in Practical
Conflicts", pp. 159-171), Isaac Levi argues against classical decision
theory, notably the two following theses: first, the idea that rational agents
have strict preferences orderings and always choose for the best; second, the
idea that the preferences of rational agents are revealed by their choices.
According to Levi, one can rate two options as equally optimal and yet choose
rationally. Moreover, things are more complicated than what decision theorists
suppose: even if detaching preference or valuing from choice behavior is
excluded, the tight connection presupposed by classical decision is irrealist,
especially when there are various ways of evaluating the various values which
come into conflict (p. 162).

Levi proposes to give up the classical criterion of rational decision
theory, which he labels "V-maximality", and to replace it by
"V-admissibility". To put things in a non-technical way, an
option is V-admissible when it comes out to be optimal in keeping with
at least one standard of evaluation in the partial ordering, whereas an option
is V‑maximal when there is no other option strictly preferred to
it according to the partial ordering (remember that a relation is a partial
ordering of a domain A — here, the domain of the available options of choice
— if and only if the relation is reflexive, antisymmetric and transitive in
A). Note that Richardson’s and Levi’s papers constitute powerful and
complementary attacks on rational choice theory.

In "Personal Practical Conflicts" (pp. 172-196), Joseph Raz
attempts to explain what conflicts are and what questions they raise. According
to Raz, we have two distinct notions of single-agents conflicts: one concerns
the possibility of there being a right action in conflict situations; the other
if there is something unfortunate about conflicts. Raz believes that even if we
choose the right or the best option, there is still something unfortunate about
conflicts. He devotes his paper to an account of this fact. Conflicts are
unfortunate because, whatever does the agent (and even if he is blameless and
acts as good as possible), there remains an unsatisfied reason left behind.
Practical reason consists in recognizing and responding to reasons: inasmuch as
reasons for action are evaluative facts favoring action (reasons thus entail
that we should conform to them), the rational resolution of a conflict leaves
some reasons aside, without eliminating their binding force.

Raz’ remarkable paper paves the way for some of the following chapters
(especially those of Betzler, Baumann, and Schaber): indeed, whereas most of
the preceding papers assumed that practical conflicts could, at least in
principle, be rationally resolved, Raz and his followers are extremely
sensitive to the conditions that render the rational resolution of conflicts
tricky or inadequate.

Monika Betzler, in her "Sources of Practical Conflicts and Reasons
for Regret" (pp. 197-222), follows the patch laid down by Raz. She agrees
with him that practical conflicts, even when rationally resolved, still have
something unfortunate, as is shown by the phenomenon of regret. Of course,
those who believe that practical conflicts can be entirely resolved will
consider regret as an irrational emotion. Betzler disagrees with such a view of
regret and provides a very sensible analysis of this emotion. She shows
convincingly how regret may be a rational emotion: it motivates us to express
our evaluation of those pursuits and experiences that arise from commitments we
have to give up. In a word, regret responds to what we have reason to value
even if we cannot act on it as we would like.

Nicholas White’s "Conflicting Values and Conflicting Virtues"
(pp. 223-243) draws mainly on Socrates and Plato’s thoughts to examine the
following questions: is there any reason to think that a virtue can come into
conflict with other virtues; do the particular traits that we identify as
virtues conflict with each other? White directs our attention to the source of
the difficulty of making comparisons between different values or options.
According to him, it is not so much the intrinsic incomparability of
conflicting options which is the source of practical conflicts, but the
indefiniteness of the conditions under which an evaluative standard should be
determined.

Peter Baumann’s "Involvement and Detachment: A Paradox of Practical
Reason" (pp. 244-261) sets out a paradox for practical reason
corresponding to the famous "preface paradox" for theoretical reason.
The paradox concerns the conflicting attitudes a rational agent can have
towards his own goals. It can be stated as follows. An agent wants all his
goals to be realized: if one asks him, for every one of his goals, if he wants
it to be realized, he will answer "yes" — if he answered otherwise,
these goals would not be goals at all. On the other hand, he doesn’t
want all his goals to be realized: a completely successful life is not
desirable, in fact (it would lose its point). So we’re both involved and detached
towards our own goals. Baumann doesn’t see how we could escape this
contradiction.

In his fine paper ("Outcomes of Internal Conflicts in the Sphere of
Akrasia and Self-Control", pp. 262-278), which completes his
preceding works on akrasia,Alfred Mele analyses the sources of
inner conflicts. Drawing on results from the psychological literature, Mele
shows that how various forms of biases influence the formation and retention of
our beliefs about what action should be done.

The next two chapters address the nature of moral dilemmas. In an
incisive paper ("Are There Insolvable Moral Conflicts?", pp.
279-294), Peter Schaber takes sides against Alan Donagan’s moral rationalism.
According to Donagan, moral theories cannot allow for dilemmas (that is to say,
insolvable moral conflicts): the existence of a moral dilemma is only a symptom
of the fact that a particular moral theory needs to be revised (just like the
existence of self-contradictions in naive set theory was a sign that this
theory was in some way defective). Schaber shows convincingly that there really
exist insolvable moral conflicts.

Moral conflicts are insolvable if they meet the following conditions.
First, the reasons favouring the conflicting options must be incommensurable.
By this, Schaber doesn’t simply mean that one is neither option better nor
equal in value than the other: he also means (this is the idea of
"practical incommensurability", pp. 285-287) that these reasons
should not be compared. For example, one should not, if one has the slightest
idea of what friendship is, compare reasons for caring about a friend and
reasons for accepting a large amount of money in exchange of that friendship.
Second, reasons must be symmetrical: neither of the conflicting reasons is
dominated by the other. Provided these conditions are met, we face real
insolvable moral conflicts: whatever the agent does, it is in some respect bad
without being wrong.

"Transitional justice" refers to the
process of coming to terms with the past in the transition to democracy. Such a
process includes trials, administrative and professional purges, restitution of
property, compensation… Transitional justice raises many conceptual problems,
for which we lack firm intuitions. In his highly stimulating "Moral
Dilemmas of Transitional Justice" (pp. 295-315), Jon Elster relies
extensively on empirical material to show how our intuitions remain mute when
we have to come to terms with the predemocratic past. Elster is probably right
when he says that the core dilemma in transitional justice is between
substantive justice (punishing those who acted unjustly) and procedural justice
(avoiding retroactive legislation). Elster addresses other topics, like the
tension between consequentialist and nonconsequientialist arguments in transitional
justice. His paper is brief and deliberately sketchy, but full of insights.

Barbara Guckes’ "Do Conflicts Make Us Free" (pp. 316-333)
stands a bit apart in the collection. Discussing the connections between
practical conflicts, free will, and responsibility, Guckes argues that the
existence of practical conflicts is a necessary condition for our acting
freely. She argues from an "incompatibilist" point of view, that is,
the idea that we have control over our actions only if we have an alternative
way of acting. However, this alternative way of acting must be rational: we
have control over our actions only if we act in accordance with reasons. And
there seems to be here a conceptual trouble, since after an examination of
three incompatibilist positions (those of Dennett, Wiggins, and Kane), Guckes
concludes that we still don’t understand how an agent can rationally control an
indetermined action.

This remarkable collection is a much valuable contribution to practical
philosophy. Some papers are quite technical and will require hard but rewarding
work for the non-specialist. It is to be noted that besides philosophers,
economists will gain much profit from Levi’s paper and jurists and political theorists from Elster’s.

 

© 2005 Guillaume Dye

 

Guillaume Dye, Guillaume Dye, Ph.D., (University of Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne), Paris, France.

Categories: Philosophical