Is there a meaning in the question: ‘why should one want to
be rational?’. The same question has been raised several times about ‘why
should one want to be autonomous at all?’. The book is part of a long tradition
that seeks to discover and defend at the same time a fundamental normative
principle applicable to action by means other than the production of a still
more fundamental principle (p. 4). In the course of such an effort Joshua Gert
comes up with a novel account of objective and subjective rationality and a
theory of normative reasons. Gert’s whole argument is based on the success or
failure to establish and defend the distinction between the justifying and
requiring rules of practical reasons. It is this particular distinction
that, according to him, has to be consistent with the following two claims: (1)
morally required action is always rationally permissible, and (2) not all
immoral action is irrational (p. 82). To use an example ‘altruistic reasons can
never, in themselves, rationally require action, even though such
reasons can justify actions that stand in need of justification’ (p. 89). Let
us then summarize the argument by following the structure of the chapters. Nevertheless,
at this point one has to stress the fact that the linkages between chapters are,
to a certain degree, a bit loose and there is repetition of some themes.

Chapter 2 starts with an effort to
challenge and demolish the thesis, ascribed mainly to those who defend
internalism about practical reason, that sufficiently justifying reasons
will eventually yield requirement. This is termed by Gert as the ‘limiting
view’ and is analytically opposed to the ‘commitment view’, according to which
one commits oneself to a belief or action at the point at which one takes one’s
justification to have become a theoretical or practical requirement. The
argument of the chapter is aimed mainly at philosophers who defend the view
that theoretical rationality is the model for practical rationality.  Gert
argues that we have to get rid of such a view of practical rationality. In
other words, it is not irrational if one fails to act on ‘purely justificatory
reasons’, because justification is logically distinct from requirement as a
function of the normative reasons relevant to rationality. Saving other people
from death and pain justifies but does not require one to risk pain or injury
(p. 26). What then about the standard Kantian view that immoral action is also
irrational?  Gert defends the opposite view, i.e. that it is not, for example,
irrational to fail to donate money. In conclusion, ‘purely justificatory
reasons’, such as altruistic reasons, have no power to make actions rationally required.

            Chapter 3 aims to defend the above stated view
against internalism about practical reasons, namely the view that rational
agents will be motivated to some degree by any practical reasons of which they
are aware, and which are relevant to their choice of action. The objection here
is specifically directed against the attached presumption that ‘all practical
reasons are prima facie rational requirements’ (p. 43), which means that acting
against such a reason is either acting irrationally or based on a countervailing
reason of equal, or greater, strength.  Gert assesses Korsgaard’s work on the
normativity of practical reason, a famous Kantian internalist committed to the
aforementioned view, but he argues that we are not forced to accept it, given
that this view proves inadequate in a number of altruistic actions.

            Chapter 4 answers to the need of clarifying what
principles of rationality we are willing to recognize. Gert makes clear that
the basic normative notion he wants to work with is not ‘reasons for action’ simpliciter
but an action’s wholesale rational status (p. 62).  This goes
against, for example, T.M. Scanlon’s strategy in his (1998) What We Owe to
Each Other.  In Gert’s view, which he emphasizes as much as he can, it is
more profitable to take ‘wholesale rational status’ as the basic unit of
normative assessment, as it is more profitable to take the sentence as the
basic unit of linguistic meaning instead of individual words. If one takes ‘a
reason’ to be basic in justifying an action it is unclear how such a normative
reason is relevant to an action unless based on an ‘all-things-considered-oughtness’
reasonableness.  According to reason-based accounts the rational status of an
action is a function of the reasons that apply to it.  Here, Gert has provided
us with a functional role analysis of reasons; one determines the strengths of
reasons based on that and not on an antecedent notion of some reasons being
stronger or weaker than others.  Yet, it does not follow that if one reason is
stronger than another in the justifying role that it is necessarily also
stronger in the requiring one.  For with regard to justifying strength, it does
not matter whose interests are involved; whereas the opposite is true for
requiring strength.  Moreover, in the moral realm, requiring strength is not
merely a higher degree of justifying strength.  Finally, Gert presents his
notion of ‘basic’ – in the sense that they do not need any other considerations
standing behind them – reasons in the form of the following: ‘in the sense of ”rational”
that has to do with objective rationality, a consideration is a basic reason
if and only if it plays one of the functional roles (i) or (ii) and has
constant strengths, and is comparable to all other reasons, within and across
these roles

(i)                
making it rationally permissible to do actions that would, without it,
be irrational, or

(ii)              
making it rationally required to do actions that would, without it, be
rationally permissible to omit

If a reason can fulfill role (i), then it is said to have justifying
strength. If a reason can fulfill role (ii), then it is said to have requiring
strength’ (p. 80).     

In support of this view chapter 5
establishes the claim that normative reasons do not have only one strength
value used in determining the rational status of actions.  This would simply
imply that there is generally a unique action that one has most reason to
perform. Following the same pattern there are different strengths for
justifying and requiring reasons and it is possible for the strongest reasons
to not rationally require action.  Gert counters two possible strategies
of avoiding that, namely by retreating to a satisfying view of rationality or
by appealing to the notions of incommensurability and exclusionary permissions as
developed in Joseph Raz’s work on practical reason.  Next, and before reaching
the core part of his exposition, Gert is attacking ideal motive accounts of
practical reason which are accounts that take the coming together of normative
and motivating reasons as unproblematically making the following ‘unique
assumption’: any given consideration would generate a unique degree of
motivation in any given agent, if that agent were ideal in relevant respects
(pp. 113-114).  Instead, in chapter 6, he advocates a range of acceptable
degrees of motivation distinct from the notion of vagueness. 

            The center of Gert’s full defense of his
argument is clearly chapter 7 which comes under the title ‘Two concepts of
rationality’.  There he gives an account of both objective and subjective
rationality.  The author needs such an account in order to defend further what he
largely took for granted in chapter 4, namely that there is a way of
determining which actions were rational and which were not, exactly the point
of the ‘wholesale rational status’ thesis.  First of all, the relation between
actions one should never do, those that are ‘objectively irrational’, and
actions that might indicate some kind of failure in mental functioning, those
that are ‘subjectively irrational’, are of different natures.  This is
absolutely important because it shows that ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ do not
stand to each other as container and contained.  Thus, subjective is not
objective rationality relativized to the beliefs of the agent, and objective is
not relativized to the beliefs the agent should have.  These features
come to characterize the ‘official’ definition of what counts as objectively ‘irrational’:

An action is objectively irrational
iff (that is, ‘if and only if’) virtually everyone would regard the action as
irrational, if they were fully informed about all nontrivial consequences of
the action (140).

On the other hand, the ‘official’ view of subjective
irrationality is that:

An action is subjectively
irrational iff it proceeds from a state of the agent that (a) normally puts an
agent at increased risk of performing objectively irrational actions, and (b)
has its adverse effect by influencing the formation of intentions in the light
of sensory evidence and beliefs (160).

            One might think that this is also the end of the
book.  Yet, Gert offers us two final chapters explaining mainly how the
psychology of a rational agent is related to the reasons available to her. Chapter
8 argues that internalism might be true only about requiring reasons but that
we should be externalists about justifying reasons. Finally, chapter 9 deals with
the nature and significance of normative judgments for practical rationality.

            It is not an easy task to give an assessment of
Gert’s success in articulating and defending his complex argument.  To be sure,
the basic distinction between justifying and requiring reasons is very helpful
in making us clarify the relation between morality and rationality. Nevertheless,
I am not entirely convinced of how he moves from such a distinction to the
actual transition from the one to the other, or as Gert likes to call
it, a gap between justifying and requiring reasons.  However, the gap has somehow
to be bridged.  Gert says that it is not a gap between some and none, or
between more and less.  For example, there are a number of difficult issues
involved in the formulation of Gert’s ‘official’ view of objective and
subjective irrationality mentioned above, such as that significant expressions
like ‘fully informed’ are being left without definition. Another crucial aspect
remains, in my view, underdeveloped, not to say neglected, and refers to the
exact meaning of the notion of ‘strength’ and the use of terminology like
normative or motivational ‘force’. After certain developments in natural
sciences, it should be about time to radically revise our notions of ‘force’ in
humanistic disciplines as well.  

In the end, this proves to be a
dense, technical (compare, for example, pp. 92-101), extremely rigorous but
utterly rewarding piece of work that provides a lot of help in our way to
clarify certain misconceptions about the status of practical rationality. In my
view, it is more suited to professional philosophers and advanced students than
to undergraduates or people that come across philosophy for the first time.

 

© 2006 Kostas Koukouzelis

 

Kostas Koukouzelis, Ph.D., Methodology,
History and Philosophy of Science Department, University of Athens    

Categories: Philosophical