Alan Goldman’s Reasons from Within is a welcome contribution to the long-standing debate concerning what generates our reasons for action.  The question at the heart of Goldman’s book is whether or not an agent’s practical reasons are generated by their subjective internal concerns and desires or whether there are objective values ‘out there’ in the world which guide, or constrain, an agent’s practical rationality.  The conflict concerning the source of our practical deliberation is known as the internal versus external reasons debate, and Goldman presents a thorough and lucid argument for reasons internalism, the view that all of an agent’s practical reasons derive from, and are motivated by, their subjective desires and concerns.  He also maintains there are no objective values or external reasons for action.

Goldman states that practical deliberation is either a case of ‘automatically, magically [or] evolutionarily’ being able to respond rationally to, and to be appropriately motivated to maximize objective value, or it is the case that our reasons reflect the motivations we have reflected in our subjective desires; purely what has value for the agent relative to their specific temporal state (p. 6).  He finds the latter internalist position far more plausible than the ‘magical’ externalist position because all it requires is ‘a grasp of the nature of desire and of coherence within motivational states’ (p. 121) and avoids deep mysteries concerning the nature of objective values or ‘brute normative facts’ and how an agent can access and respond to them.  Moreover, he adds, agents trust both their reflective and unreflective decisions that derive from their pre-existing internal motivations.  How then does Goldman characterize reasons and desires?

Reasons, for Goldman, are the subject of deliberation and motivation.  They are states of affairs that motivate rational agents when constituted by a coherent set of desires (p. 95).  Desires are not what motivate agents; desires are ‘functional paradigms’ of states of being motivated, which must be connected to our subjective concerns (p. 8).  For example, your alarm clock may ring in the morning to wake you for the busy day ahead. You may desire to stay in bed, yet this desire essentially provides no reason for you to do so.  The fact you have a busy day ahead is the reason you wake up.  Though, as Goldman notes, this tends to lead to the assumption that the fact you have appointments not only provides you with a reason to get up, but a seemingly objective reason for anyone in the same position, regardless of their desires.  There seems, then, to be a natural inclination to want to ‘share’ reasons, though the question this raises is whether this sharing appeals to a deeper objective basis, that is, does the value of certain states of affairs reflect some deeper objective value?

This quandary leads us kernel of Goldman’s book: the conflict between the internalist and the externalists regarding reasons or, as Goldman equivocates, the subjectivist versus the objectivist regarding values (p. 143).  However, as I shall suggest below, I feel Goldman’s equivocation of these distinctions is misplaced; there is option of being both an internalist about reasons without having to classify all values as subjective.

As an internalist regarding reasons, Goldman maintains that an agent’s reasons for action are necessarily generated by pre-existing considerations contained within their motivational belief set.  If an agent concludes the best course of action in a given circumstance is to Ø then this decision has been made in virtue of their existing subjective desires, evaluations dispositions, projects etc.  Such a constraint on practical reasons, originally proposed by Bernard Williams, has become known as the ‘Internalist Requirement’.  Thus, Goldman argues, ‘a reason is not a reason intrinsically: in itself it cannot demand on pain of irrationality that agents be motivated by it (p. 9).  The externalists, on the other hand, deny such a requirement on practical reason.  They maintain an agent can be rationally motivated by reasons in virtue of their independent force regardless of our existing motivations.  As Goldman sees it, then, the central is question is whether subjective motivations generate reasons for action or do external reasons generate motivations (p. 9).  He favours the former.

The internalist position itself dates back to Hume’s arguments in his Treatise on Human Nature (bk II, pt. III, ch. 3) and is still often spoken of as ‘Humean Internalism’.  Hume’s own position is that all practical reasons are derived from an agent’s ‘passions’ or desires, and practical rationality is, essentially, instrumental; that is, we deliberate over the best means to adopt in order achieve our ends.  Reasons in this sense, then, are a combination of an appropriate belief and a desire.  My reason to go to the pub is my desire for a beer and the belief I can get one there.

Goldman’s own internalism is a somewhat modified Humeanism.  He does not accept that all desires are reasons even when combined with a correctly informed and coherent belief, though he does maintain agents act on their coherent and informed desires most of the time (p. 23).  Desires, for Goldman, are ‘complex motivational states’, and acting rationally is acting coherently between these various states. Our desires, combined with deeper concerns within our motivational set and correct empirical information are states of affairs that constitute the practical reasons that can satisfy such concerns  (p. 45).  Though the prime function of desire is to prompt action (p. 91).

Interestingly, in a somewhat anti-Humean sense, Goldman’s prototypical desires include what he calls a ‘cognitive evaluative aspect’ (pp. 81, 108, 113, 119) or, more simply, an evaluation of the desired object.  What this cognitive element entails is that the reasons or sates of affairs that motivate a rational agent to act or believe in such a way are what strikes the agent as true (p. 23, 108), though Goldman never really gets into the metaethical issues here regarding non-cognitivist view of ethical propositions.  He mentions expressivsim – the non-cognitivist view that moral judgments do not state facts or ascribe real properties of right and wrong but only express certain attitudes of approval or disapproval – in passing, but only as compatible with his internalist conception of practical reasons (p. 143).  That aside, Goldman interprets this cognitive evaluative aspect of desire in a strict internalist sense.  This needs some elaboration, and in order to do so we should pitch this against an externalist example.

Goldman often uses T. M. Scanlon as a prime example of an externalist (pp. 108-113).  This reading is not unchallenged; though for our purpose let us grant Goldman his interpretation.  In Chapters 1 and 2 of his What We Owe to Each Other, Scanlon advances his ‘buck-passing’ account of value where to call something good or valuable is for the thing in question to have other properties that constitute practical reasons.  The normative ‘buck’ is passed from goodness to other reason providing properties; goodness does not itself provide a reason for action.  Moreover, Scanlon advances an anti-Humean claim that desires have no motivational force or justificatory role to play in the notion of a reason.  The idea of a reason is primitive; all a reason is a consideration that counts in favour towards something by providing a reason for it.  On this buck-passing account, as Goldman sees it, reasons derive from the value of what is desired, amounting to an ‘objective reason both for the desire and for the action to fulfil it’ and, ‘given these objective reasons that the evaluative component of desires recognizes, to count desires themselves as creating reasons would be to count the relevant reasons twice’ (p. 111-112).

Goldman claims he agrees with the externalist in that the ‘recognition of the role of the evaluative component of desire is crucial to understanding which desires create reasons and which do not’ (p. 112), but to interpret the component as they do leads of a vicious circularity:

To be rationally motivated would be to recognize value; to recognize value would be to recognize a reason; a reason is what motivates a rational agent.  What we would get out of this is that to desire rationally is to desire as a rational agent desires, not a great piece of philosophical enlightenment (p. 112).

I deal with the circularity charge below when I discuss the subject of value in more detail.

Aside from the fact that for Scanlon desires have no independent motivational force, Scanlon has already noted that Goldman’s proposed focus on desires with this ‘evaluative component’ still has little force as a source of our reasons.  Say I have a desire for a new mountain bike.  This involves me reading up on the latest models and visiting bike shops and taking in account the various features in favor of each model.  This is what Scanlon refers to as a desire in the ‘directed attention sense’.  It is a normative notion in that it clearly involves the thought that I have a reason to buy a new bike.  Yet it is not the case that being in this subjective state of having a subjective desire gives me a reason to buy one.  Stronger still, it not the case that the reasons I have are there in virtue of my subjective desires as Goldman claims.  It is true that certain subjective conditionals have a role in my reasons for action; I have reason to catch a train to London to see my friends, but not merely because I desire to go but because there are reasons to do so. You can dress desire up as much as you want, but the essential point is that desires do not the play the central role in the practical thinking that Goldman attributes to them.

Goldman’s own conclusion, then, is that the evaluative component of desire should not be seen as taking the thing in question to provide a practical reason for action.  The thing in question is not providing some external reason constituted by objective value; if it provides a reason at all it is only because it reflects an agent’s deeper concerns which ‘anchor’ their informed coherent motivational sets (p. 115).

As stated above, my primary contention is with Goldman’s equivocation of the question regarding external reasons and the question of objective value (p. 11).  Moreover, I do not feel the above internal reasons requirement is tied necessarily to any kind of skepticism concerning objective values.

Goldman is essentially maintaining two premises.  Firstly, ‘there are no objective values or external reasons’ (p. 20).  And secondly, that an agent’s practical reason for action always derives from their subjective motivations, concerns or desires (p. 108).  It seems to me that both of these premises are mistaken.  I have dealt briefly with his second premise, let us deal with Goldman’s case against objective value.

Goldman’s first premise is based on John Mackie’s famous ‘Argument from Queerness’ which maintains objective values would have to be very mysterious, non-natural, properties that, by their very nature, are intrinsically motivating for rational agents (pp. 21, 186, 206).  However, it is important to remember that Mackie was dealing specifically with moral judgments; his ‘Error Theory’ claimed that ethical thinking seemed to take itself as objective, when in fact all its claims are false.  Moreover, Mackie also held a position Goldman refers to as ‘moral judgment internalism’, the view that agents must be motivated by their moral judgments independently of their prior motivations (p. 143).  It is important, then, not to confuse these issues.  Although not explicitly endorsing Mackie’s argument from queerness, Goldman does maintain objective values would be somewhat mysterious non-natural properties analogous to divine commands, prescribing actions and external standards which we cannot understand (pp. 187, 206).  Yet, contra to Mackie, he rejects any kind of moral judgment internalism, a theory he claims is crucial for the reasons externalist (p. 143-185) and crucially adds that the ‘link between objective value and motivation must be maintained if appeal to objective value is to have any philosophical or practical point’ (p. 188).

As Goldman notes, the most powerful response to this argument comes from Thomas Nagel in The View From Nowhere.  Nagel argues that value judgments do not necessarily motivate agents to act in certain ways but rather provide them with reasons to do so.  Moreover, these reasons are not founded in ‘external’ non-natural properties, but emerge when an agent abstracts from their personal situation and considers herself from an impartial standpoint of objectivity.  Such an abstraction, then, allows for the recognition of ‘agent-neutral’ values, independent of an agent’s subjective concerns and desires which, in turn, are accompanied by agent-neutral reasons for action.  These agent-neutral reasons are ‘external’ from an agent’s subjective, or agent-relative and should motivate a rational agent.  In a similar vein to Scanlon, goodness, for Nagel, is to have other properties which provide practical reasons.

Goldman does not find this too enlightening and charges it with a similar circularity charge he directed towards Scanlon’s position:

The question is whether a property that exists independently of all our concerns but nevertheless demands that we be concerned with about it by providing reasons for such concern is any less strange than an objective property that intrinsically does motivate us.  It can be asked why certain properties merit appropriate responses, and if the answer is simple ‘because they are valuable’, the circle is tight and unilluminating (p. 188).

However, it has been argued such a circle is, to use phrase from Alan Thomas’ Value and Context, ‘virtuous’, rather than vicious: David Wiggins’ has argued in ‘Truth Invention and the Meaning of Life’ that a property and a response are ‘made for each other’, stating:  ‘Surely it can be true both that we desire x because we think x is good, and that x is good because x is such that we desire x.  It does not count against the point that the explanation of the ‘because’ is different in each direction’.

In a broad sense both Wiggins and John McDowell claim an agent’s value judgments are both subjective, yet real, an idea Goldman refers to as a kind of intermediate position between the objective and subjective perspectives (p. 217).  The same manner in which a post box causes the appearance of the color red to agents with the correct faculties for color response so to the perception of a value in an object or act merits an appropriate positive response.  Yet Goldman sees this idea as empty and always collapses back into a subjectivist position:

[T]he subjective side of the relation is the determining factor in the relational properties that constitute values.  Any purely objective property we could ascertain across the diverse objects that we find valuable would be hopelessly disjunctive, and the disjunction would be open-ended.  As such it would not provide any comprehensible explanation for our responses (p. 221 [my emphasis])

Now, it seems to me that Goldman is correct here regarding the importance of the subjectivity, but I still do not feel this entails some kind of anti-realism regarding the status of objective value.

In Value and Context Alan Thomas proposes a form of realism in which all values presuppose human interest.  An agent’s relationship to value will always display various kinds of relativity, one of which is perspectivalness.  However, this perspectival relativity does not enter into the content of the value judgments we make in some indexical sense.  For Goldman, objective value has to be either real in some implausible, external, mysterious sense commanding motivation independent of the agent of subjective concerns, or, is solely dependent on an agent’s subjective desires and concerns which to make all value extrinsic.  Yet he ignores Thomas’ option of taking value to be real in the sense that it features irreducibly in the explanation of an agent’s formation of moral belief – a sui generis form of ethical objectivity.  Moreover, this conception of objective value is compatible with the internal reasons requirement mentioned above.

Thomas’ views William’s internal reasons requirement as a neutral constraint on practical reasons, without any Humean entailments concerning desire.  We can accept that all practical reasons, including moral reasons, are internal.  Yet, importantly, moral reasons are impartial, but in no sense external.  Such impartial reasons are contractualist in form, applicable to agents with an interest in morality and pragmatic justification for their actions from an objective perspective which no one could reasonably reject to.  These objective reasons then, do not necessarily command motivation in the sense Goldman requires, as Thomas notes, ‘the claim that we all motivated to be impartial is just as implausible as the claim that we have a standing disposition to accept external reasons’.  This takes us back to Goldman’s view of Scanlon as an externalist.  Scanlon maintains that those who do not wish to view their reasons impartially suffer from a moral fault connected to an incorrect Humean theory of desire.  However, Thomas argues that internal reasons do not depend on such a Humean claim:  wanting your reasons to be impartially defendable, governed by an objective cognitive architecture is not the same as wanting peach ice cream.

Moreover, Thomas notes morality does appear to be disjunctive, though not in the hopeless sense Goldman maintains.  There is one account of how agents acquire knowledge of objective value and reasons they generate, and a separate account of how agents with a concern for morality are disposed to respond to these reasons.

In this review I have tired to exposit Goldman’s central ideas and direct the reader to possible lines of critique, which I feel Goldman has not sufficiently addressed.  I appreciate my own thoughts may well be underdeveloped.

Goldman’s book is a good one, clearly written and often amusing.  It contributes significantly to the current debates in both normative and metaethics and generates a vast amount of discussion.  My only reservation concerns the book’s structure; some of the sections are very long, which can lead to loss of focus concerning some of his arguments.

 

I am grateful to the Arts & Humanities Research Council for support at the time this review was completed.

 

Christine Korsgaard, ‘Scepticism about Practical Reason’ in Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1996)

John McDowell, ‘Values and Secondary Qualities’ in Andrew Fisher and Simon Kirchin (ed.) Arguing about Metaethics (Routledge: Oxon, 2006)

J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Penguin Books: London, 1977)

Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1986)

T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Belknap Press of Harvard University: Cambridge, 1998)

Alan Thomas, Value and Context (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2006)

–          Bernard Williams (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

–          Thomas Nagel (Acumen Press: Stocksfield, 2009)

David Wiggins, ‘Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life’ in Needs, Values, Truth (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1998)

Bernard Williams, ‘Internal and External Reasons’ in Moral Luck (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1981)

 

© 2010 Jamie Buckland

 

Jamie Buckland, University of Reading