Autonomy and the Self by Michael Kühler & Nadja Jelinek

Author:Michael Kühler & Nadja Jelinek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

A problem now arises because the only path of access to normative reasons is through subjective assessment, and because it may well happen that what we see as a reason and what is a reason come apart. Most importantly, we may even be justified in seeing something as a normative reason which is, in fact, no normative reason. Here we may consider the following example by Garrett Cullity and Berys Gaut (1997, p. 2): your doctor tells you to take a certain medicine, but he is mistaken, and the medicine will harm you. In this example, you will see it as a reason to take the medicine, and you are justified in doing so. There is a clear sense in which your doctor’s advice makes it, from your point of view, rational for you to take the medicine, in spite of the fact that it will harm you. Doing what you have, in fact, reason to do – not to take the medicine – would be irrational.

The same could be held for the example of Huckleberry Finn. Comprehensible to everybody, the moral standards which Huck has come to adopt as a member of a slaveholder society make it rational for him to turn Jim over to the slave hunters, so as to bring Jim back to his ‘rightful owner’, Miss Watson. The rationality of this decision is not affected by the fact that there is no normative reason for it. Conversely, the mere fact that there is a normative reason for a weak-willed action does not suffice to make that action rational.

The distinction implied by both examples is between the rationality of an agent, on the one hand, and normative reasons, on the other hand. This naturally raises the question of whether normative reasons could be explained in terms of (ideal) rationality (see Smith 1994, for example). My own position, for which I cannot, however, argue here, is that they cannot. That is, I am presuming the nonreductionist view (as opposed to reductive rationalism) that rationality and normative reasons are distinct. Ideally, a rational action is performed for a normative reason, but, for its rationality, it is decisive that it is justified for the agent from his first-person or personal standpoint to the best of his knowledge and belief. From a third-person or impersonal standpoint, rationality and normative reasons can come apart. It is possible, from this standpoint, to distinguish between what an agent is justified to see as a reason and what is a reason, without the normative reason being reducible to (ideal) rationality.5

Both normative reasons and rationality have to be distinguished from rationalisability. While rational action requires that the agent be justified concerning the reason by which he guides his action, rationalisable action is not bound to this requirement: the agent merely has to guide his action by what he sees as his best reason, whether or not he is justified in doing so. The rationality and the rationalisability of an action are two different things. Like normative

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