Akrasia and the Desire to Become Someone Else: Venturinha on Moral Matters
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Akrasia and the Desire to Become Someone Else: Venturinha on Moral Matters Javier González de Prado 1 Received: 7 August 2019 / Accepted: 16 October 2019/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract This paper discusses practical akrasia from the perspective of the sophisticated form of moral subjectivism that can be derived from Nuno Venturinha’s (2018) remarks on moral matters. Keywords Akrasia . Moral subjectivism . Response-dependence . Venturinha
Nuno Venturinha’s book, Descriptions of Situations, provides a concise, but remarkably wide-ranging account of language and thought from what can be called a practicebased perspective. This type of perspective takes as its starting point the situated study of our discursive practices in particular contexts. One of the main challenges faced by such an approach, as I see it, is to show how our practices can come to be governed by objective standards, that is standards that go beyond the evaluative stances of the participants in the practice. This challenge is especially pressing in relation to moral practices, the topic of the last chapter of Venturinha’s book. Our epistemic practices concerning empirical issues involve perception and practical interactions with our surroundings, which arguably introduce sufficient friction with the world for objective standards to arise. It is not obvious what could play an analogous role to perception in the case of moral thought (one can perhaps argue that moral intuitions bring us into contact with objective, mindindependent moral facts, but this is surely a controversial idea). Not surprisingly, therefore, it has been common in the literature to endorse some form of nonobjectivism about our moral practices. Instances of such non-objectivism can be found in different versions of moral emotivism, relativism, expressivism and constructivism (see, among many others, Ayer 1936/1971; Stevenson 1944; Harman 1975; Blackburn 1984, 1993; Gibbard 1990; Street 2010).
* Javier González de Prado [email protected]
1
Department of Logic, Philosophy and History of Science, UNED, Madrid, Spain
Philosophia
In this note, my goal is to discuss akrasia from the perspective of the sophisticated form of moral subjectivism that, I think, can be derived from Venturinha’s remarks on moral matters. In order to do so, I start by examining Venturinha’s Disclosure Principle and the type of subjectivism it leads to. Then I critically discuss Venturinha’s epistemic account of akrasia and I propose what I take to be a better alternative view, based on the Disclosure Principle. According to this proposal, in an akratic subject there is a conflict between the motivational dispositions she currently has, as the person she is now, and the motivational dispositions that the person she aspires to be would have.
1 The Ethical and the Subjective At first sight, it could seem that Venturinha embraces a purely subjectivist view of moral practices, or at least of what he calls the ethical. Indeed, he starts the chapter distinguishing between “morality”, understo
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