Respect and the reality of apparent reasons
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Respect and the reality of apparent reasons Kurt L. Sylvan1
Accepted: 2 September 2020 The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Rationality requires us to respond to apparent normative reasons. Given the independence of appearance and reality, why think that apparent normative reasons necessarily provide real normative reasons? And if they do not, why think that mistakes of rationality are necessarily real mistakes? This paper gives a novel answer to these questions. I argue first that in the moral domain, there are objective duties of respect that we violate whenever we do what appears to violate our firstorder duties. The existence of these duties of respect, I argue, ensures that apparent moral reasons are exceptions to the independence of appearance and reality. I then extend these arguments to the domain of overall reason. Just as there are objective duties of respect for moral reasons that explain moral blameworthiness, so there are objective duties of respect for reasons (period) that explain blameworthiness in the court of overall reason. The existence of these duties ensures that apparent reasons (period) are exceptions to the independence of appearance and reality. Keywords Apparent reasons Objective reasons Rationality Normativity Respect
& Kurt L. Sylvan [email protected] 1
Philosophy, Avenue Campus, University of Southampton, SO18 1BF Southampton, United Kingdom
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K. L. Sylvan
1 Introduction On a familiar view in meta-ethics, rationality requires us to respond to apparent normative reasons, not normative reasons per se.1 The popularity of this view owes partly to a view about normative reasons on which they are, in the first instance, facts that count in favor of acts and attitudes. Given this view, it is natural to think that one can fail to be in a position to appreciate all the reasons or the normative relations they bear to one’s acts or attitudes while remaining fully rational. If there is any obvious connection between rationality and normative reasons on this sort of view, it is indirect: one is rational only if one responds correctly to the normative reasons that appear to exist from one’s perspective. So understood, rationality has two aspects worth separating. On the one hand, rationality requires us not to ignore our beliefs about what there is reason to do. This dimension of rationality is captured by coherence requirements such as: Enkrasia:Rationality requires one to / if one thinks there is decisive reason to /.2 While recent literature focuses heavily on such requirements, we can hold that rationality calls for more than coherence even if we agree that it calls for less than correctness. Note that some apparent reasons are generated by appearances of a nondoxastic kind. If it looks like there is a red-hot coil on the stove, there is prima facie rational pressure not to thrust your hand onto it. The pressure is not weaker if the appearance misleads, nor if you lack the explicit belief that there is decisive reason not to burn yourself.3
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This view originates in Scanlon (19
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