Abstract:

This essay presents a conception of human action. The conception lies between the two extreme choices offered by contemporary moral psychology: Humeanism and Rationalism. At the value-neutral, anti-cognitive extreme, Humeanism holds that desire is but a brute impulse, that caring is but a hierarchical complex of desires, that practical reasoning is solely a matter of figuring out how to get what we want, and that action is but the causal upshot of the mechanistic interplay of our various motivating states. At the value-laden, hyper-cognitive extreme, Rationalism holds that desiring something is a way of regarding it as good or valuable, that caring is reducible to evaluative belief, that practical reasoning is a matter of figuring out what we are (most) justified in doing, and that action always aims at the good. Steering a course between the value-neutral anticognitivism of Humeanism and the value-laden hyper-congnitivism of Rationalism, this essay argues that desire is more than impulsion yet less than evaluation, that caring is more than desiring but less than evaluating, that practical reasoning involves more than instrumental calculation but (often) less than evaluative reflection, and that wayward action takes many forms--not just akrasia and weakness of will (which are not the same) but also their lesser-known siblings: indifference and compromise. What emerges is a picture of our practical lives that has desiring and caring at the center. If sound, the argument of this essay establishes that the modes of human attraction are manifold and mutually irreducible. We desire, we care, we value. Recognizing this multiplicity for what it is allows us to make sense of why we defy reason so often and why, when we defy reason, our doing so makes sense to us.