we act that does not treat (our having) those reasons as figuring in the cau- sation of the relevant behavior (or, one might add, as realized in physical causes of the behavior)! The challenge is particularly acute when an agent has two or more reasons for A-ing but A-s only for one of them, as in the following example:
Al has a pair of reasons for mowing his lawn this morning. First, he wants to mow it this week and he believes that this morning is the most convenient time. Second, Al has an urge to repay his neighbor for the rude awakening he suffered recently when she turned on her mower at the crack of dawn and he believes that his mowing his lawn this morning would constitute suitable repayment. As it happens, Al mows his lawn this morning only for one of these reasons. In virtue of what is it true that he mowed his lawn for this reason, and not the other, if not that this reason (or his having it), and not the other, played a suitable causal role in his mowing his lawn? (Mele 1997a, p. 240)
Elsewhere, I have argued that no noncausalist has successfully answered this challenge (Mele 1992c, Chapter 13; 2000; 2003, Chapter 2). Perhaps, as Davidson claims, “failing a satisfactory alternative, the best argument for a [causal] scheme. . . is that it alone promises to give an account of the ‘mysterious connection’ between reasons and actions” (p. 11).
3. RATIONALIZING
Davidson’s “Actions, Reasons, and Causes” helped to revive a causal ap- proach to action explanation not only by advancing telling objections to leading anticausalist arguments but also by offering a way of accommo- dating in a causal framework the idea, favored by many anticausalists and causalists alike, that intentional actions are explicable in terms of agents’ reasons. A central notion in the Davidsonian synthesis is “rationalization,” a species of causal explanation designed in part to reveal the point or purpose of the explananda.
The essay opens as follows: “What is the relation between a reason and an action when the reason explains the action by giving the agent’s reason for doing what he did? We may call such explanations rationalizations, and say that the reason rationalizes the action” (Davidson 1980 [1963], p. 3). Davidson’s thesis in that article is that “rationalization is a species of causal explanation.” “The primary reason for an action is its cause”; and “a reason rationalizes an action only if it leads us to see something the agent saw, or thought he saw, in his action – some feature, consequence, or aspect
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of the action the agent wanted, desired, prized, held dear, thought dutiful, beneficial, obligatory, or agreeable” (p. 4). When a reason is a “rationalizing” cause of an action, it is a reason for which the agent performs that action. In a later article, Davidson remarks: “Two ideas are built into the concept of acting on a reason. . . : the idea of cause and the idea of rationality. A reason is a rational cause. One way rationality is built in is transparent: the cause must be a belief and a desire in light of which the action is reasonable” (Davidson 1980 [1963], p. 9; 1980 [1974], p. 233). In “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” he tells us that “[i]n order to understand how a reason of any kind rationalizes an action it is necessary and sufficient that we see, at least in essential outline, how to construct a primary reason” (p. 4), where “R is a primary reason why an agent performed an action A under the description
d only if R consists of a pro attitude of the agent towards actions with a
certain property, and a belief of the agent that A, under the description d, has that property” (p. 5).
Although Davidson states his position in terms of his coarse-grained theory of act individuation, that theory is not essential to the position. Henceforth, readers may treat the action variable ‘A’ (or Davidson’s occa- sional ‘x’) as a variable either for actions themselves or for actions under
A-descriptions (or x-descriptions), depending upon their preferred mode
of act individuation; the same goes for the term ‘action’. That having been said, Davidson’s basic idea about rationalization, under one interpretation and with a little refinement, may be expressed as follows: a reason’s ratio- nalizing an action is a matter of its being a cause of that action that explains the action (partly) by revealing something that the agent was aiming at in performing it, and, therefore, something that makes the action “reasonable” or “agreeable,” to some extent, from the agent’s point of view. Obviously, the rationality associated with rationalization is understood in a thin and subjective way (cf. Davidson 1980 [1963], p. 9). An agent who pries the lid off a can of paint for a reason constituted by an urge to drink some paint (p. 4) and a belief that he can put himself in a position to drink some by prying off the lid strikes one as crazy. Even so, his action is rationalized by this reason, and from the narrow perspective of the urge and the belief, prying off the lid is an instrumentally rational course of action.
Davidson’s notion of rationalizing is a broadly instrumental one. In some cases, the belief component of a reason for A-ing represents A-ing as a means to E. In others, the belief represents A-ing as an instance of E (e.g., the belief that going for a swim would be a good way of exercising today in someone who desires to exercise today). In yet others, the belief represents A-ing as a constituent of E. For example, someone who desires to serve an excellent