Presentación del ERP seleccionado

To return to the beginning: I will take the idea of a reason as primitive. I have tried in the intervening pages to explain and defend this choice by describing the role of reasons within a larger account of rationality, motivation, and justi~cation. My aim has been to identify and allay various doubts that have led people to be wary of the idea of a reason

and to think that it stands in need of explanation, perhaps in terms of the idea of desire. One source of such doubts is the belief that if a person has a reason for action, then it is irrational for him to fail to be motivated by it. This imposes a heavy burden on claims about reasons, since such charges of irrationality are often implausible and certainly dif~cult to sustain. Against this, I have argued that common sense and ordinary usage strongly support a narrower notion of irrationality, according to which it is not always irrational to fail to acknowledge a strong reason that one has.

A second source of doubt about reasons is the idea that there is an independent notion of desire, which is a clearer notion than that of a reason. Desires, on this view, are psychological states which are the basic motivators of actions and also have a fundamental role as start- ing points for justi~cation. I have argued that the notion of a desire is not nearly as clear as is commonly supposed, and that the most plausi- ble account of what a desire is presupposes the idea of “taking some- thing to be a reason.” When a rational person takes herself to have a reason for an action, I argued, this is motivationally suf~cient to explain that action without any further appeal to desire. Desires turn out, on re_ection, to have neither the special motivational force nor the special justi~catory role commonly attributed to them.

The language of reasons, as opposed to mere desires, is crucial to an adequate description of the structure of our own practical reasoning and also to our relations with others, as rational creatures who recog- nize many of the same reasons and can recognize the value of each other. I have argued that although there is wide disagreement about the reasons we have, there is also a method for examining and criticiz- ing our judgments about reasons that is suf~cient to carry conviction in many cases. This commonsensical method does not amount to a decision procedure or even a theory, but it should be suf~cient, I argued, to allay general epistemological doubts about reasons.

2

Values

1. Introduction1. Introduction

Chapter 1 explained and defended my decision to treat the notion of a reason as primitive. In this chapter I will use the notion of a reason, taken as the most basic and abstract element of normative thought, to provide a general characterization of a slightly more speci~c normative notion, the idea of value. This will provide the basis for the discussion, in the remainder of the book, of the speci~c forms of value involved in our ideas of right and wrong or, as I will say, of what we owe to each other.

Outside philosophy, the terms ‘value’ and ‘values’ are commonly used in a very broad sense to apply to a wide range of moral as well as to various nonmoral ideas. Questions of right and wrong, for example, are generally thought of as questions of value, and speci~c ideas of right and wrong such as justice, equity, and ~delity to agreements are naturally referred to as “values.” But many other things are said to be valuable, or to represent values, in a sense that seems independent of considerations of right and wrong, including such things as works of nature, excellences in art and music, and intellectual or scienti~c ac- complishments. Intermediate between these two areas of value—the narrowly moral and the ostensibly “nonmoral”—there are such values as loyalty to one’s friends and devotion to family, as well as such things as industriousness and the avoidance of excessive consumption.

In discussions within professional philosophy, the terms ‘value’ and ‘values’ are used less frequently than ‘good’ or ‘the good’, although these sets of terms are often treated as if they were interchangeable, as when something called “a theory of value” is taken to be addressed to the questions “What is goodness?” and “What things are good?”1

Moreover, “the good” and “the right” are generally treated as prima facie distinct normative domains. “The good” deals with how we have reason to want the world to be, while “the right” has to do with what we may or must do. Some have maintained that the latter is in one way or another reducible to the former, but this is a distinctive and contro- versial claim (in a way that it could not be a controversial claim that notions of rightness are “reducible to” questions of value in the broad sense I described in the previous paragraph, since they obviously are such questions).

In this chapter I will argue that this emphasis on “the good” has had a distorting effect on our thinking about value in general, and in particular on our view of the relation between rightness (“what we owe to each other”) and other values. Our most fundamental notion of value is broader than “the good” as this is often understood in philo- sophical discussion, and is not exclusively a notion of how it would be best for the world to go, or of what would be best for particular people. If this broader account is accepted, then the distinction be- tween “what we owe to each other” and other values will appear less stark, not because there is no distinction to be drawn, or because the right is “reducible to” the good, but because many other values will be seen to have a structure similar to that which most obviously charac- terizes our ideas of right and wrong. I will argue that this is true for such values as excellences in art, science, and other endeavors; the value of important personal relations such as love and friendship; and the value of human life.