## 1. Practical and Theoretical Reason



 Practical reason defines a distinctive standpoint of
reflection. When agents deliberate about action, they think about
themselves and their situation in characteristic ways. What are some
of the salient features of the practical point of view?



 A natural way to interpret this point of view is to contrast it with
the standpoint of theoretical reason. The latter standpoint is
occupied when we engage in reasoning that is directed at the
resolution of questions that are in some sense theoretical rather than
practical; but how are we to understand this opposition between the
theoretical and the practical? One possibility is to understand
theoretical reflection as reasoning about questions of explanation and
prediction. Looking backward to events that have already taken place,
it asks why they have occurred; looking forward, it attempts to
determine what is going to happen in the future. In these ways,
theoretical reflection is concerned with matters of fact and their
explanation. Furthermore it treats these issues in impersonal terms
that are accessible (in principle) to anyone. Theoretical reasoning,
understood along these lines, finds paradigmatic expression in the
natural and social sciences.



 Practical reason, by contrast, takes a distinctively normative
question as its starting point. It typically asks, of a set of
alternatives for action none of which has yet been performed, what one
ought to do, or what it would be best to do. It is thus concerned not
with matters of fact and their explanation, but with matters of value,
of what it would be desirable to do. In practical reasoning agents
attempt to assess and weigh their reasons for action, the
considerations that speak for and against alternative courses of
action that are open to them. Moreover they do this from a
distinctively first-personal point of view, one that is defined in
terms of a practical predicament in which they find themselves (either
individually or collectively--people sometimes reason jointly
about what they should do together).



 There is, however, a different way of understanding the contrast
between practical and theoretical reason, stressing the parallels
rather than the differences between the two forms of
reflection. According to this interpretation, theoretical reflection
too is concerned with a normative rather than a factual question,
namely with the question of what one ought to believe. It attempts to
answer this normative question by assessing and weighing reasons for
belief, the considerations that speak for and against the particular
conclusions one might draw about the way the world is. Furthermore, it
does this from a standpoint of first-personal reflection: the stance
of theoretical reasoning in this sense is the committed stance of the
believer, not the stance of detached contemplation of one's
beliefs themselves (Moran 2001). Seen in this way, the contrast
between practical and theoretical reason is essentially a contrast
between two different systems of norms: those for the regulation of
action on the one hand, and those for the regulation of belief on the
other.



 Theoretical reason, interpreted along these lines, addresses the
considerations that recommend accepting particular claims as to what
is or is not the case. That is, it involves reflection with an eye to
the truth of propositions, and the reasons for belief in which it
deals are considerations that speak in favor of such propositions'
being true, or worthy of acceptance. Practical reason, by contrast, is
concerned not with the truth of propositions but with the desirability
or value of actions. The reasons in which it deals are considerations
that speak in favor of particular actions being good, or worthy of
performance in some way. This difference in subject matter corresponds
to a further difference between the two forms of reason, in respect of
their consequences. Theoretical reflection about what one ought to
believe produces changes in one's overall set of beliefs, whereas
practical reason gives rise to action; as noted above, it is practical
not only in its subject matter, but also in its issue.



 Two observations should be made about this way of understanding
practical reason. First, the contrast just drawn might suggest that
there is a categorial difference in the consequences of theoretical
and practical reason, insofar as the former produces changes in our
mental states, whereas the latter gives rise to bodily movements. But
it would be misleading to contrast the two kinds of rational capacity
in these terms. Practical reasoning gives rise not to bodily movements
per se, but to intentional actions, and these are intelligible as such
only to the extent they reflect our mental states. It would thus be
more accurate to characterize the issue of both theoretical and
practical reason as *attitudes*; the difference is that
theoretical reasoning leads to modifications of our beliefs, whereas
practical reasoning leads to modifications of our intentions (Harman
1986, Bratman 1987).



 Second, it is important to be clear that in neither case do the
characteristic modifications of attitude occur infallibly. There is
room for irrationality both in the theoretical and the practical
domain, which in its strongest form involves a failure to form the
attitudes that one acknowledges to be called for by the considerations
one has reflected on. Thus a person might end up reading a mystery
novel for another hour, while at the same time judging that it would
be better on the whole to go back to work on their paper for the
upcoming conference. Practical irrationality of this latter kind is
known as *akrasia*, incontinence, or weakness of will, and its
nature and even possibility are traditional subjects of philosophical
speculation in their own right. If we assume that this strong kind of
practical irrationality is possible, however, then we must grant that
practical reason is not automatically practical in its issue. A more
accurate way to represent the consequences of practical reason would
be to say that deliberation about action generates appropriate
intentions insofar as an agent is rational (Korsgaard 1996a). 



Intentions and beliefs are not the only attitudes that are answerable
to reasons; emotions too have their reasons, understood as
considerations by reference to which they can be justified or
criticized. Thus it is appropriate or fitting for someone who is in
the presence of imminent danger to feel fear, and by the same token
fear is inapt or irrational if it is felt about something that is not
dangerous at all. Though emotions are responsive to reasons, however,
we do not typically form or modify them through processes of
reflection or deliberation. Reflective modification of our beliefs and
intentions, by contrast, is common, and commonly understood to involve
an exercise of our capacities for theoretical and practical
reason. 



Reasoning is an inferential process that takes as input some attitudes
of a subject, and yields as output the formation or modification of
other attitudes. Inferential processes of this kind are involved in
the paradigmatic cases in which we exercise our capacities for both
theoretical and practical reason. In the practical case, however,
there is an interesting question about how exactly to understand the
new or modified attitudes that are the outputs of our reasoning about
what to do. On a broad understanding of practical reasoning, it is an
inferential process through which new intentions are formed or old
ones modified. According to this view, we resolve through reasoning
the question of what we are going to do (Broome 2013, McHugh and Way
2016). A narrower understanding has it that reasoning should be
understood as an inferential process whereby we modify our beliefs,
including our normative beliefs about what we ought to do. On this
interpretation, practical reasoning, strictly speaking, is an
inferential process through which we adjust our beliefs about action,
including our beliefs about what we have reason to do; but the
adjustments in our intentions that result from such reflection are not
themselves conclusions of reasoning (Raz 2011, chap. 7). Agents who
have resolved the question of what they ought to do still have a
question to settle, about what they are going to do. But proponents of
the narrower view would note that this further question is not one
that is to be resolved through reasoning: once one has figured out
what one ought to do, there is no practical *reasoning* left to
be done. 



Proponents of both the broader and the narrower accounts of reasoning
should agree, however, that there are rational constraints on
intentions. The *akratic* agent, for instance, is a paradigm of
irrationality, and this means that there is some kind of requirement
to intend to do what one believes one ought to do (just as there are
rational norms that are violated when one is afraid of something that
one knows to pose no real danger at all). Our capacity for practical
reason must involve some capacity to modify our intentions in
accordance with this requirement, otherwise practical reason will be
practical only in its subject matter, but not in its issue.


## 2. Naturalism and Normativity



 The connection of practical reason with intentional action raises
large questions about its credentials as a capacity for genuine
reasoning. As noted above, intentional action is not mere bodily
movement, but reflects a distinctive attitude of the agent's,
*viz*., intention. To be in this kind of mental state is to have
settled on a plan which one seeks to realize through one's
action. Intention seems in this respect to be strikingly unlike
belief. Propositional attitudes of the latter sort have a
representational function; they aim to fit the way the world is, so
that if one discovers that the world is not how one previously took it
to be, one will acknowledge pressure to modify one's belief in the
relevant dimension (pressure to which one will respond if one is not
irrational). With intentions however things seem crucially different
in this respect (Smith 1987). The intention to go shopping on
Wednesday, for instance, is not a state that would or should be
abandoned upon ascertaining or confirming that one has not (yet) gone
shopping on Wednesday; rather a person with such an intention will
ordinarily try to bring the world into alignment with the intention,
by going shopping when Wednesday comes around. Intentions are in this
way more like an architect's blueprints than like sketches of an
already-completed structure (Anscombe 1957; compare Velleman
1989).



 Reflection on this contrast between belief and intention has led some
philosophers to ask whether practical reason might not be something of
a misnomer. The difficulty, in a nutshell, is to make sense of the
suggestion that a genuinely rational process could by itself generate
states with the peculiar function of intentions. Reason seems a
capacity for cognitive operations, whereas intentions are
distinctively noncognitive states, insofar as they do not aim to
reflect independent facts of the matter about the way things happen to
be in the world.


 
 Expressivism represents one line of response to this skeptical worry about
practical reason. Accounts of this kind offer interpretations of the
normative and evaluative language that distinctively figures in
practical reflection. As was seen in section 1, such reflection
addresses an agent's reasons for acting in one way or another;
conclusions about such reasons are characteristically couched in
evaluative terms, as claims about what it would be *good* to do,
or as normative conclusions about the actions that one *ought* to
perform. According to the expressivist, however, evaluative and
normative claims of these kinds do not represent genuine cognitive
achievements, judgments that are literally capable of being true or
false. Rather they give expression to desires, sentiments, plans, and
other pro-attitudes, the sorts of goal-directed noncognitive state that move
people to action. The expressivist contends that we can make sense of
the capacity of practical reason to generate states with the peculiar
structure and function of intentions only if evaluative and normative
assertions are understood along these lines.



 Expressivism in this form suggests a naturalistic interpretation of
practical reason, one that may seem appropriate to the enlightened
commitments of the modern scientific world view. It is naturalistic
metaphysically, insofar as it makes no commitment to the objective
existence in the world of such allegedly questionable entities as
values, norms, or reasons for action. If normative and evaluative
claims do not represent genuine cognitive achievements, then their
legitimacy does not depend on our postulating a realm of normative or
evaluative facts to which those claims must be capable of
corresponding. It is also naturalistic psychologically, insofar as it
yields explanations of intentional human behavior that are basically
continuous with explanations of the behavior of non-rational
animals. In both the human and the non-human case, behavior is
understood as the causal product of noncognitive attitudes, operating
in conjunction with a creature's factual representation of how things
are in its environment. The special sophistication of human agency
may be traced to the fact that humans have much more sophisticated
linguistic methods for giving voice to their motivating noncognitive
attitudes. Indeed, many contemporary expressivists would contend that
these expressive resources are sufficiently powerful that we can
explain by means of them the features of practical deliberation that
initially give it the appearance of a genuine form of reasoning
(Blackburn 1998, Gibbard 1990, Gibbard 2003).



 Other philosophers remain unimpressed with this naturalistic approach
to practical reason. One ground for dissatisfaction with it is the
following. The expressivist strategy relies on an initial contrast
between practical reflection on the one hand, and the genuine forms of
cognitive activity characteristic of theoretical reasoning on the
other. There has to be some important sense in which practical
discourse does not satisfy the standards of rationality that
distinguish authentic cognitive discourse in the literal sense;
otherwise the contention that normative discourse is expressive rather
than cognitive will lack any significant content. But the contrast
between theoretical and practical reflection required for this purpose
seems elusive. As we saw in section 1 above, theoretical reasoning
appears to be no less a normative enterprise than practical
reasoning. It is plausibly understood to concern itself with reasons
for belief, the evidence and other considerations that speak for and
against particular conclusions about the way things are in the
world. To the extent this is the case, theoretical and practical
reasoning would both seem equally problematic from the naturalistic
perspective--assuming, that is, that it leaves no place for
such normative considerations as reasons. But if naturalism calls into
question the credentials of theoretical reason, it thereby undermines
the contrast between genuine reasoning and noncognitive forms of
normative and evaluative discourse on which expressivists themselves
rely.



A different ground for concern about expressionism has to do with the
distinction between normative judgment and intention. Expressivism
makes sense of the fact that practical reason is practical in its
issue by collapsing this distinction altogether. Normative reflection
can bring about adjustments in our intentions because it just is a set
of operations on our intentions (or intention-like practical
states). Compliance with what we ordinarily think of as a rational
requirement, to bring our intentions into alignment with our normative
beliefs, is thus secured through a kind of conceptual fiat. The result
is that there is no room, on this position, for the paradigmatic form
of irrationality in practice represented by *akrasia*, whereby
agents fail to do what they themselves believe they ought to do.


 Many of those who reject expressivist accounts would endorse some
variety of realism about the subject matter of practical reason. The
basic commitment of realism in this domain is the idea that there are
facts of the matter about what we have reason to do that are prior to
and independent of our deliberations, to which those deliberations are
ultimately answerable. Realists picture practical reason as a capacity
for reflection about an objective body of normative truths regarding
action (Skorupski 2010, Parfit 2011, Scanlon 2014). An alternative
approach--different both from realism and from the kind of
expressivism sketched above--is constructivism (Korsgaard 1997,
Street 2008, Street 2010). This approach denies that practical reason
is a capacity for reflection about an objective domain of independent
normative facts; but it equally rejects the expressivist's
naturalistic suspicion of normativity. According to the
constructivist, practical reason is governed by genuine normative
constraints, but what makes these constraints normative is precisely
their relation to the will of the agents whose decisions they govern.
The principles of practical reason are constitutive principles of
rational agency, binding on us insofar as we necessarily commit
ourselves to complying with them in willing anything at all. The realm
of the normative, on this approach, is not pictured as a body of
truths or facts that are prior to and independent of the will; rather,
it is taken to be 'constructed' by agents through their
own volitional activity.


## 3. Reasons and Motivation



 The capacity of practical reason to give rise to intentional action
divides even those philosophers who agree in rejecting the
expressivist strategy discussed above. Such philosophers are prepared
to grant that there are normative and evaluative facts and truths, and
to accept the cognitive credentials of discourse about this
distinctive domain of facts and truths. But they differ in their
accounts of the truth conditions of the normative and evaluative
claims that figure in such discourse. We may distinguish the following
two approaches. 



 The first of these, often referred to as internalism, holds that
reasons for action must be grounded in an agent's prior motivations
(Williams 1981; cf. Finlay 2009). According to this influential position, a given
agent *s* can have reason to do *x* only if *x*-ing
would speak to or advance some element in *s*'s 'subjective
motivational set'. There must be some rational connection
between *s*'s *x*-ing and the subjective motivations to
which *s* is actually already subject; otherwise the claim
that *s* has reason to *x* must be rejected, as false or
incoherent. Behind this internalist position lies the idea that
practical reason is practical in its issue. Internalists contend that
we can make sense of the generation of new intentions through
reasoning only if we assume that such reasoning is conditioned by
motivational resources that are already to hand. Practical reason, on
the internalist account, is the capacity to work out the implications
of the commitments contained in one's existing subjective motivational
set; the upshot is that motivation is prior to practical reason, and
constrains it.



 Externalists reject this picture, contending that one can have
reasons for action that are independent of one's prior
motivations. They typically agree that practical reasoning is capable
of generating new motivations and actions. They agree, in other words,
that if agent s has reason to do *x*, it must be possible
for *s* to acquire the motivation to *x* through reflection
on the relevant reasons. But they deny that such reasoning must in any
significant way be constrained by *s*'s subjective motivations
prior to the episode of reasoning. On this approach, practical reason
is not conceived merely as a capacity for working out the implications
of one's existing desires and commitments; it equally involves the
capacity to reason about what it would objectively be good to do, and
to act on the basis of this kind of evaluative reflection. Normative
reflection is thus taken to be independent of one's prior motivations,
and capable of opening up new motivational possibilities (Parfit
1997).



This disagreement is conventionally understood to be driven by
diverging approaches to the explanation of intentional
action. Internalists are impressed by the differences between
intentions and the cognitive states that figure in paradigmatic
examples of theoretical reasoning. Pointing to these differences, they
ask how practical reason can succeed in producing new intentions if it
is not based in something of the same basic psychological type: a
motivation or desire that is already part of the agent's subjective
motivational equipment. Many externalists find this contrast between
intentions and cognitive states overdrawn. They observe that we need
to postulate basic dispositions of normative responsiveness to account
for the capacity of theoretical reflection about reasons to affect our
beliefs, and question why these same dispositions cannot explain the
fact that practical reasoning is practical in its consequences.
Cognitive or not, intentions belong to the broad class of attitudes
that are sensitive to judgments, and this may account for the capacity
of practical reflection to generate new intentions (Scanlon 1998,
chap. 1). A third possibility is that intentions result from
dispositions or capacities distinct from the psychic mechanisms that
render theoretical rationality possible. Depending on how it is
developed, this approach may offer a different way of accounting for
the practical consequences of practical reflection, without assuming
that reasons for action are grounded in an agent's subjective
motivations (Velleman 2000, chap. 8, Wallace 1999). 


More recently, it has been maintained that the Humean approach has
its basis not in a philosophical account of motivation, but rather in
our understanding of what explains peoples' reasons for action
(Schroeder 2007). There are cases in which features of a person's
psychology make an obvious difference to what the person has reason to
do. Some people like to dance, others detest this activity, and this
difference in their "desires" appears to determine a corresponding
difference in their reasons. Even in cases of this kind, however, it
is far from obvious that differences in the agent's "desires" are what
ultimately explain their differing reasons (Scanlon 2014). Moreover,
the fact that psychological factors might sometimes be relevant to the
explanation of a person's reasons does not entail that they always
have explanatory relevance.


## 4. Instrumental and Structural Rationality



 Among the substantive norms of practical reason, those of
instrumental rationality have seemed least controversial to
philosophers. Instrumental rationality, in its most basic form,
instructs agents to take those means that are necessary in relation to
their given ends. In the modern era, this form of rationality has
widely been viewed as the single unproblematic requirement of
practical reason. The instrumental principle makes no assumptions
about the prospects for rational scrutiny of peoples' ends. Rational
criticism of this kind apparently presupposes that there are objective
reasons and values, providing standards for assessment of ends that
are independent from psychological facts about what people happen to
be motivated to pursue. In line with the naturalistic attitude
sketched in section 2, however, it may be doubted whether such
independent standards can be reconciled with the metaphysical
commitments of contemporary scientific practice. A world that is shorn
of objective values or norms leaves no room for rational criticism of
peoples' ends, but only for Weberian *Zweckrationalitat*:
the rational determination of means to the realization of ends that
are taken to be given, as a matter of human psychological fact.



 This line of thought can be traced back to the philosophy of David
Hume, who famously asserted that 'Reason is, and ought only to
be the slave of the passions' (Hume 1978, 415). Those attracted
to the Humean approach should bear in mind, however, that instrumental
rationality is itself the expression of an objective normative
commitment. The instrumental principle says that we are *rationally
required* to take the means that are necessary to achieve our ends;
if the principle represents a binding norm of practical reason, then
we are open to rational criticism to the extent we fail to exhibit
this kind of instrumental consistency, regardless of whether we want
to comply with the principle or not. If naturalism really entails
that there can be no objective norms or values, it may be wondered how
an exception can possibly be made for the instrumental requirement. A
more consistently naturalistic position would be to reject even
*Zweckrationalitat* in favor of a skeptical attitude towards
practical reason in all its forms (Hampton 1998)--an attitude
that may well correspond to the intentions of the historical Hume
(compare Dreier 1997, Millgram 1995). Further questions can be raised
about the plausibility of the suggestion that the instrumental norm
exhausts the requirements of practical reason. The norm says that one
should take the means that are necessary relative to one's
psychologically-given ends. But how can the fact that a given means
exhibits this kind of necessity give a person reason to choose the
means, if the end is not itself something it would be valuable to
achieve in some way? The instrumental principle seems to function as a
binding norm of practical reason only if it is taken for granted that
there are additional, independent standards for the assessment of our
ends (Korsgaard 1997; Quinn 1993).




Many proponents of the instrumental principle would agree that it does
not generate reasons for action. The fact that a given means is
necessary, relative to one's given ends, is not a reason to take the
means. The instrumental principle functions, rather, as a structural
requirement on one's attitudes (Broome 1999, Broome 2004). Thus,
suppose one intends end E, and believes (truly) that E can be achieved
only if one intends to do M. It appears that there are two ways in
which one could revise one's attitudes in response to these
considerations, compatibly with the instrumental principle: one could
form the intention to M, or one could abandon one's original intention
to E. The instrumental principle, considered in itself, is indifferent
as between these two possibilities; it should be understood as a
wide-scope requirement, governing combinations of attitudes, rather
than a source of detachable normative conclusions about what one has
reason to do. (Modus ponens represents a similar rational requirement
in the domain of theoretical reason, governing combinations of
beliefs.)




Rational requirements of this kind have recently become a subject of
lively philosophical debate. The idea that there are structural
requirements on our attitudes appears to be common ground among
philosophers who differ significantly in their views about the nature
and scope of practical reason. It is accepted by most Humeans, for
instance, who believe that there is no scope for the rational
criticism of individual ends, and also by Kantians, who think that the
requirements of reason ultimately constrain us to choose in accordance
with the moral law. From the perspective of practical and theoretical
deliberation, we commonly grant the force of these structural
requirements, acknowledging a kind of rational pressure to bring our
beliefs and intentions into compliance with the instrumental principle
and other standards of consistency and coherence.




Many philosophers take such structural requirements at face value,
granting that practical reason is rightly governed by and responsive
to these wide-scope demands. Indeed, it has influentially been argued
that standards of good *reasoning*, in both the practical and the
theoretical domain, derive exclusively from structural requirements of
rationality of this kind (Broome 2013). But questions arise about this
approach. For one thing, reasoning has a kind of directionality that
is hard to make sense of solely in terms of the ideal of compliance
with wide-scope requirements. Thus it isn't good reasoning to
give up the intention to achieve end E solely because one lacks the
intention to take the necessary means M, even though, as we have seen,
revising one's attitudes in this way brings about compliance
with the wide-scope requirement.




How, more generally, should we understand the relation between
structural requirements and our reasons for action and
belief? One view, held in common by Humeans and by some Kantian
constructivists (see sec. 2 above), is that reasons are fundamentally
derivative from rational requirements. What one has reason to do, on
this view, is what one would desire or intend to do if one was fully
rational (i.e. fully in compliance with the wide-scope structural
requirements that govern one's attitudes in combination).




For those who do not share this reductionist view, however, the status
of rational requirements becomes more puzzling. One might hold that
practical reason is ultimately answerable to two different kinds of
constraints: to rational requirements on the one hand, and to
independent facts about what one has reason to do on the other
hand. But this position is potentially unstable. Once the independence
of structural requirements from normative reasons is made clear, it is
no longer obvious why we should care about whether our attitudes do or
do not comply with the structural requirements. On this view, there is
nothing wrong with failing to take the necessary means to your end,
unless the end itself is one that you have compelling reason to pursue
(Raz 2005). More generally, it has been argued that there are no
independent requirements of structural rationality at all, and that
the appearance of such requirements within the deliberative point of
view can be explained by substantive features of the reasons to which
both practical and theoretical reason are ultimately and properly
responsive (Kolodny 2005).


## 5. Maximizing Rationality




Humean proponents of structural approaches to practical reason have
attempted to accommodate the rational criticism of individual ends,
without departing from the spirit of
*Zweckrationalitat*, by expanding their view to encompass
the totality of an agent's ends. Thus, even if there are no
reasons or values that are ultimately independent of an agent's
given ends, the possibility remains that we could criticize particular
intrinsic desires by reference to others in an agent's
subjective motivational set. An agent's desire for leisure, for
instance, might be subordinated insofar as its satisfaction would
frustrate the realization of other goals that are subjectively more
important to the agent, such as professional success. Practical
reason, it might be suggested, is a holistic enterprise, properly
concerned not merely with identifying means to the realization of
individual ends, but with the coordinated achievement of the totality
of an agent's ends.




Many philosophers take this holistic approach to be the most promising
way of thinking about the tasks of practical reason. It defines an
important and difficult problem for practical reason to address,
without departing from the metaphysically modest assumption that there
is no court of appeal for the rational criticism of an agent's ends
that is independent of those ends themselves. The holistic approach
finds its most sophisticated and influential expression in the
maximizing conception of practical rationality. According to the
maximizing conception, the fundamental task of practical reason is to
determine which course of action would optimally advance the agent's
complete set of ends. Thus it is widely accepted that the rational
action for a given agent to take is the one whose subjective expected
utility--reflecting both the utility of possible outcomes, from
the agent's point of view, and the agent's beliefs about the
probability of those outcomes--is the highest. 




The maximizing conception of practical rationality has been
influentially developed in decision theory and in the theory of
rational choice (as studied, for instance, in modern economics). These
disciplines articulate with mathematical precision the basic idea that
practical rationality is a matter of consistency in action: people act
rationally to the extent they do what is likely to bring about the
best state of affairs, given both their preferences over the outcomes
that may be brought about through their agency and their beliefs about
the probability of those outcomes. Proponents of these theories
sometimes claim for them the additional advantage of empirical
adequacy, arguing that they are flexible enough to accommodate the
full range of behaviors that human agents engage in, both within the
marketplace and outside of it. Especially if one operates with the
notion of 'revealed preferences'--preferences, that
is, that are ascribed to agents solely on the basis of actual
behavior--then virtually anything an agent might choose to do
could be interpreted as an *attempt* to maximize expected
utility. Decision theory, on the resulting interpretation of it,
becomes an all-encompassing framework for understanding free human
behavior, according to which all agents who act freely are striving to
produce outcomes that would be optimal, relative to their current
preferences and beliefs.




If decision theory is interpreted in this way, however, then its
relevance to the understanding of practical reason may appear
correspondingly tenuous (compare Pettit and Smith 1997). The
maximization of subjective utility is supposed to represent a
normative ideal, one by appeal to which we can assess critically the
deliberations of agents. In this guise, the attraction of the
maximizing model lies in the idea that there can be rational
requirements on action, stemming from the totality of an agent's
preferences and beliefs, even if we do not assume that there are
independent, substantive standards for the critical assessment of
individual ends. But this normative interpretation of maximizing
rationality is tenable only if it is at least conceivable that
individual agents might sometimes fail to satisfy its
requirements--an'ought'that it is not so much as
possible to flout is not really an 'ought' at all (Lavin
2004). Thus the axioms of decision theory include constraints on an
agent's overall preferences (such as completeness and transitivity)
that might be violated even by agents who are striving to satisfy
their currently strongest desires. Such agents will be criticizable by
the lights of decision theory insofar there is no consistent utility
function that can be ascribed to them on the basis of their actual
choices and behavior. The normative credentials of decision theory
rest, then, on the plausibility of the axioms that are taken to define
an individual utility function--axioms that may not be quite as
innocent or uncontroversial as they appear (compare Mandler 2001).




Further questions arise about the plausibility of the normative
requirement to maximize expected utility. Doubts have been expressed,
for instance, in regard to the assumption that it is necessarily
irrational to fail to select that action that would be optimal,
relative to one's preferences and beliefs. Perfectly rational
agents often appear to be content with states of affairs that are
'good enough', from the perspective of their aims and
desires, even when they know that alternatives are available that
promise a higher return; they 'satisfice', rather than
seeking to maximize the value of the outcomes achievable through their
actions (Slote 1989). They also treat their past intentions and plans
as defeasibly fixed constraints on deliberation, rather than
attempting to maximize subjective utility anew in every situation they
confront (Bratman 1987). Finally, they can adopt different attitudes
toward risk, attaching greater importance to avoiding bad outcomes
than to maximizing expected utility, as classically conceived (Buchak
2013). Defenders of the maximizing model contend that it is flexible
enough to accommodate alleged counterexamples of these kinds (Pettit
1984). If not, however, there may be grounds for doubting that it
represents a basic norm or practical reason.




A different issue about maximizing rationality concerns the set of
desires or aims that is taken as fixed for purposes of applying the
requirement of maximization. We may distinguish two basic
approaches. The first and perhaps most common of these takes the
subjective utility of alternative actions to be determined by the
agent's preferences at the time of deliberation. According to this
interpretation of the maximization model, we are rational to the
extent we do that which best promotes the totality of our present
aims. A second and quite different interpretation results if we expand
the set of desires that determine the subjective utilities of outcomes
to include the totality of the agent's preferences over
time. According to this model, rational agents aim to maximize the
satisfaction of all of their anticipated desires, accepting
frustration of present preferences for the sake of greater
satisfaction at later times. This interpretation of the maximizing
model gives expression to the common idea that a certain prudential
regard for one's own future well-being is a requirement of practical
reason (Nagel 1978, chaps 5-8). But if we take it to be a
comprehensive account of rationality in action, the prudential
interpretation can also appear to be an unstable compromise: if
practical reason demands of us impartiality as between our present and
future desires, should it not equally demand impartial consideration
of the desires of other agents who may be affected by what we do? Why
should we take the distinction between persons to be significant for
the theory of practical reason, once we have denied such significance
to the distinction between different times in the life of a single
agent (Parfit 1984; compare section 5 below)?




However we define the class of desires that is subject to the
requirement of maximization, we do not need to take those desires
exactly as they are given. Many proponents of the maximizing approach
suggest that an agent's actual desires should be laundered somewhat
before the demand to maximize is applied. For instance, if my desire
for *X* is contingent on a false factual belief about the nature
of *X*, then it is not obvious that practical reason requires
that the desire be taken into account in determining what it is
rational for me to do. A popular form of laundering would rule out
desires of this kind, by subjecting to the requirement of maximization
only those desires that would survive if the agent were factually
well-informed about the objects of desire and the circumstances of
action, and deliberating in a calm and focused frame of mind. Indeed,
once we are in the business of laundering desires we can go still
further, excluding from consideration desires that are substantively
objectionable, even if they would survive the filter of corrected
factual belief. To move into this territory, however, would clearly be
to abandon the Humean framework of the original maximizing approach,
assuming resources for the rational criticism of ends that are
independent of the agent's actual dispositions. 



 Some philosophers respond to the cases that invite desire-laundering
by distinguishing between subjective and objective dimensions of
practical reason. Our corrected desires, such philosophers maintain,
are relevant to determining what it would be objectively rational for
us to do, or what we objectively have reason to do. But we are often
not in a position to grasp that our factual beliefs are false. When
this is the case, we can hardly be faulted for failing to do what we
objectively have most reason to do. In situations of this kind, it may
be subjectively rational for us to strive to satisfy our actual
desires, even if some of those desires would not survive correction of
our mistaken but blameless factual beliefs. 


## 6. Consequentialism, Value, and Moral Reason



 If maximizing rationality is not the unproblematic requirement of
practical reason that it initially seemed to be, what are the
alternatives to it? Let us begin with the assumption that critical
assessment of an agent's individual ends is off-limits. This apparent
truism has been questioned by some philosophers, who point out that
many of our basic aims in life are rather inchoate; people want, for
instance, to be successful in their careers, and loyal to their
friends, without being clear about what exactly these ends require of
them. To the extent one's ends are indeterminate in this way, they
will not provide effective starting points for instrumental,
maximizing, or even satisficing reflection. We need to specify such
ends more precisely before we can begin to think about which means
they require us to pursue, or to generate from them a rank-ordering of
possible outcomes. Here is a possible task for practical reason that
does not fit neatly into the categories of instrumental or maximizing
reflection, however broadly construed (Kolnai 2001,Wiggins 1987,
Richardson 1994).



 Practical deliberation about ends is not an easy or well-defined
activity. There are no straightforward criteria for success in this
kind of reflection, and it is often unclear when it has been brought
to a satisfactory conclusion. These considerations encourage the
Humean assumption--especially widespread in the social
sciences--that there is no reasoning about final ends. On the
other hand, how is one supposed to clarify one's largest and most
important ends, if not by reasoning about them in some way? Rather
than exclude such reflection because it does not conform to a narrowly
scientific paradigm of reason, perhaps we should expand our conception
of practical reason to make room for clarificatory reflection about
the ends of action. To do so would be to acknowledge that practical
reason has an essentially heuristic dimension, one that is connected
to the project of self-understanding. By working out the meaning and
implications of such antecedent commitments as loyalty or success, for
instance, we also help to get clear the values that define who we
really are (Taylor 1985).



 Humean models of practical reason rest on a basically
consequentialist account of the relation of action to value. According
to this account, value inheres ultimately in states of affairs,
insofar as it is these that are the objects of subjective preference
rankings. Actions are then judged rational to the extent they bring
about states of affairs that are valuable in this way. It is a matter
of controversy, however, whether this is the most plausible way of
thinking about the rationality of action. Defenders of satisficing
models, for example, think that a given action can be rational even
when it is acknowledged by the agent that an alternative action would
bring about a more valuable state of affairs. Alternatively, it might
be maintained that we can judge an action rational without being able
to arrive at any clear independent ranking of the state of affairs
produced by it, as better or worse than the alternatives. Perhaps our
judgments of the value of actions are ultimately parasitic on our
convictions about the what there is reason to do or to admire; in that
case, we will not be able to derive conclusions about reasons from
antecedent premises in the theory of value (Scanlon 1998,
chap. 2). Related questions have been raised about the basic
consequentialist assumption that value attaches in the first instance
to states of affairs. Thus it may seem to distort our understanding of
friendship, for instance, to maintain that what friends value
fundamentally are states of affairs (involving, say, joint activities
with the friend); what people value as friends are rather concrete
particulars or relations, such as the persons with whom they are
befriended or their relationships with those persons. Building on this
idea in the theory of value, it has been proposed that actions are
rational insofar as they succeed in expressing the attitudes that it
is rational to adopt toward the true bearers of intrinsic value:
people, animals, and things (Anderson 1993).



A supposed advantage of this approach is its ability to explain the
rationality of behaviors that seem intuitively sensible, but that are
hard to fit into the consequentialist scheme (such as commitments
deriving from one's past involvement in an activity or project,
which can look like an irrational weighting of 'sunk
costs' to the consequentialist; compare Nozick 1993). But
defenders of the consequentialist model contend that we can account in
terms of it for rational actions that appear to resist treatment in
consequentialist terms. For instance, if friends have special,
'agent-relative' reasons to attend to the interests of
each other--and not merely reasons to promote the neutral value
of friendship wherever it may be instantiated--this can be
expressed in consequentialist terms by introducing person-indexed
value functions, which rank possible states of affairs in terms of
their desirability from the agent's point of view (Sen
2000).



Whether or not we accept a consequentialist framework, questions in
the theory of value would seem to be an important focus for practical
reflection. Many philosophers are attracted to the idea that reasons
for action are ultimately provided by the values that can be realized
through action (Raz 1999). If this is right, and if we assume as well
a realist or at least non-subjectivist conception of value, then a
different way of thinking about the task of practical reason comes
into view. This may be thought of not primarily as a matter of
maximizing the satisfaction of the agent's given ends, nor of
specifying ends that are still inchoate, but rather as the task of
mapping the landscape of value. This task in turn admits of a number
of different interpretations. In the spirit of G. E. Moore, we might
understand the evaluative reflection relevant to deliberation in
consequentialist terms, as reflection about a non-natural property of
goodness that is instantiated by states of the world; but this is not
a very popular approach today. An influential alternative to it,
inspired by Aristotle, holds that the proper focus of practical
reflection is the question of what it would be to act well (Lawrence
1995, Foot 2001). According to this view, the values that are
relevant to determining what an agent ought to do are those that are
specifically connected to human agency, specifying what it would be to
be good (or at least non-defective) as a human agent (Thompson 2008,
Thomson 2008). Those attracted to pluralistic conceptions of the good
take a more expansive view, suggesting that any concrete dimension of
value that might be affected by action falls within the purview of
practical deliberation (Raz 1999, Raz 2011). 




 Morality has provided an especially fertile source of examples and
problems for the theory of practical reason. A defining question of
moral philosophy is the question of the rational authority of moral
norms: to what extent, and under what conditions, do people have
compelling reasons to comply with the demands of conventional
morality? (Alternatively: to what extent, and under what conditions,
are people rationally required to comply with those demands?)
Reflection on this question has produced some of the most significant
and illuminating philosophical work in the theory of practical
reason. Two divergent tendencies within this body of work can be
singled out. Some accounts of moral reasoning proceed by relating it
to patterns of reflection appropriate to other, non-moral domains,
particularly the maximizing patterns canvassed in the section 5. Thus
it has been argued that, though morality imposes constraints on the
direct pursuit of individual utility, these constraints can be
justified in the terms of ordinary economic rationality; the strategy
of morally-constrained maximization is recommended on grounds of
enlightened self-interest, and this in turn accounts for the authority
of moral considerations to govern the practical reflection of
individuals (Gauthier 1986). Other philosophers have tried to make
sense of morality as a set of rational norms by assimilating it more
directly to the maximizing conception. Consider utilitarianism and
other consequentialist approaches to the normative structure of
morality, which interpret moral rightness in terms of the value of the
consequences (of actions, policies, institutions, or other objects of
moral assessment). These theories derive at least some of their appeal
from the fact that they apply to the moral domain the maximizing model
of rationality that seems both familiar and appealing outside of moral
contexts. Thus one way to argue for ethical consequentialism is to
observe that it is the theory that results when we combine the
requirement of maximization with a distinctively moral constraint of
impartiality, applying the requirement to a set of preferences that
includes those of all the persons (or other sentient creatures)
potentially affected by our actions (Harsanyi 1982).



Opponents of this kind of ethical consequentialism stress the
discontinuities between moral and non-moral patterns of
reasoning. They argue that morality is a source of demands (such as
prohibitions on murder and deception) that cannot be represented
accurately within the framework of maximizing rationality (for
example, Scanlon 1998, chap. 5). If this is correct, then we will be
able to make sense of moral requirements, as norms that appropriately
govern the reflections of individual agents, only if we expand our
conception of the forms and possibilities of practical reason.



There are two connected features of moral norms that seem particularly
significant in this connection. First, they are intuitively understood
to represent agent-relative reasons for action (Nagel 1978). Thus, if
I have promised that I will take you to the airport tomorrow
afternoon, this consideration has a significance for me that it does
not necessarily have for other agents. In particular, the importance
to me of keeping my promise seems to be independent from the
impersonal end of promissory fidelity. This shows itself in the fact
that my reason to keep the promise I have made would be unaffected if
I found myself in a scenario in which breaking my promise would lead
five other agents to keep promises they would otherwise have
flouted. Second, these agent-relative considerations have a
distinctive function within practical deliberation. They are not
merely considerations that speak in favor of the actions they
recommend, but operate rather as practical requirements that
presumptively constrain the agent's activities. The fact that I
have promised to take you to the airport tomorrow, for instance, is
ordinarily a decisive basis for concluding that that is to be done. I
do not need to weigh this consideration against other values that
might be pursued under the circumstances; rather, the promissory
commitment enters the deliberative field from the start in the deontic
guise of an obligation.




There are divergent approaches that have been taken within ethical
theory for making sense of these salient features of moral
reason. Kantians for instance, take rational agents to impose the
moral law on themselves when they act, where the law in question
functions as a limiting condition on their pursuit of their ends
(Korsgaard 1996b, O'Neill 1989). Proponents of virtue theory
take it that compliance with some agent-centered requirements is
partly constitutive of being a good human being (Foot 2001). A still
different class of approaches understands moral norms in essentially
interpersonal terms: either as demands that are imposed by agents on
each other (Darwall 2009), or as relational requirements that define
what we owe *to* each other, and that make possible relations of
mutual recognition or regard (Scanlon 1998, Wallace 2019). These are
very disparate ways of conceptualizing morality as a sui genesis
domain of agent-centered obligations. They have in common, however, a
commitment to the idea that reflection on the nature of morality can
bring to light structures of practical reason that would not otherwise
be salient.