Table Of ContentNATURAL REASONS
NATURAL REASONS
PERSONALITY AND POLITY
S. L. Hurley
4
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1989
Oxford University Press
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14 6 q Copyright © 1989 by S. L. Hurley
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Hurley, S. L. (Susan L.)
Natural reasons : personality and polity / S.L. Hurley
Pp. cm.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-19-505615-9
1. Decision-making (Ethics) 2. Jurisprudence. I. Title.
BJ1419.H87_ 1989
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To my mother, and the memory of my father.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank St. Catherine’s College and All Souls College for their
generous support of this work in its early stages. I would also like to thank
Edward McClennan and the National Science Foundation for the opportunity
and funding to attend the Public Choice Institute, held at Dalhousie University
in Halifax in the summer of 1984, during which the seeds of some of the ideas
developed here were planted.
My greatest thanks, for inspiration, comments, and encouragement over
many years, are due to Ronald Dworkin, John McDowell, Derek Parfit,
Amartya Sen, and Charles Taylor. I am also grateful to many other people
for extremely helpful criticisms of various drafts and sections of this material
and comments in conversation, including Michael Bacharach, Simon Black-
burn, David Braybrooke, John Broome, David Charles, Gerald Cohen, Ro-
bin Cubitt, Donald Davidson, William Ewald, Elizabeth Fricker, Rai Gaita,
Peter Gardenfors, Richard Gaskin, Allan Gibbard, James Griffin, Justin Gos-
ling, Samuel Guttenplan, Jean Hampton, John Harsanyi, Steven Holtzman,
Mark Johnston, Lewis Kornhauser, David Lewis, Sabina Lovibond, John
Mackie, David Mitchell, Thomas Nagel, Martha Nussbaum, David Owens,
Christopher Peacocke, David Pears, Nicholas Rawlins, Donald Regan, Hugh
Rice, Kevin Roberts, Paul Seabright, Martin Slater, Michael Smith, John
Vickers, David Wiggins, Bernard Williams, and the members of my seminars
at U. C. Berkeley, 1984, at Harvard, 1987, and at Princeton, 1988. Needless
to say, all remaining errors are my own.
Earlier versions of some the material in the book were published in four
articles: “Frege, the Proliferation of Force, and Non-Cognitivism”, in Mind,
1984; “Objectivity and Disagreement”, in Morality and Objectivity: Essays
in Honour of John Mackie, Ted Honderich, editor (Routledge & Kegan Paul,
London, 1985); ‘“‘Supervenience and the Possibility of Coherence”, in Mind,
1985; and “Conflict, Akrasia and Cognitivism”, in Proceedings of the Aris-
totelian Society, 1985-86. I’m grateful to the editors concerned for permission
to use revisions of previously published material.
Princeton, N.J. S.L.H.
January 1989
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION
Part I. Relations Between Mind and Value
CHAPTER 2. OBJECTIVITY
1. Terminology and distinctions: cognitivism, realism, centralism, and
objectivism about reasons for action
2. Parallels: centralism about colour, law, and logic, and some preliminary
doubts 15
3. Wittgensteinian and Davidsonian arguments applied against centralism,
and how the issue about centralism cuts across the issue about
cognitivism 20
4. A coherence account and the threats of overdetermination and of
indeterminacy
CHAPTER 3. DISAGREEMENT
1. A coherence account and the locus of disagreement
2. Disagreement in form of life and substantive disagreement
3. Practices as criteria of agreement in form of life; constraints on
interpretation vs. ultra-interpretations 33
The antecedence doctrine and substantive disagreement; disagreement
>
about colours? 38
Uncontestable concepts 43
a Conceivably contestable concepts 45
r Essentially contested concepts
e The shifting locus of substantive disagreement and the limits of
substantive and conceptual difference
CHAPTER 4. PREFERENCE 55
1. Survey of the arguments of three chapters and introduction to the
‘problem’ of the eligibility of interpretations 5S
2. Conceptions of the preference relation and examples of the ‘problem’
involving transitivity 58
3. An intuitive introduction to the general idea of independence
conditions
x CONTENTS
4. Mutual Preferential Independence and the individuation of criteria
5. The argument yet again, this time concerning Independence
and the individuation of alternatives: axiom-conservatism vs.
data-conservatism
CHAPTER 5. INTERPRETATION
1. The need for substantive as well as formal constraints on eligibility: a
sample of views
Special feelings don’t help
e Constraint by natural and social environment: the rejection of
e
psychological individualism
4. The mind as world-laden: naturalism vs. idealism
5. The role of empirical information: the causation of particular mental
states vs. the individuation of their contents in terms of normal causal
relations
Causal relations, causal explanations, and rational explanations
e Constraint by reasons and values: interpretation does not compete with
n
science 98
CHAPTER 6. SUBJECTIVISM 102
1. Preference as value-laden 102
2. Extended preference and interpersonal comparisons 105
3. Substantive constraints on extended preference, human nature, and
ethical disagreement 112
4. Disagreement and democracy 120
Part II. Conflicting Reasons and Values
CHAPTER 7. CONFLICT 125
1. Conflict of reasons: real or apparent? 125
2. Restricted agglomerativity: the relational form vs. the indexed form 128
3. Prima facie reasons vs. pro tanto reasons, and the absence of evidential
akrasia 130
CHAPTER 8. AKRASIA 136
1. Irrational systems and rational subsystems; conflicts within persons and
conflicts between persons 136
The irrationality of taking the unit of agency as fixed 145
r Some illustrations 149
n
y Collective action, self-determination, and ethics 156
a
Attributions of akrasia: conflict and formal vs. substantive constraints
w
on eligibility 159
