Resumen de Rationality Through Reasoning / Precis of Rationality Through Reasoning

Abstract

Rationality Through Reasoning [Broome (2013)] investigates normativity, rationality and reasoning, and the relations among them. Its original stimulus was an idea of mine about the so-called 'motivation problem' in moral philosophy: the problem of how a normative belief motivates you to act. You believe you ought to do something and you end up doing it. How come? I deal with a special version of the motivation problem: when you believe you ought to do something, how does that belief bring you to intend to do it? My answer is that it can do so through a process of reasoning: you can reason your way from the premise-attitude of believing you ought to do something to the conclusion-attitude of intending to do it. I call this 'enkratic reasoning'. I take reasoning to be an act - something you do - at least sometimes. So an attractive feature of my answer to the motivation problem is that you can motivate yourself to do what you believe you ought to do, by means of an act of reasoning. My answer is also consistent with the view that a normative belief is a belief like any other; it need not be an attitude of some other sort that somehow incorporates motivation Show more