Values and the Reflective Point of View

On Expressivism, Self-Knowledge and Agency

Robert Dunn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317002703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Values are inescapable. They pervade and shape our psychology, our agency, and our lives as reflective and self-knowing subjects. This book explores the crucial ways in which values figure within reflection and thereby shape our theoretical and practical lives, against the backdrop of an expressivist moral psychology that is sensitive to the vicissitudes of valuing. Combining a discussion of the role that values play within reflection with a critique of a range of influential contemporary views in moral psychology and the theory of agency, Dunn shows how such views obscure or distort the nature of that role and that there is a 'natural fit' between an expressivist account of values and the best account of the role of values in the lives of reflective agents. Writers discussed include Simon Blackburn, Michael E. Bratman, Donald Davidson, Harry Frankfurt, Christine Korsgaard, Thomas Nagel and J. David Velleman. The book is also an important addition to the literature on self-knowledge. Dunn argues that, by reasoning about truth and values, we possess a unique, non-observational way of coming to know our own minds and hearts, together with what we are going to make happen in the world. The discussion criticizes recent contributions to the theory of self-knowledge by Richard Moran and J. David Velleman.

Chapter 1

Values and Reflection

Values are central in our lives. We call our values beliefs, but it’s a question how best to categorize them. These values pervade and shape our psychology, our agency, and our lives as reflective and self-knowing subjects. A philosopher like Kant holds that reason itself forces certain values on us.

We can be true to our values or we can betray them. Some philosophers hold that we must be divided in our minds when we betray our values. We can even betray our values to the point of perversity, opting for what we see as entirely bad. What makes this possible is that, despite the way in which many theories of agency cast us, we are not always lovers of the good in so far as we are pursuers of goals. Sometimes we are just lovers of success in action, focussed on how to realize a current end-in-view, be it cheery or bleak.

The topics of practical reflection are plural, as perverse agency makes vivid. One mistake about deliberation about what to do is to suppose that it never foregrounds our desires, except incidentally – that it is exclusively focussed on features of our choice situations that those desires make salient for us. This mistake typically goes along with a collapse of desires into values, a move which ignores the vicissitudes of valuing and which erases the difference between purposive and reasoned activity. A different kind of mistake about practical deliberation is to suppose that it always foregrounds our desires, a move which ignores the plurality of considerations that provide reasons within reflection and which contributes to various distortions within the theory of agency.

These themes set the agenda for the present essay. They mark out for discussion various aspects of our values as these values figure within reflection, especially reflection that relates to our desires, wills, deeds and passions. They also provide a context for indicating how an expressivist approach to values can avoid an impoverished moral psychology. Indeed, the familiar assumption that a commitment to expressivism about values incurs an impoverished moral psychology turns out to be far from the truth. There is a ‘natural fit’ between the roles that values play in the lives of reflective and self-knowing agents and an expressivist interpretation of these values that is sensitive to the complexities of the relations which such agents can have towards their own values. Let’s briefly consider the arguments of Chapters 2–6.

We number our values among our beliefs. But it’s never enough simply to leave it at that. Consider our beliefs about what it would be good to do, or about how it would be admirable to be. These beliefs seem to be psychologically very different from our non-evaluative beliefs about what the world around us is like. The values we set on courses of action or ways of being seem to be somehow closely related to our desires or emotions in ways that set them apart from our simple, worldly beliefs. The problem is how to spell out the contrast.

I think that we can do this by looking to the way in which, within deliberation, certain questions take others as discursive transforms – in particular, to the way in which questions about what to desire, will, do and feel reflectively ‘give way’ to evaluative questions as the issues in focus, with answers to the latter dictating answers to the former. In Chapter 2, I give an account of discursive transforms. The central idea is that some questions are reflectively indistinguishable from others, and there’s an order of dominance among them. So, for example, the question of whether to desire p will ‘give way’, upon consideration, to the question of whether p (or the situation p represents) is somehow good, with the answer to this evaluative question dictating an answer to the question of what to desire.

The phenomenon of discursive transforms, to my mind, reveals what is distinctive about our practical and passional values: typically, within reflection, we put ourselves in a position to form desires, make choices, take up affective reactions, and the like, by reasoning about evaluative issues; and the evaluative conclusions we come to are, or involve, dispositions to acquire matching desires, attitudes of will or feelings. On this reading, the phenomenon of discursive transforms points to a cautious expressivist account of values: expressivist, because the values are taken to be, or to involve, dispositions that relate to practical and passional aspects of our natures; and cautious, because the story allows for the vicissitudes of valuing – for how pathologies can sever the link between our values and our desires, wills or emotions.¹

There is, however, a serious challenge to this line of thinking. It comes from the kind of ‘internalist’ position defended by Michael Smith. Smith, like the cautious expressivist, holds that there is a necessary (albeit defeasible) connection between our values and our desires. However, Smith’s defense of internalism turns on an analysis of the content of our evaluative beliefs. Thus, our beliefs about what it’s desirable to do, he claims, are beliefs about what we would want to do if we were fully rational; and so, anyone with a belief with that content will either have a matching desire or be irrational (as a matter of a failure of coherence). In cases where we are rational, says Smith, what causes us to desire the good (as we see it) is our evaluative belief, combined with the tendency towards coherence that characterizes us to the extent we are rational.

Now, Smith looks well placed to give an account of why consideration of what it’s desirable to do is especially suited to function as a focus for practical deliberation, without construing any evaluative belief we form as intrinsically practical: the content of such an evaluative preoccupation, as revealed by analysis, secures its unique relevance to deliberation about what to desire/do. In Chapter 2, I argue that we shouldn’t accept Smith’s brand of internalism. On the one hand, Smith seems to accept the very plausible idea that propositional mental states are (in core part) rational in their make-up in a way that reflects their direction of fit; that beliefs (for example) are (in core part) constituted by coherence-preserving dispositions to infer, like the modus ponens habit of inference, which reflect their mind-to-world direction of fit.² On the other hand, Smith treats the tendency towards coherence at work where we match desires to values about what to do as external to those values. And yet, we can make perfectly good sense of the idea that such values are dual in their direction of fit, having a mind-to-world direction of fit with respect to their evaluative contents (which marks them out as passive thoughts) and a world-to-mind direction of fit with respect to their embedded contents (which marks them out as active thoughts).³

Moreover, we can do all this without incurring the cost that Smith thinks vitiates any such flexibility about direction of fit – namely, that we ignore the vicissitudes of valuing, by treating values as besires,⁴ or as states that are, or include, desires. For the cautious expressivist will hold that it is in terms of the very tendency towards coherence that operates where we match desires to values that we can make good functional sense of the notion that values have a world-to-mind direction of fit in relation to their sub-contents. And this approach yields a further gain. It lets us keep the account of values within a simple, unified theory about how our minds tend towards coherence; namely, they have this feature because mental states are rational in their constitution in a way that reflects their direction(s) of fit.

By these lights, we should think of the psychology of values in the following way, if we share the commonsense idea that mental states have a constitution that can be mapped onto their direction of fit. Values are complex in their make-up because they are dual in their direction of fit: they include coherence-preserving dispositions that relate to them as passive thoughts (such as habits of modus ponens inference)⁵ and coherence-preserving dispositions that relate to them as active thoughts (such as the disposition to desire what’s seen as good, choose what’s regarded as fit to be chosen, and so on).⁶ But then, this brings us back to expressivist internalism and to a cautious expressivist reading of the role of evaluative questions as the discursive transforms of questions of what to desire, will, do and feel.⁷

The role of some questions as discursive transforms of others within deliberation helps us to understand more than just the nature of valuing. It also (perhaps surprisingly) helps us to understand a certain kind of deliberatively available self-knowledge and the way in which valuing enters into its acquisition. This is the theme I develop in Chapter 3. I argue there that there’s a non-observational way of taking up questions about what we desire, will, feel or are going to do, such that the topic in focus becomes what’s good, or fit to be willed or fit to be felt about in a certain way, just as there’s a non-observational way of taking up questions about what we believe such that the topic in focus becomes what’s true. By reasoning about truth and values, we have a unique way of coming to know our own minds and hearts, and what we are going to make happen in the world.

The values that we form within reflection enable us, where all goes well, both to shape and to come to know about aspects of our mental lives and our future agency. However, our practices and passions do not always match the values we arrive at within reflection: our values have their vicissitudes. Sometimes even, at the extreme, we are perverse and opt for what we reckon to be evil, without qualification. Perhaps, filled with pride or despair, we seek to destroy everything we value. There are, however, conceptions of agency that make perversity look impossible: on these stories, we are always pursuers of the good in so far as we are pursuers of goals; and so, apparently perverse agents turn out to be closet lovers of the good. In Chapter 4, I argue that we can save the possibility of perversity (and save it while remaining expressivist about values) by not conflating purposive and reasoned activity, and by recognizing how, as agents of reasoned activity, we are sometime lovers of the good and sometime mere lovers of success in action. Perverse agents are the latter, bent on success with respect to their bleak aims – aims with which they may even identify.

Lovers of success in action foreground a current desire, or set of desires, in their practical reasoning. However, some philosophers hold that we are always self-absorbed in our reasonings about what to do, invariably foregrounding our current desires. By these lights, the point of view we occupy in practical reflection is characterized by self-consciousness. I discuss this issue in Chapter 5, arguing that it’s a distortion of practical reflection to hold either that we always foreground our current desires or that we never do (except incidentally). Practical reflection is plural in its content. Sometimes we reason about our desires, as when we are merely after success with respect to an end-in-view, or when we take the satisfaction of a desire, or set of desires, to matter to the realization of some serious or substantive good. However, very often, perhaps even typically, the topics of our reflection don’t mention our desires at all: we reason about features of the situation of choice that attract our attention, but not about the desires that might make those features salient.

The view that practical reflection always takes a current desire, or set of desires, as its (focal) topic has been called ‘the objectifying mistake’. In Chapter 5, I indicate ways in which this mistake has played a role in various distortions in the theory of agency, especially in relation to themes like identification with our desires and autonomy. I also discuss how some significant attempts to avoid the objectifying mistake about the contents of reflection have involved the substitution of a different kind of error – namely, ‘the desire-as-valuing mistake.’ This is a mistake that mislocates desires, assimilated to values, among the mental states that enter into practical reasoning as constituents. Expressivism about values might be supposed to be especially vulnerable to this second mistake; however, it is avoided by cautious expressivism.

Finally, in Chapter 6, I turn to the perennial issue of whether there are any values that reason itself forces on us within the reflective point of view. In particular, I focus on a recent attempt by Christine Korsgaard to argue that this is indeed the case. Korsgaard takes her cue from Kant’s idea that willing evil (in formal terms) implicates us in a contradiction and (in material terms) violates an end that is inescapable or necessary within practical reflection. Korsgaard argues that evil values (like those of Hume’s sensible knave) are ‘reflectively unstable’ because they are inconsistent with a deep value to which we are all committed, if we are to value anything at all – namely, our common humanity or rational nature (Kant’s necessary end).

It’s a fascinating idea. However, so far as I can see, Korsgaard fails to make it good. Her argument, in its detail, relies on an unsuccessful defense of the Kantian theme that reasons for one are reasons for all – in her terms, that reasons are public. For all that Korsgaard says, the ambition of showing that the cure for evil values (like those of the sensible knave) lies in being freed of a contradiction remains among the illusions of philosophy.

1 As I indicate in Chapter 2, the way into expressivism through an account of discursive transforms has an obvious affinity with Simon Blackburn’s recommendation that we can read off what is distinctive about valuing by considering our evaluative practices, in which evaluative propositions serve as the focus for practical thought and discussion.

2 I take it that Smith accepts this idea as part of his acceptance of a version of commonsense functionalism about mental states.

3 This applies to our beliefs about what we should believe, as well. If we believe that we should believe p when we shouldn’t, we fault our belief as false; and, if we fail to believe p when we think that we should, we fault our pattern of belief. Thus, it’s misleading to say that difference in direction of fit marks out the difference between (say) theory and practice. Hence, I introduce the contrast between passive and active propositional thoughts. I discuss values about what to believe in Chapter 2, pages 28–9.

4 So-called besires are held to be single, unitary kinds of mental state that are belief-like/desire-like amalgams. I discuss these in Chapter 2, pages 14–19.

5 Even granting that our practical and passional values have a passive aspect, an expressivist treatment will want to go on to theorize in a distinctive way about the dispositions to infer that they therein incorporate. See Chapter 2, note 66.

6 It’s then an interesting question whether we should count the dispositions that our values include as active propositional thoughts as dispositions to infer. I consider this issue in Chapter 2, pages 30–36.

7 In Chapter 2, pages 14–19, I argue against the competing view that our values are intrinsically practical and so-called besires.

Chapter 2

Moral Psychology and Expressivism

It’s a common thought that our beliefs about what’s good, or fit to be chosen, or obligatory or admirable are different from our beliefs about what the world around us is like. We call our evaluations beliefs, but they seem to be somehow intimately tied up with our desires, decisions, intentions, actions and emotions – with our practical and passional lives – in a way that marks them out from our non-evaluative, worldly beliefs. The question is how to get at this difference and articulate it.

Expressivists try to get at and articulate this difference by looking to our evaluative practices. Simon Blackburn characterizes the expressivist approach in the following terms. Evaluations that take our desires, wills, deeds and...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Values and Reflection
• 2 Moral Psychology and Expressivism
• 3 Self-knowledge, Truth and Value
• 4 Perverse Agency
• 5 Two Mistakes about Practical Reasoning
• 6 What’s Wrong with the Sensible Knave?
• Appendix: Making Sense and Mental Partitions
• Bibliography
• Index