Wrong Kinds of Reasons Problem

Mark Schroeder has recently presented apparent counterexamples to the standard account of the distinction between the right and the wrong kinds of reasons. We argue that these examples appear to refute the standard account only because they blur the distinction between two kinds of reasoning: reasoning about whether to intend or believe that p and reasoning about whether to take up the question of whether to intend or believe that p.

A demon threatens catastrophic destruction if you don’t value his toenail clippings. That doesn’t make them valuable. Your friend’s depressed and could really use a win. Letting him win is still not good sportsmanship. These sorts of problems arise in any activity where it makes sense to talk about there being a right way and a wrong way to engage in the activity. In all such cases there’s a question about whether reasons which go to making something the thing we ought to do go to within practice go to making it the right way to engage in that practice. But there’s also a converse questions: do considerations which bear on what counts as the right way to engage in a practice always bear on whether one ought to perform the moves of that practice? Here I show that they do not, and sketch an account of the relevant evaluative concepts which makes sense of this.

Abstract: In trying to distinguish the right kinds of reasons from the wrong, epistemologists often appeal to the connection to truth to explain why practical considerations cannot constitute reasons. The view they typically opt for is one on which only evidence can constitute a reason to believe. Talbot has shown that these approaches don’t exclude the possibility that there are non-evidential reasons for belief that can justify a belief without being evidence for that belief. He thinks that there are indeed such reasons and that they are the right kind of reasons to justify belief. The existence of such truth promoting non-epistemic reasons is said to follow from the fact that we have an epistemic end that involves the attainment of true belief. I shall argue that there are no such reasons precisely because there is an epistemic end that has normative authority.

Thomas Kroedel argues that we can solve a version of the lottery paradox if  we identify justified beliefs with permissible beliefs. Since permissions do not  agglomerate, we might grant that someone could justifiably believe any ticket in a large  and fair lottery is a loser without being permitted to believe that all the tickets will lose.  I shall argue that Kroedel’s solution fails. While permissions do not agglomerate, we  would have too many permissions if we characterized justified belief as sufficiently
probable belief. If we reject the idea that justified beliefs can be characterized as  sufficiently probably beliefs, Kroedel’s solution is otiose because the paradox can be  dissolved at the outset.

Reactive emotion accounts hold that blameworthiness should be analyzed in terms of the familiar reactive emotions. However, despite the attractions of such views, we are not persuaded that blameworthiness is ultimately a matter of correctly felt reactive emotion. In this paper, we draw attention to a range of little-discussed considerations involving the moral significance of the passage of time that drive a wedge between blameworthiness and the reactive emotions: the appropriateness of the reactive emotions is sensitive to the passage of time in ways that attributions of blameworthiness are not. There are a number of ways in which reactive emotion accounts might attempt to accommodate the moral significance of time, however. We consider the most important of these, but ultimately find them wanting. Accordingly, we conclude that the prospects for the reactive emotion accounts are bleak. Our argument, if successful, has a range of implications for legal theory, most importantly in providing a novel moral basis for statutes of limitations and in shedding light on new avenues in the theory of criminal law generally.