Abstract
The distinction between agent-relative reasons and agent-neutral reasons is philosophically important, but there is no consensus on how to understand the distinction exactly. In this paper, I discuss several interpretations of the distinction that can be found in the literature: the Motivational Interpretation, the Scope Interpretation, and the Goal Interpretation, and argue that none of these interpretations is entirely convincing. I propose a novel interpretation of the distinction, which I call the Normative Force Interpretation, according to which the distinction between agent-relative reasons and agent-neutral reasons concerns the normative force that these reasons can have for agents.
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Notes
McNaughton and Rawling (1998: 38) use the term “ultimate statement of the reason”, rather than “full specification”, but I take the idea to be the same, or at least very similar.
Strictly speaking, the agent-neutral reason would then be something like “the fact that a child is drowning (which happens to be mine)”.
This has also been pointed out by Krister Bykvist. See Bykvist (2018). However, Bykvist is more critical of the distinction than I am.
Another worry is that the different kinds of agent-relative reasons have nothing in common, and that there is not one way of drawing the distinction that applies to all relevant cases. After all, project- and relationship-dependent reasons differ from deontological restrictions in that the former speak in favor of performing certain acts, whereas the latter speak in favor of refraining from certain acts. Furthermore, reasons of the former kind sometimes permit an agent to put a special emphasis on her own life, and sometimes they require her to do so; reasons of the latter kind require the agent to put a special emphasis on her own actions. However, the assumption that there is unified interpretation of the distinction that applies to all kinds of agent-relative reasons seems warranted: in each case, the fact that something is mine – my project, my relationship, my action – is considered to be normatively relevant. The question is therefore in what way it matters that something is mine.
See, for example, Parfit (1984); Mack (1998); Darwall (2002); Kolodny (2003); Huckfeldt (2007); Jeske (2008); Keller (2013). Schroeder (2007: 280) even calls this interpretation the “official definition” of the agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction. Lerm (2013) lists this interpretation as one possible interpretation without embracing it fully.
Of course, proponents of SI can respond that there is only one person who stands in the father-child-relation to this specific child, namely me, and that this suffices to show that nobody but me has this specific reason to save the child. I do not find this reply convincing. First, it might very well be that more than one person stands in the father-child-relation to this specific child (for example, I might be the social father, but somebody else is the biological father; or the biological father is deceased, but me and another person are both social fathers to this child). Second, the father-child-relation seems important because it is one variation of the parent-child-relation, but more than one person stands in the parent-child-relation to this specific child. I thank an anonymous referee for helping me to clarify this example.
An anonymous referee has pointed out to me that agents may aim at other things than bringing about states of affairs, and that this may hurt my argument. While the question whether goals are state of affairs or something else this is a complex question that I cannot discuss in the detail it deserves here, I would like to say a couple of things in response.
First, I think that it is intuitive plausible to understand goals as states of affairs that agents aim to bring about rather than actions that they aim to perform. Suppose that my goal is that my children have financial security after my death. It does not seem obvious that this is the same goal as my goal to do what I can do to ensure that my children have financial security after my death. Or suppose that my goal is to be a good husband. This also does not seem to be the same as my goal to do everything that a good husband does.
A second consideration to think of goals as states of affairs comes from action theory. So-called teleological accounts of actions or of reasons for action understand actions as “means by which we affect how the world goes” (Portmore 2011: 56; for a defense of a teleological account of action, see also Sehon 1997). And, as Portmore points out, this means that acting consists in actualizing possible worlds. And actualizing possible worlds is plausibly understood as bringing about states of affairs. Now, of course, the teleological conception of either actions or of reasons for action is controversial, but it provides independent support for the idea that goals are states of affairs.
Third, when an agent pursues a goal, she considers the thing that she aims at to be good in some form. Thus, we can expect the question of what goals are – states of affairs, or actions, or perhaps something else – to mirror the debate on the fundamental bearers of value. And while there are many different accounts about the correct understanding of fundamental bearers of value (for an overview of the possible positions here, see Olson 2004: 32), states of affairs seem to be a plausible candidate for a fundamental bearer of value; and as Wedgwood (2009: 327) has pointed out, it is possible to translate every claim about value into a claim about a valuable state of affairs. If this is correct, then we should be able to translate every claim about an agent’s goal into a claim about a state of affairs that she aims to bring about.
An anonymous referee has questioned whether it really makes sense in such a case to say that we both share the same goal. Priority between more general aims seems to affect what each of us should aim at when making a particular choice. Nevertheless, I think it still makes sense to say that agents share the same goals, even if they prioritize the shared goals in different ways. In other contexts, it seems plausible to say that you still have a specific goal (say, start a family), even though some other goal of yours has priority at that moment (say, advancing your career). Similarly, we might say that in situations of conflict, agents still have the same goals even though they prioritize them differently. But proponents of GI do not claim that in cases of agent-relative reasons we have different priorities among our goals; they say that we have different goals.
To repeat, it does not suffice to say that the reason is agent-relative simply because it is my daughter who is drowning, for reasons that include an agential back-reference can also be agent-neutral reasons. The reference to the agent needs to do normative work for the reason to count as agent-relative and altering the force of my reason to save this child is such normative work. I thank an anonymous referee for pressing me on this.
See also Bykvist (2018) who is critical about the agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction and thinks that we should rather focus on how the weighing of reasons should be done according to different moral theories. I am obviously sympathetic to this view, but I think that NFI shows that the agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction matters quite a bit when we talk about weighing reasons according to different moral theories.
See my remarks in FN 7.
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Acknowledgements
This research has been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation as part of the research project on “Value-Based Non-Consequentialism” (Grant Number PP00P1_176703 / 1). For helpful comments and feedback, I thank Monika Betzler, Julian Nida-Rümelin and Christoph Knill, as well as a very helpful anonymous referee.
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Löschke, J. Agent-Relative Reasons and Normative Force. Philosophia 49, 359–372 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00218-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00218-1