Search

This thesis has two distinct aims. The first is to shed light on our practice of attributing rationality to others. To begin, Chapter 2 demonstrates that we cannot rely on questions of what rationality requires to make sense of this practice. Chapter 3 explores a different strategy and directly engages with rationality attributions. It lays out some desiderata for an adequate account of such attributions. Chapter 4 develops a novel account of rationality attributions. This account focusses on explicitly mentioning sets of an agent's attitudes, and also includes a measure for the attribution's robustness. Thanks to these features, the account meets the desiderata, and also allows for progress on persisting disagreements in the debate. Chapter 5 further illustrates the account by contrasting it with an alternative contextualist understanding of rationality attributions. The second aim of this thesis is to defend the Normativity of Rationality. In Chapter 6, I consider problems for a reasons-based understanding of the Normativity of Rationality which arise from so-called transmission principles, and point out strategies to defend rationality's normativity. Chapter 7 provides further support for one of these strategies. Finally, Chapter 8 presents my positive argument. I propose to understand rationality's normativity in terms of commitment - if you are rationally required to x, you are committed to x. Commitment can avoid the counter-examples of alternative understandings in terms of reasons or ought by combining features of both notions. This makes commitment a promising normative notion in its own right.

Since the publication of Anthony Kenny’s Action, Emotion and Will, there has been a consensus that emotions involve representing their objects as mattering to the subject in a certain way. All major contemporary theories aim to accommodate this characteristic, and those that clearly cannot have generally been abandoned. This essay is an investigation of a related but distinct characteristic of emotion, one that has often been mentioned but that is only beginning to be systematically investigated. This is that emotions are candidates for rationality: it is unreasonable to be angry with someone who is blameless, to envy someone who is wretched, or to be outraged about something that is unproblematic. In this essay, I offer an account of exactly what this rationality consists in, I argue that existing theories of emotion cannot wholly accommodate it, and I develop a theory that can. Chapter One is a critique of the currently ascendant perception theories, and Chapter Two is a critique of the formerly ascendant belief theories. Chapter Three outlines a positive account of emotions, which I characterise as a form of ‘non-doxastic cognitivism’. Chapters Four and Five look at some more specific features of emotion, namely their hedonic character and their potential for sentimentality.

In law as well as in ordinary life, it matters what rules societies have; but what does it mean for a society to have a rule? HLA Hart’s famous answer is that for a society to have a rule is for there to be a certain social practice in that society, consisting of an external, behavioural aspect and an internal, attitudinal aspect. Hart’s ‘practice theory’ dominates thinking in jurisprudence about social rules, but, I argue, there are serious problems with it. It would be better to adopt what I call the ‘acceptance theory’. In the early chapters of this thesis, I argue that the practice theory is both overinclusive and underinclusive. It is overinclusive because Hart’s description of the ‘internal aspect’ is too general. It is underinclusive because the ‘external aspect’ is unnecessary. Once these criticisms are taken into account, what remains of the practice theory is the idea that a society has a rule because its members have a certain attitude. I spend much of this thesis determining the features of this attitude. Ultimately, I focus on the attitude known as “acceptance” in the philosophy of action. Acceptance of a proposition simulates belief in that proposition, though it may be held independently of that belief. I argue that a person or society has a rule when that person, or that society’s members, accept that some action ought to be performed, whatever their beliefs about the matter. This theory incorporates the plausible core of the practice theory, while avoiding its problems.

When an act is right or wrong, there may be an explanation why. Different moral theories recognize different moral facts and offer different explanations of them, but they offer no account of moral explanation itself. What, then, is its nature? This thesis seeks a systematic account of moral explanation within a framework of moral realism. In Chapter 1, I develop a pluralist theory of explanation. I argue that there is a prima facie distinctive normative mode of explanation that is essential to moral theory. In Chapter 2, I characterize normative explanation through its formal properties. I then draw on John Mackie’s claim that moral explanations are queer to develop a powerful form of moral scepticism. In Chapters 3–4, I reject attempts to reduce normative explanation to logical necessity, metaphysical necessity, or conceptual (analytic) necessity. The failure of these accounts is taken to reinforce Mackie’s scepticism. In Chapter 5, I defend a partial analysis of normative explanation in terms of irreducible normative laws. I argue that irreducible normative laws offer a realist, though non-naturalist, answer to Mackie’s scepticism. The existence of irreducible normative laws then is defended as offering the best realist explanation of why rightness and wrongness supervene on descriptive properties. In Appendix A, I discuss the claim the normative explanation has an essential connection to the motivation of virtuous agents. I defend this claim from certain difficulties posed by Jonathan Dancy’s recent work.

The cohabitation effect denotes that people who cohabit with their romantic partner before marriage are at greater risk for relational discord than those who do not. One explanation suggests that communicating about the relationship during the transition from dating to cohabitation with a romantic partner can influence individuals’ relationship quality. Specifically, people who communicate about the relationship, labeled as deciders, are less likely to experience relationship concerns than those who do not, known as sliders. However, little inquiry has acknowledged that deciders and sliders can be topically avoidant during the transition. This dissertation was conducted for several purposes: (a) to investigate the extent to which sliders and deciders are prone to avoiding topics; (b) to explore the degree to which topic avoidance during the transition is related to cohabitors’ relationship quality; and (c) to test whether a complex perspective on topic avoidance that includes topics, reasons, and strategies is related to cohabitors’ relationship quality. The dissertation analyzed data collected from 519 individuals who have transitioned from dating to cohabitation via CloudResearch. The dissertation found that during the transition: (a) cohabitors report lower relationship quality when they avoid topics concerning their current relationship; (b) cohabitors are primarily motivated to avoid topics for relationship and self protection as well as avoiding conflict, though each is associated with relationship quality differently; (c) certain strategies for topic avoidance are inversely associated with cohabitors’ relationship quality; and (d) a holistic approach to topic avoidance is associated with cohabitors’ relationship quality in unique ways. As a result, these findings were discussed more broadly in topic avoidance research, stay-and-leave literature, and inertia theory.

In numerous countries, a large majority of the population gambles each year. Understanding the reasons that motivate individuals to abstain from gambling can help inform researchers’ conceptualization of this relatively uncommon decision. I designed this investigation to assess and compare the importance of 13 reasons for abstaining from gambling reported by individuals who were abstinent from gambling for at least 6-months and to identify those motivations associated with continued abstinence during a 6-month follow-up period. To meet these objectives, I conducted two studies. First, I recruited a sample of n=509 adults via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) who had abstained for at least six months and examined the cross-sectional associations between the importance of reasons for abstinence reported by participants and their durations of abstinence. I also conducted an exploratory factor analysis, which revealed that importance rankings for 9 of the 13 reasons loaded onto subscales of reasons. The survey results indicated that financial concerns and knowledge that the odds are against them were the most commonly reported reasons for abstention. In addition, lifelong abstainers tended to rank reasons reflecting sociocultural values as more important than did non-lifelong abstainers. Next, I conducted a second study in which I analyzed importance rankings of the same 13 reasons that had been previously collected as part of an ongoing longitudinal survey. I also collected 6-month follow-up data from those participants. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the importance rankings from Study 2 demonstrated good fit with the subscales from Study 1, Robust CFI = 0.990, Robust RMSEA = 0.053, 95% CI for RMSEA = 0.047 to 0.059, SRMR = 0.042. Similar to Study 1, participants in Study 2 ranked fear of losing money and knowledge that the odds are against them as the most important reasons for abstaining. In addition, lifelong abstainers in Study 2 also ranked reasons reflecting sociocultural values as more important than did non-lifelong abstainers. Longitudinal findings demonstrated variability between Time 1 and Time 2 in both the importance rankings and durations of abstinence reported by participants. Nevertheless, participants who ranked sociocultural values as a more important at baseline were more likely to remain abstinent during the six-month follow-up period. This association became non-significant when baseline duration of abstinence was included as an independent variable, and that may have resulted from collinearity between rankings of this subscale and lengths of abstinence at baseline. The results of these two studies suggest that financial concerns and knowledge that the odds are against them are the two most important factors motivating non-gamblers to abstain. However, these reasons do not appear to predict continued abstinence over time, whereas reasons reflecting sociocultural values appear to be longitudinally associated with future abstinence. These findings have implications for both the prevention and treatment of problem gambling. Family-based prevention programs for gambling may help children to avoid gambling in the future by creating sociocultural motivations for abstinence. In addition, linking abstinence-based goals to clients’ religious beliefs, moral values, and the family environments in which they were raised may help clients in recovery from gambling disorder to achieve and maintain abstinence.

Recent research in social psychology suggests that our attitudes and actions don’t typically issue from our reflective capacities. Instead, it appears that they often issue from what psychologists refer to as “automatic” processes, understood as psychological processes that operate quickly, efficiently, and outside of our conscious awareness and control. Much of this same research also suggests that when we do exercises our reflective capacities (rare as it may be), it’s usually not to question our attitudes and actions but rather to rationalize them (that is, to come up with reasons to do, think, and feel things that we want to do, think, and feel anyway). In light of these findings, a number of people have recently argued that we aren’t the kind of rational, reflective creatures that philosophers have traditionally thought we are. My aim in this dissertation is to respond to their worries. In the first half, I focus on questions related to our ability to do things for reasons. Common sense suggest that we often do things for reasons, but if our attitudes and actions typically issue from automatic processes, to what extent is this true? I argue that the best way to make good on the idea that we often do things for reasons is to accept both that our ability to do things for reasons doesn’t depend on our reflective capacities and that many of the processes that actually guide our attitudes and actions, though perhaps “automatic,” are nevertheless quite responsive to reasons. In the second half of the dissertation, I focus on whether we can rely on our reflective capacities to improve our agency. Although I deny that we need these capacities to do things for reasons, the reasons for which we do things aren’t always good reasons, and it’s only natural to think that we can rely on our reflective capacities to monitor and control their influences on us. However, this sort of view faces to main empirical challenges. First, it appears that we often don’t know what the causes of our attitudes and actions are, so how can we be expected to monitor and control their influences on us? Second, even if we do know what the causes of our attitudes and actions are, why should we think that we’re inclined to use reflection to question them? Isn’t it much more likely that we’ll use it to rationalize them instead? In response to the first challenge, I argue that once we recognize that reflection doesn’t require us to have introspective access to its objects, it becomes more plausible to think that we’re often in a good position to reflect on the causes of our attitudes and actions. In response to the second challenge, I argue that as long as we focus on the ways in which other people improve our reflection, the idea that we’ll often be inclined to use reflection to question our attitudes and actions becomes more plausible as well.

Using an online data collection procedure, I assessed the level of importance (not at all to very important) of each of 17 possible reasons for lifelong abstention from each of four drugs (prescription stimulants, prescription opioids, cocaine, and heroin) reported by 768 undergraduates enrolled at a large state-supported university. Each participant also completed personality measures that assessed trait self-control, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and intellect/imagination. Factor analyses indicated that 16 of the 17 reasons for abstinence comprised four clusters, and I created four subscale scores for each participant by calculating mean ratings for the reasons that loaded on each of the factors. With few exceptions, ANOVAs revealed that importance ratings for each of the four subscales (Negative Consequences, Not Enjoyable, Social Disapproval, and Difficult to Acquire) and the non-loading reason (Against One’s Beliefs) were highest for heroin, followed in descending order by cocaine, prescription opioids and, finally, prescription stimulants. Reasons reflecting Negative Consequences were rated most important for each of the four drugs. Reasons reflecting the drugs being Difficult to Acquire were rated as the least important type of reason. These findings suggest that reasons for abstinence are viewed by lifelong abstainers as less important for prescription drugs than they are for comparable nonprescription drugs. Although multiple regressions revealed statistically significant associations between the personality characteristics and reported importance ratings, the associations were quite small (all adjusted R2 ranged from 0.015 to 0.101) suggesting that these personality characteristicsmay not be reliable predictors of students’ reasons for abstaining from these substances. To the degree that these findings generalize across the population of university students, it appears that university students view each type of reason for abstaining as less important for pharmaceutical drugs than for illicit drugs. University students who are lifelong abstainers also appear to consider negative consequences as the most important types of reasons for abstaining from the drugs investigated. Education and prevention messages could, therefore, emphasize negative consequences as one means to reinforce continued abstinence from these (and perhaps other) drugs.

It is possible to act for a reason. We do it all the time. You might have brought her medicine for the reason that she is ill. He might go to the store to get milk. Edmund might skate in the middle of the pond because the ice in the middle of the pond is thin. What must be true of us, and of the world, such that we can act for reasons? In normal cases, when someone acts for the reason that (for example) the ice in the middle of the pond is thin, it really is the case that the ice in the middle is thin. This is mostly due to the fact that we are not often wrong about such mundane ways the world is. But what if one takes it that the ice is thin, and in fact it is not thin? Can one still act for the reason that the ice is thin? In my efforts to give a sufficient answer to this question, I have been led to a package of views, the core tenets of which are at least the following five. First, it is possible to act in the light of a falsehood: a consideration that is not the case can be an agent’s reason for acting. Second, it is not possible to act in unbelief: in order for an agent to act for a reason, the agent must at least believe that reason to be the case. Third, the reasons for which agents act can play a role in explaining the actions done for those reasons –– even when agents act in the light of falsehoods. Fourth, there are very few (if any) formal rules or principles constraining the explanatory role of reasons. Any action explanation that specifies the content of the reason for acting has reserved a legitimate explanatory role for the reason. Fifth, all of these claims apply equally to motivating and normative reasons, so-called practical and epistemic reasons, and reasons for action and reasons for belief.

Reductionism about personal identity is the view that facts about personal identity reduce to lower-level facts about things like psychological or physical connectedness. In this dissertation, I give arguments for reductionism and for Derek Parfit’s “Extreme Claim” that reductionism requires a radical revision of our ordinary normative thought. After detailing the extent of this revision, I introduce and describe a special sort of self-alienation that is likely to be engendered by a genuine belief in Extreme Claim Reductionism. I argue that this alienation cannot and should not be eliminated, and consider existing attempts to eliminate similar sorts of alienation and note where they seem to fall short of their aim. I then outline a practical strategy for living with Extreme Claim Reductionism and the alienation that accompanies it.

This dissertation is a collection of essays under the theme of moral responsibility 'at the margins'. I investigate a number of examples of disordered agency and cognition -- self-deception, delusion, and addiction -- through the lens of a so-called `reasons-responsiveness' theory of morally responsible agency, employing the theory to examine the extent to which agents in those conditions are morally responsible, and in virtue of what this is so. In Chapter 2, after a brief introductory chapter, and before getting into the individual disordered phenomena, I develop and defend the reasons-responsiveness theory of responsible agency to which I will appeal in later chapters. Such theories -- according to which responsible agency is based in an agent's capacity for recognizing and responding to reasons for action -- are not entirely new. However, developed in the right way, they are also well-equipped to respond to a kind of skeptical challenge to morally responsible agency that has somewhat recently come into vogue. This skeptical challenge is motivated by recent findings in social and cognitive psychology that seem to show that much of human behaviour is motivated by considerations which are, from the perspective of justifying action, irrelevant. For example, contributions to a communal office coffee fund can as much as triple when the instructions are accompanied with a pair of watchful 'eyes'. I argue that of all mainstream theories of agency, the reasons-responsiveness theory is least threatened by results such as these. I further respond by addressing a dispute between reasons-responsiveness theorists themselves: what is required for someone to count as responding to reason? I argue for a liberal interpretation of this requirement on independent grounds, and note that such a version of the theory is even better equipped to respond to the skeptic, yielding a theory of agency which is actually enhanced by appeal to the empirical results. In Chapters 3 and 4 I develop a novel account of self-deception and use that account to address the question: Are some delusional subjects responsible for their delusions? The central difficulty for the philosophical theory of self-deception has been to yield a psychologically plausible description of its dynamics. Self-deception is also paradigmatically intentional behaviour for which agents are typically blameworthy. I argue that no extant account of self-deception can capture both of these features. On my account, what makes a state a self-deceptive one is not determined by how it comes about. Rather, it is determined by how that belief is maintained. Self-deception, on this view, is willful failure, a refusal, to meet epistemic requirements for motivationally biased reasons. Thus, self-deceivers are typically responsible for their self-deception. I further argue that if this account is correct, there will be at least some cases of delusion (e.g., the Reverse Othello and Capgras delusions) for which agents are, in some sense, responsible. Appealing to the distinction between blameworthiness and (what I shall call) 'attributability', I claim that this leads us not to the conclusion that delusional subjects should be blamed, but instead to a more nuanced understanding of the kind of agency involved in the dynamics of delusion, and of the reasons these subjects are excused. The final chapter is about addiction. Perhaps the central question raised by addiction is: to what extent are addicts responsible agents? Theorists notoriously oscillate between two extreme positions: (1) that addicts are just like unimpaired agents and are fully responsible and (2) that addicts helplessly suffer a condition that leaves them utterly without self-control. I argue against both extreme positions, engaging with current science at both turns. Against (2), I argue that there is no satisfactory understanding of the 'brain disease theory' of addiction that entails that addicts are not responsible agents. I then argue against (1) by considering addicts at different stages of addiction -- those who are aware of their predicament vs. those who are not (although they should be). With respect to the unaware, I argue that they share some features with the self-deceived which explains their insensitivity to a rationally circumscribed body of evidence. Concerning the aware, I appeal to empirical work on `ego-depletion' and willpower -- and to Chapter 2's theory of responsibility -- to argue that these addicts suffer a graded impairment of the will, one that partially excuses them from blameworthiness.

Intuitively, emotion/judgment conflicts are irrational because they are disruptive. They create disturbances and divisions in our generally well-ordered and cohesive selves. When you fear the spider, even though you judge that it isn’t harmful to humans, you may recoil from its frightful appearance. You might also spend your mental and practical resources and devising a safe disposal of the pest with a long broom handle that keeps a comfortable distance between you and it, even though your judgment implies that such precautions aren’t necessary. Unless or until the conflict is resolved, each element of the conflict vies for influence over your thoughts and actions. In this dissertation, I give an account of emotion/judgment conflicts according to which they are conflicts of assent-bearing attitudes. As attitudes, emotions and judgments both entail rational commitments, at a minimum, to refrain from having inconsistent attitudes. Emotion/judgment conflicts violate these commitments. A major objection to this view is that emotions appear to be inconsistently responsive to reasons that support altering or extinguishing it. Some emotions easily change in response to reflection, but some are highly recalcitrant. Therefore, emotions don’t obviously have the sort of relationship to reasons and reflection that our attitudes have. Attitudes are reason responding. In response to this objection, I argue that emotions do generally respond to reflection on our reasons, even in some cases in which they appear to be recalcitrant because they are unmoved by the reasons that formed the basis of our judgment. The modes of reflection that would be able to adjudicate the conflict are just the sorts that our emotional faculties respond to: attention redirection, information elaboration, and imagination. These modes of reflection can correct for hasty and myopic judgments as well as ill-founded emotions by widening our reasons set and recalibrating our weighting schemes.

The three research studies included in this dissertation aimed to examine the reasons for e-cigarette use among U.S. adults, and to examine the U.S. public opinion on allowing e-cigarette use where smoking is otherwise prohibited. Mixed (quantitative and qualitative) research methods were used. Data from an online survey (2012) and focus groups (2014) were analyzed. Among 307 survey respondents who had ever used e-cigarettes, the three most common reasons for e-cigarette use were curiosity (40.8%), the belief that “it helps people quit smoking” (19.1%), and perceiving e-cigarettes “less harmful than regular cigarettes” (9.3%). About 40% of U.S. adults were uncertain whether e-cigarette use should be allowed in smoke-free public areas, 37% opposed, while 23% favored allowing their use in smoke-free environments. The majority of the focus group participants have used e-cigarettes to complement regular cigarette smoking and intake nicotine where smoking is restricted. E-cigarette use was viewed to be less harmful and more convenient than smoking regular cigarettes. The findings of the three studies suggest that curiosity about e-cigarettes lead to experimentation and the convenience to use e-cigarettes in smoke-free areas lead to continual use. With impending regulation and the changing e-cigarette landscape, there is a need for continued monitoring and research on reasons for and attitudes about e-cigarette use, and on public opinion pertaining to e-cigarette use in smoke-free areas.

This is an essay about reasons for action. It begins with two rather ordinary observations. The first is that these two uses of the term ‘reason’ roughly correspond with the two main roles that a reason can play: the role of favoring a prospective course of action, and the role of explaining action. Each of these roles seems crucial to a philosophical account of reasons, and it is not obvious that either has claim to priority. The second observation is that accommodating each of these roles seems to place restrictions on what we can say about reasons for action, and those who lean toward giving priority to one role rather than the other tend also to give priority to the corresponding set of restrictions. They take that set as given, and then focus their efforts on finding a way to meet the other set if they can. Accommodating the explanatory role has seemed to many to require that a reason bear some relation to the motivations of the agent for whom it is reason. One might wonder: what sense could there be in calling something a reason for me to act if it were not in any way capable of explaining my being moved to act? I argue, however, that accepting this sort of internalist condition on something’s being a reason to act precludes accepting a condition of objectivity that is imposed on us if we wish to accommodate the favoring role: sometimes, at least, when we have a reason to act, we could not cease to have that reason simply by having a (perhaps radically) different set of attitudes. I then consider whether the reverse might be true of externalist theories. Does taking the favoring role as one’s starting point preclude a full account of the explanatory role of reasons? I argue that it does not. I show that an Anscombean conception of intentional action allows for a fairly clean solution to a pair of puzzles that motivate this worry. This approach relieves much of the pressure to think of reasons as being tied to motivational attitudes.

In this dissertation I develop a theory of practical reasons as such, and then I extend that theory to specifically moral reasons. According to the theory of practical reasons that I develop in Part I, the existence and weight of an agent's reason to act in a particular way depends on an agent's motivational states--specifically those motivational states issuing from practical orientations that play some role in structuring the agent's practical identity. I then argue that this account of practical reasons is a well-motivated reductive account of practical reasons that is extensionally adequate. In Part II, I turn to questions of specifically moral reasons, which putatively have the properties of being categorical and of having practical priority. I argue that the theory of practical reasons that I develop in Part I doesn't rule out the possibility that moral reasons would have these two properties, and I suggest (following Peter Strawson) that such properties could be grounded in our orientation towards others as participants in certain forms of meaningful interpersonal relationships--an orientation that is perhaps internal to our practical identity as relational agents. I argue that if this is correct, then moral reasons will be categorical and have practical priority.

Objective: To explore the causal factors which are the reasons of exercise and non-exercise and the potential strategies to promote exercise in the young-old elderly. Method: The focus group discussion was a main method. Observation and in-depth interview were employed. Participants were Thai elderly aged 60-69 years, residing in Tambon Salaya. Focus group discussion was conducted with 12 groups. Participants were allocated into groups by genders and exercise behavior. Those allocated into exercise group had to report exercise behavior fitting to the recommendation by American College of Sports Medicine. Questions covered 4 main issues which were perception of exercise, facilitating factors and barriers of exercise, and potential strategies to promote exercise. Content analysis was employed to analyze the data. Results: Motivation and attitude to exercise, routinely exercise, and early-life experience about exercise were found to be individual factors to facilitate exercise. External factors which were social network and support as well as accessibility and availability were also expressed to have facilitating effects. Exercise benefits were recognized as a reward making exercise sustainable. Meanwhile, a range of factors were found to be barriers. Time constraint, perception and attitude to exercise, and health problems were cited to be barriers. Lack of social network and difficulty in transportation were perceived as external barriers. Adverse experience of exercise was cited to block the continuation of exercise. Conclusions: A range of causal factors cover from individual to external factors found in this study can explain why some elderly adopt exercise behavior as health-promoting behavior and why some elderly do not. In this study, suggestion of strategies to promote exercise was provided based on the findings.

HIV medication adherence is critical for HIV viral suppression and reducing morbidity and mortality. Adherence rates are below optimal levels and women have poorer adherence compared to men. Fifty percent of people treated with antiretroviral therapy (ART) are resistant to at least one medication. Current interventions are costly and magnitude of improvement is often small. Three studies were conducted to examine the reasons why people are missing their medications and the relationship with documented factors. The first study examined key correlates and reasons for missed medication in people from nine cities in the US using an ordinal regression model. Problems taking pills (PTP), (a factor of five reasons) was significantly associated (p=.003) with use of a protease inhibitor (PI) regimen. A person taking a PI regimen is 1.7 odds of having more PTP versus a non-PI based regimen. Symptom experience (OR: 3.8; 95% CI: 2.7, 5.2) and other health conditions (OR: 0.7; 95% CI: .45, .98) were found to be independently associated with PTP. The second study's purpose was to examine and gain an appreciation of the reasons why HIV infected women taking ART in the US are missing their HIV medications, and how the results can influence a new trajectory of adherence research. Women were 2.2 times more likely to document reasons pertaining to forgetfulness than PTP, (OR= 2.2, 95% CI: 1.63, 2.94, p

Philosophers have long thought that practical authority is morally problematic. The most familiar explanation is that exercising authority (for example, by the giving of commands) interferes with a subject’s responsiveness to the reasons that apply to her; in this sense, authority is thought to be irrational or somehow inconsistent with autonomy. This explanation of the problem presupposes an account of what it is to exercise authority: to exercise authority over a subject is to intentionally change the reasons that apply to that subject. In this paper, I begin to develop a new account of authority’s problematic nature by focusing on the relation between the content of authoritative directives and an agent’s intention in obeying. In cases of personal authority, the issuing of a command involves the giving of an intention to act to the subject; I argue that this breaks down the self-other asymmetries which theorists of self-knowledge assume exist with respect to the ‘privileged access’ one is said to have of one’s own mind. This understanding of the problem is missed if we think about authority primarily in terms of reasons and reason-giving, as in the case of Raz’s service conception.

Most philosophers believe that morality gives us reasons, and that those reasons apply necessarily and universally. I refer to this rather general view as the Normativity Thesis. My dissertation is (1) a defense of the Normativity Thesis, and (2) an inquiry into what form the Normativity Thesis should take. I defend the Normativity Thesis on the grounds that morally wrong action always provides sufficient reason for criticism of the wrongdoer. I then argue that sufficient reason to criticize always involve the failure on the part of the criticizable person to respond to her own reasons. Thus, morally wrong action involves the failure to respond to reasons. It is commonplace to capture the relationship between reasons and morality as follows: Necessarily, for all A, x: if A’s doing x was morally wrong, then when A did x, there was a reason for A not to do x. This thesis, however, is in tension with a prominent theory about reasons for action, Humeanism: Necessarily, for all A, x: if A has a reason to do x, then A has some desire that will be served by doing x. The tension results from the fact that it appears to be possible that someone lacks any desire that is served by ii refraining from immoral action. I provide a novel argument for Humeanism, inspired by Bernard Williams’ famous argument for that thesis. Thus, I argue, since we have very good reason to accept Humeanism, the standard way of specifying the Normativity Thesis is problematic. I suggest that given Humeanism, we are compelled towards a specification of the Normativity Thesis that gives a central role to what I call moral sentiments: compassion and respect. On my view, the normativity of morality derives from reasons to have those sentiments, rather than reasons for action. Finally, I suggest that this view of the normativity of morality provides strong but non-conclusive reason to adopt a particular view about the nature of the property of moral wrongness, or what it fundamentally is to be morally wrong -- a view that again places moral sentiments at center stage.

Two natural ideas we have about justification are that we are justified by basing our beliefs on good reasons, rather than wishful thinking or blind prejudice, and that justification makes our beliefs objectively likely to be true. Despite their appeal, respecting both of these ideas is impossible if we think that one's reasons for belief are determined entirely by one's psychological states, such as one's beliefs and experiences, and not by how the world is around one. If one's reasons are isolated from the world, it seems that they could not make our beliefs likely to be true.This is why the debate between epistemic internalists, who think that justification is determined just by states of the believer, and externalists, who deny this, seems so intractable. Internalists are motivated by the intuition that justification is determined by the subject's reasons for belief, whereas externalists are motivated by the intuition that justification makes our beliefs objectively likely to be true.I argue that the key to resolving this dispute is to reject the view that one's reasons are determined entirely by one's psychological states in favor of the view that one's reasons are facts - including facts of the world around one. We can then accept both the idea that justification is a matter of the subject's reasons for belief and the idea that justification makes one's beliefs objectively likely to be true. On this view one's reasons (the facts of the world around us) can make one's beliefs likely to be true. The result is a theory of justification that captures the motivations both of traditional forms of internalism and traditional forms of externalism, while avoiding the characteristic problems those views face.

In my dissertation, I argue that rationality, for real humans, is best understood as a strategy for communication and interacting in a social environment. In particular, I argue that humans are rational to the extent that they are able to understand and be understood by others, to the extent that they can give and accept reasons and explanations. This raises a pair of questions. The first concerns the source of the norms for giving and accepting reasons. The second is why we should accept and follow these norms if they are not guaranteed to preserve truth or optimize outcomes. I address the first question by arguing that these norms function as constraints on our imaginations, on the ways in which we can think about or understand the world. This goes beyond the traditional view that these norms govern acceptable inferences. Rather, I argue, the more significant function of these norms is to govern the structure of our reasoning in the sense of guiding considerations about the relevance and form of our understandings of situations. This suggests an answer to the second question. We ought to accept these norms because they are self-confirming. Following them allows us to communicate and interact with others who follow these same norms. In those endeavors that require interaction and coordination in a social group, being understood is frequently more important than being right.

According to a common philosophical view of practical reasons, normative reasons for acting are independent of agents’ desires. Desires are never reason-providing in themselves; instead, they are transparent to the reasons that support having them. With this view goes a picture of practical deliberation that is like science in its objectivity and detachment. But I suggest that there are times when a practical deliberator should not be so detached. Suppose an agent is forced to choose between two paths along which she could direct her life, and that the relevant desire-independent reasons are insufficient for her to choose one over the other. I argue that this kind of deliberative impasse transforms the question before the agent from “what to do” into “who she wants to be” because the situation engages the agent’s concept of herself as the author of her life. If she becomes inclined toward one of her options, with the sense that it represents who she wants to be, she may invoke her authority to choose her path as one who is in charge of actively leading her life. In choosing in this way, the inclination on which the agent acts has become a reason which is “self-creating” in two senses: (a) it is created by an existing self, out of elements that constitute that self; yet (b) it also helps to create and re-constitute the self, for it gives the agent reason to reshape those elements in a particular way, thus reorienting her life. I locate the normativity of self-creating reasons in self-respect. First, unlike mere desires, self-creating reasons are normative because they stem from the cares that give a person her unique identity; as I argue, this demands respect. Second, the agent may choose on the basis of the inclination, even though it outstrips any desire-independent reasons so to choose, because in doing so she acts as the author of her identity—a role which also demands respect.

The current study was conducted with a sample of 253 college undergraduates to extend the findings in the existing research on motivational models of alcohol and marijuana use. Specifically it was intended to evaluate the relative benefits of assessing motives for using these drugs during a specific episode rather than in the dispositional fashion utilized in virtually every existing study on the subject. Affect regulation aspects of the motivational model were further explored by measuring state (rather than trait) affect immediately preceding a use episode. A timeline follow-back method was used to identify the most recent use episode and to assess recent quantity of use and negative consequences in greater detail. The similarity of the types of motives derived from episodic assessment to those seen dispositionally lends further credence to the validity of DUM subtypes, their distinct pathways to use and related problems, and the affective-motivational model as a whole. Affective states (rather than just traits) played a significant role in the motives endorsed and outcomes. Previous findings on the direct effects of drinking to cope on the development of problems were confirmed on an episodic level. Finally, episodic assessment appeared to have some utility above and beyond that of dispositional assessment when examining specific episodes of use.

The purpose of this investigation is to determine some of the variables related to parents' stated reasons for institutionalizing mentally retarded males. The variables to be studied are the age, education, and income of the parents and the age, level of retardation, and number of siblings of the child.