Considering the Options: The Purpose and Authority of Practical Deliberation.

Abstract

This dissertation is about practical deliberation: why we do it and what is at stake when we do. Contemporary ethicists tend to take one of two possible positions regarding the purpose of practical deliberation. Either deliberation is purely instrumental, serving heterogeneous ends fixed by motivational dispositions over which an agent has no rational control, or deliberation serves one particular meta-end—such as the systematic justification of desires or the inclination toward self-understanding—the possession of which is a precondition on rational agency. I argue that neither of these options yields an adequate understanding of motivational psychology, and offer instead a third option that takes deliberation to be a process of open-ended problem-solving aimed at overcoming actual instances of motivational uncertainty. I call this position the prospectivist account of motivational psychology and deliberation. Chapter One argues that prospectivism is a distinct theoretical option, reducible to neither instrumentalism nor a meta-end account of deliberation. Chapter Two defends the position that prospectivist deliberation meets the two constraints on practical reason: it is both practical and rational. Chapter Three argues that normative theory should not proceed without an awareness of the reflective conditions that give rise to the question of what to do. I call this the guidance-first approach to normativity. I answer Nomy Arpaly’s explicit challenge to the guidance-first approach, and I use prospectivism to modify and correct existing accounts of the conditions that give rise to deliberation, specifically, those offered by Thomas Nagel and Christine Korsgaard. Chapter Four defends an evidential theory of normative justification: a given value’s capacity to guide unproblematic activity serves as evidence for (i.e., justification of) that value. Chapter Five argues that prospectivist deliberation suffices to explain the data that is usually cited in favor of free will, in part by providing an account of how prospectivist deliberation can be used to justify claims of moral responsibility. Since prospectivist deliberation is also compatible with determinism, this effectively deflates the ‘problem of free will’.