Are There Subjective Reasons?
Are There Subjective Reasons?
I like coffee and you like tea. This gives me a reason to choose coffee, but it doesn’t give you a reason to make that choice. The reason is relative to me—to my preferences. You would choose tea given the choice. Thus we might say that reasons of this type—desire-based reasons—are “subjective reasons”: they are relative to the individual subject making the choice. They are not like “objective reasons” that apply to everyone equally, such as (allegedly) moral reasons, which are indifferent to the individual’s personal preferences. Everyone has a moral reason not to murder his neighbor, no matter how much he might prefer him dead—viz. that it would be morally wrong to do it. But some reasons (perhaps most) are subjective in the sense that they don’t generalize: they apply only to individuals with appropriate desires or wishes or tastes or inclinations. They have no rational hold over anyone else. It would be wrong to criticize someone for not acting on them, given their personal preferences. When it comes to matters of taste, the right response is: “It’s all completely subjective”.
But this is mistaken for two reasons. The first is that your preferring tea gives me a reason to offer you tea, while I contentedly stick to coffee: that is, the fact that you have a preference for tea works as a reason applicable to me to act in certain ways in relation to you. You have a certain property—being a tea-fancier—and that gives me a reason to supply you with tea in appropriate circumstances. So that reason applies to everyone equally: it is objective. It is objectively the case that everyone has a reason to give you tea not coffee: there is nothing subjective about that. Second, ifI shared that property I too would have a reason to choose as you do. So we can generalize as follows: everyone is such that if they have a preference for tea they have a reason to choose tea. It is not as if you could have that preference and it still be a question what you have reason to do. It isn’t “up to you” what it is rational to do, a matter of subjective whim. True, you may not actually have the property in question, but it is an entirely objective matter that ifyou do a certain choice is rational. It is an objective property of the property that it requires a certain choice. It functions as an objective reason whenever it is instantiated. There is nothing subjective about the reason once the facts are fixed. The reason may be said to be a conditionalreason, i.e. it depends on instantiating certain properties, but there is nothing “subjective” about it. Salt only dissolves if certain conditions obtain—that doesn’t make it “subjective”. We might call desires “subjective states” because they are psychological properties of conscious subjects, but that doesn’t imply that they provide merely subjective reasons. Whenever a reason applies it always generates objective requirements: on others to act in certain ways, and on anyone who has the property that grounds the reason. There is never any purely subjective (or “agent-relative”) rationality: all rationality is objective (impersonal, absolute, general).
We might compare this to subjective facts. There are no purely subjective facts, i.e. facts that have no objective reality. There are psychological facts about subjects, but these are objective facts in the sense that they exist absolutely, not forsome people and not others. Bat experiences are facts in the objective world (there is no other). They might be knownonly by bats, but their existenceis not relative to bats—they are part of objective reality (not fictions or dreams or projections). To be is to be objective. Not everyone has bat experiences, but they don’t exist only from the perspective of bats (whatever that might mean). In the same way not everyone has a preference for tea, but that preference exists objectively and gives rise to objective reasons for action that apply to anyone. Even a taste shared by no one else, say a fondness for grilled cactus, has its objective reason-giving power: this idiosyncratic individual can expect to be offered grilled cactus at a barbecue, and if anyone else were to acquire the taste they would have every reason to act on it. There are no reasons that apply to an individual in isolation without implications for anyone else. Rationality is never purely personal in this sense.[1]
Colin
[1]We might then say that there are two sorts of objective reason for action: the sort that depends on the psychological make-up of the individual and the sort that doesn’t so depend. The former would include personal tastes; the latter would apply to moral reasons (assuming we accept this view of morality). There are not “subjective reasons” and “objective reasons”.
Could there be purely personal reasons within a subject’s dream state?
Wouldn’t they generalize to any dreamer who had the same dream?
“Reasons” have always seemed to me to figure more in the rationalization (in the derogatory sense) of prospectively and retrospectively considered actions/decisions/choices than they do in the proximate, occurrent and actual determination of actions/decisions/choices. Anyway, even if, say, moral reasoning traffics in the domain of objective moral reasons, “moral reasons” seem to be no more compulsorily binding on or determinative of subsequent actions than any other sort of reasons for action. Going on four straight days now, in Orlando, without air-conditioning. If my cat had not finally reconciled himself to the cat-litter box the stench would be intolerable!
Sorry to hear that–I assume you had good reasons to stay.
Is your underlying claim that there is no instance of an ‘object specific property’? By this I mean an instance where X has property p and if any Y were to have property p then Y would necessarily be identical to X.
Identity to x would be such a property, but it’s not what I had in mind–just that preferences can be shared.
Does each object have its own unique identity property? On the one hand, I feel it must (otherwise what justifies us in singling this object out from the background world); on the other hand, this would seem like a meaningless use of the term property.
Just to clarify. No power-outtages (?) in Orlando from the last hurricane. It’s just the wretched air-conditioning unit itself that’s at issue. Wrangling with air-conditioning repair-men is no less harrowing than wrangling with professional philosophers (not least because repair-men seldom traffic in objective moral reasoning).
Nagel as you no doubt know has argued that there are kinds of case in which we do have agent-relative reasons to act and in which there isn’t a corresponding agent-neutral reason for everyone else so to act. One kind of case involves what he calls “reasons of autonomy”–reasons a person has to pursue some object solely due to the fact one has made it a personal project to pursue it which gives it value for that reason. So, to use his examples, if I decide that it would be an excellent thing for me to climb Mountain Kilimanjaro (or attain posthumous fame) and then commit myself to bring about this object, these decisions together make this objects valuable for me, and therefore generate a reason for me to pursue it. The values and reasons here are intelligible from my point of view in light of my commitment, but unintelligible from an objective point of view where this commitment isn’t taken into account. It may be that the satisfaction that would attend my opinion of having attained the desired object has objective or agent-neutral value, but not the fact of having attained it, and this fact alone is given value by the act of commitment to it. In the case of posthumous fame, no satisfaction resulting from its attainment can be supposed, yet a person who has made posthumous fame one of his projects has an agent-relative reason to pursue it. What do you make of Nagel’s “reasons of autonomy” and these examples?
They are like the coffee-tea example: not necessarily shared by others but if others have the desire in question thay have an equal reason to pursue it.