• DOI:10.1086/292774
• Corpus ID: 143778698

Are External Reasons Impossible?

@article{Cohon1986AreER,
  title={Are External Reasons Impossible?},
  author={Rachel Cohon},
  journal={Ethics},
  year={1986},
  volume={96},
  pages={545 - 556}
}

• Rachel Cohon
• Published 1 April 1986
• Philosophy
• Ethics

It is clear that our desires and aims provide us with some reasons for action. Are there also reasons for action that are not contingent upon what desires or aims we have? In his article "Internal and External Reasons,"' Bernard Williams answers a version of this question in the negative. He offers an argument intended to show that there are no reasons to perform actions that would not satisfy the agent's desires, aims, or other "motives." I shall try to bring into sharp focus what I take to be the weaknesses in this argument. But I also wish to show that, although the argument is unsuccessful, Williams does successfully identify the main hurdle that his opponents must surmount if they are to prove that desire-independent reasons are possible. According to Williams there are two mutually incompatible ways to interpret a sentence of the form "P has a reason to A" or "There is a reason for P to A."2 On the first or internal reading, it is a necessary condition for the truth of the sentence that P have some motive or aim which will be served or furthered by his A-ing, so that if he has none, it is not the case that he has a reason to A. On the second or external reading, the reason sentence does not imply that the agent has any such motive or aim and so "will not be falsified by the absence of an appropriate motive" (p. 17). More explicitly, "any model for the internal interpretation must display a relativity of the reason statement to the agent's subjective motivational set, which I shall call the agent's S.... An internal reason statement [a statement interpreted in the internal way] is falsified by the absence of some appropriate element from S" (p. 18). Although no precise definition of a subjective motivational set is given, Williams says that S contains desires, and "such things as dispositions of evaluation, patterns of emotional reaction, personal loyalties, and various projects . .. em-