| OCR Text |
Show Chapter VII. Nagel's Internalism 282 explains those general desires which embody our acceptance of the principles of practical reason" (31; italics added). There are at least two important points to be drawn from these passages. First, Nagel clearly thinks our acceptance of the principles of practical reason are embodied in desires of a certain sort. This may mean either that (4) we express our acceptance of these principles by having certain desires; or that (5) our acceptance of these principles are motivated by such desires. 2.3.(5) would surrender the field to the Humean for all practical purposes, so to speak. But even 2.3.(4) concedes to the Humean entirely too much. For if what our acceptance of these principles comes to is just that we have certain sorts of desires, then by definition these desires must be unmotivated, not motivated desires. And then whatever action follows from thus accepting them cannot exclude unmotivated desires from being among its motivational influences. In this case, unmotivated desires - to reason, reflect, or deliberate - are necessary causal antecedents of those occurrent rational activities, and hence are no more or less rationally inescapable than those activities themselves. And it did seem that Nagel meant to resist this conclusion in the passage from pages 29 to 30, quoted earlier. The second point to notice in these passages is Nagel's description of something that plays the same, formal role for desire that principles of theoretical reason play for belief. Nagel believes that a reason in itself must be able to motivate action, not because it contains some further, independent motivational factor (like a desire) among its conditions of application. Again, on the face of it, this is controversial at the very least. A reason, like a proposition or principle, is an abstract object, a "consideration" with rational content. Abstracts objects are not a species of causal event. So it is not easy to see how by themselves they might make any such event occur - or, in case they might, how they might bring it about that the actions they cause occur at just the spatiotemporal locations they do. 2.4. Means-End Reasoning and the Extraordinary Interpretation Nagel proposes that the motivational efficacy of reasons derives from "the principle governing their derivation from" the "conditions for their existence" (32), i.e. the principle of means-end reasoning; and that "[a]ny acceptance of a reason for action must conform to the general principle concerning means and ends" (35). By this he means that certain ends of action provide reasons for undertaking the actions required to bring them about. For © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
