ABSTRACT
Reflection on the last chapter suggests that we need to reconsider the connection between practical reasoning and reasons for acting, and the sense, if any, in which acting against reason is both possible and irrational. It certainly seems plausible to think of intentional action as behaviour done for a reason, and to display the reason in argumentative form. If I get up from the deck chair to mow the lawn, my reason can, rather ponderously, be spelt out as follows: I thought it would be a good thing to get the lawn mown; that will only happen if I get out of this deck chair and fetch the mower from the shed; therefore…If we accept a Socratic view, the full display of my reason for acting will always correspond with a fairly full display of the deliberative preliminaries. This is because there is nothing else that the human agent is interested in apart from the overall good. Consequently, any consideration of what it is best to do will start from that point There may, of course, be some explorations which come to nothing, and so disappear from the final account; but the starting point of deliberation and the basic reason for acting will always be the same, with the intervening steps which are approved by reason filling in the gap between reason and action. Once we drop that monolithic picture, even if we postulate that practical reasoning will always start from the consideration of some human good, we make room for the possibility of deliberative preliminaries resembling those when one suddenly discovers that one has a free afternoon (see Chapter VIII, pp. 109-10). In that case one’s early practical reasoning takes the form of considering various options in the possibly vain hope of finding some decisive considerations in favour of one or other. One does not, however, start with a principle of decision; and in the end there may be an arbitrary choice of the good which will then determine what is to be done. In such cases the full display of the agent’s reason for acting will not reach any further back than the good
finally settled on. The various things I might do on this afternoon are all acknowledged with sincerity as equally good things to do for a variety of reasons, for judging between which I have no criterion. This important part of my practical reasoning does not figure in the display of my reason for doing what I do. It is what I adopt as my reason for deciding how to arrange my afternoon which takes pride of place as the premiss of the argument by which my reason for doing as I do is schematized.
