ABSTRACT
Reasons – arguments, pro and con considerations, goals, incentives, purposes, aspirations –move people to act. Some do so with a bang. Others do so with a whisper. Some run against the tide of other considerations. Others ride within a tribe of complementary reasons. But reasons move. Describing reasons as movers of behavior is thinking of them as motives or causes and as
the objects of reference for psychological explanations for why people do (or fail to do) things. Not brute mechanical causes but causes or perhaps better ‘becauses’ that can and often may reflect deliberative reasoning. Reason itself is sometimes described as the capacity for reasoning or for being responsive to argument, deliberation, calculation or self-reflective analysis. To understand why Ian, the victim of paranoia mentioned in the first chapter, refuses to leave his apartment, we need to appreciate his reasons, or the peculiar logic that governs his deductions from his conviction that the government is spying on him. To recognize why Alice complains about her husband, we need to grasp her reason. Howard cheated on her. Reasons don’t move when a person is unable to act on them, of course, or when a person’s
ability to reason or react to reasoning is impaired, incapacitated or relevantly disabled. Take the disorder of clinical depression. It may leave a person, say, like Alice, unable to get out of bed in the morning. So, if you ask, “But doesn’t she have sufficient reasons to get out of bed?,” you are inquiring as to why those reasons (for example, the need to get dressed and go to work) fail to motivate her. Alas, the character of her depression, and the answer to your question, depends on the fact that the condition impairs her ability to respond positively to or even perhaps to appreciate reasons for getting out of bed. The reasons, although otherwise normally sufficient to move her, don’t move her. Being incapacitated or ‘disordered’, she can’t react in a desirable or reasonable way. The gravitational inertia of her condition weighs down upon her.
