ABSTRACT
Many philosophers of practical reason assume that practical rationality is partly constituted by the suitable coordination of means and ends - that is, by instrumental rationality. While instrumental rationality was argued to be a myth in Raz (2005), the objections he raised to the normativity of instrumental rationality turned out to be special cases of broader worries about the normativity of coherence requirements. Hence, it seems fair to say that most in the current literature see no special problem about instrumental rationality. In Chapter 32, I question this lingering consensus. I argue that there are special problems about the normativity of instrumental rationality. But I think we needn’t fret, since the patterns of reasoning that the instrumental principle allegedly underwrites shouldn’t have been regarded as instrumental from the outset. In short: we can do without instrumental rationality. The chapter is structured as follows. I begin in §1 with some terminological clarifications and a more precise statement of my main claims, together with some disclaimers. I turn in §2 to giving special reasons for skepticism about instrumental rationality. §3 shows that the practical phenomena commonly assumed to be underpinned by instrumental rationality can be better explained by non-instrumental structural rationality. §4 sketches a more specific non-instrumental account which better captures the order the instrumental principle was meant to capture. I conclude in §5 by showing how this picture fits nicely with a wider strategy for vindicating the normativity of rationality that I have developed elsewhere.
