Prichard, Falk, and the End of Deliberation

In moral deliberations we must be acquainted beforehand with all the objects, and all their relations to each other; and from a comparison of the whole, fix our choice or approbation. No new fact to be ascertained; no new relation to be discovered.… If any material circumstance be yet unknown or doubtful, we must first employ our inquiry or intellectual faculties to assure us of it; and must suspend for a time a moral decision or sentiment.

– David Hume²

Although many associate the terms with Bernard Williams' work on practical reason, the terms 'internalism' and 'externalism,' along with the general contours of debates in ethical theory between views so dubbed, were originally introduced by W.D. Falk in a response to H.A. Prichard's intuitionist account of 'ought.'³ Recent voices have developed finer distinctions than Falk's, who made little of the differences between, for instance, reasons and motivations. Nowadays philosophers want to be able to ask, for instance, whether we must be motivated to do what we ought, where this is a different question from whether we must have a reason to do what we ought.⁴ It is standard, also, to distinguish internalism about normative judgments from internalism about normative facts.⁵ Many options have opened up as a result. One can now defend, for instance, both motivational externalism about reasons as well as reasons internalism about 'ought,' or combine externalism about ought with motivational internalism about reasons.

It is worth wondering whether there is anything further to be gained by pursuing these questions, or if every option and issue is finally on the table.⁶ Certainly we can now see that many issues that seemed to hang on truth of some or other internalist doctrine in fact can be finessed. To be sure, doctrines have an affinity for one another. Moral realists tend to favour motivational externalism about 'ought,' for instance. But marching under the realist banner does not appear to require arming oneself with motivational externalism.⁷ Philosophical histories such as Stephen Darwall's tell us how and why many internalisms of various sorts arose among the Moderns.⁸ Driving the development of many of these positions was a search for a vindication of moral requirements that did not invoke a Divine order. Yet internalist views can be found among those who invoke such an order, and externalist among those who reject it. Again, it does not seem that adopting one or the other view in any area irresistibly forces a choice on this question. In the end, most will agree that there are relationships between reasons and motivation, on the one hand, and values, 'oughts,' and obligations (or beliefs about such things), on the other. And if there are any necessary relationships, as internalists believe, they would likely be sufficiently defeasible so that the distance between internalism and externalism turns out to be much smaller than many may have originally thought.

It therefore seems worth revisiting Falk's original discussion to reconsider the concerns that led him to distinguish what he called 'internalist' from what he called 'externalist' views of obligation in the first place. As it turns out, the sorts of distinctions that we nowadays routinely make between reason and motivation, between explanatory and justificatory reasons, between moral belief and moral facts, and so on, are not critical to at least one issue in which Falk was particularly interested. That issue I think is best construed as a concern about the relationship of 'ought' and related terms to what I will call the "endpoint" of practical deliberation. That, at any rate, is what I will argue in the following.

By the "endpoint" of practical deliberation, I mean, roughly, that point in deliberation at which, because there is no further information to gather, no further interests or demands to consult or no further time, any further deliberation would be irrational. It is the point at which, as Hume puts it in the passage above, there is "no new fact to be ascertained; no new relation to be discovered."⁹ I begin by setting up the...