Human Destinies: Philosophical Essays in Memory of Gerald Hanratty

Chapter Three: Mechanisms That Respond to Reasons

t h r e e mechanisms that respond to reasons an aristotelian approach to agency Rowland Stout are there any mechanisms in the natural world that respond to reasons—that are sensitive to considerations about what they should do? i think the answer is that there are approximately 6.6 billion of them on this planet alone. this is not to say that there is nothing more to being a person than being a rational agent—a reasons-responder. my claim is just that to the extent that we are agents we are mechanisms that respond to reasons. the idea of being a mechanism that is responsive to reasons is thoroughly Kantian and represents us both as belonging to the phenomenal world and as being in touch with the “supersensible” space of reasons. it is on the one hand an idea completely characteristic of the age of enlightenment—a way of defining the human condition that makes no essential reference to God. as such it belongs to a structure of ideas that Gerry Hanratty criticized for being too limited. But it is 81 82 Rowland Stout also precisely this idea of being caught between two spaces—the straightforwardly physical and the transcendent—that interested Hanratty in his discussions of Gnosticism.1 the central idea there was that physical material entities like us can gain knowledge of a transcendent reality and thereby regain some element of divinity that our material nature has otherwise blocked from us. Hanratty’s research has revealed that there was an element of Gnosticism in Hegel’s thinking. But it would be harder to claim that Kant’s conception of the will as the sort of causality that belongs to living things insofar as they are rational—as the power to act according to the idea of rules—has any such element.2 according to Kant we bring the transcendent space of reasons into a physical manifestation every time we move our bodies, and not just at moments of religious insight. Practical rationality seems to be an altogether more mundane concept than sophia—the special and indeed secret insight that the Gnostics claimed for themselves. We must not be railroaded by the proponents of “rational choice theory” into treating practical rationality as the trivial calculation of preference maximization. the simple reason for this is that preferences are themselves determined by practical rationality. not only must practical rationality be what determines the best means to ends, it must also choose between ends when they are not all achievable. But more than this it must be the articulation of a conception of value out of which the ends themselves are seen as ends. as such it must reflect and build upon human nature. such a conception of value is not in any way given to us in simple logical principles. it evolves as our conceptual articulacy evolves and in response to challenges from other conceptions of value. and there is no reason to suppose that there is some final codification of such a conception. Whatever conception of values we come up with is always subject to modification in the light of further experience. this is Hegel’s great insight in his conception of the dialectical method. rationality is dynamic, open-ended, and uncodifiable. there can be no reduction of the norms of rationality into non-normative facts or logical formulas. But that does not make it mystical in any sense. rationality mechanisms that respond to reasons 83 is embedded in the human condition and emerges from the history of the human condition. so i defend the claim that people are mechanisms that respond to reasons in this tribute to Gerry Hanratty because it is just the sort of claim that he would have tried to undermine in his characteristically unassertive way. the claim that, as agents, we are mechanisms that respond to reasons has a rather dispiriting quality to it. in particular it may strike one as both too optimistic and too pessimistic about human nature. it will seem too optimistic to the extent that the requirement that one can respond to reasons seems very demanding. are we not also irrational creatures—still very recognizably doing things in the world when behaving in a way that fails to respond to reasons? my reply to this will be to insist on very undemanding conceptions of rationality and reasons when defending the claim that, as agents, we are sensitive...