Can Explanatory Reasons Be Good Reasons for Action?

CAN EXPLANATORY REASONS BE GOOD REASONSFOR ACTION?

GERALD BEAULIEU

Abstract: What kind of thing is a reason for action? Are reasons for actionsubjective states of the agent, such as desires and/or beliefs? Or are they, rather,objective features of situations that favor certain actions? The suggestion offeredin this article is that neither strategy satisfies. What is needed is a third category forclassifying reasons which makes them out to be neither purely subjective norpurely objective. In brief: a reason for action is a feature of the situation thatmatters to the agent. On this proposal, subjective states of the agent are indeedindispensable in characterizing reasons for action. Precisely which set of situ-ational features matter to an agent—precisely what shape the agent experiences thesituation as having—depends on the agent’s psychological makeup. Those featuresthemselves are not psychological states, however, and it is precisely those featuresthat constitute the agent’s reasons for action.

Keywords: action, explanatory reason, motivating reason, normative reason,objectivism, psychologism, reasons-explanation, reason for action, salience,shape, situation.

What explains a person’s action? Why did so and so do such and such?The focus on action—on what the person does, rather than on mere bodilymovement as such—indicates that we are asking about the person’sreasons for acting when we ask such questions. An explanation that citedonly such things as neurophysiological happenings would not be anunhelpful answer to our question. It would not be an answer to ourquestion at all. What interests us when we seek an explanation of some-one’s action is an understanding of the person’s behavior that reveals itsworth for a rational being, that is, a being that acts in the light of reasons.An account of the person’s behavior in terms of neurons firing would notdo the trick. What we want is an account in terms of the reasons for whichthe person acted. Call such an explanation a reasons-explanation.

Much has been written about the nature of reasons-explanations, andthere is not space here to provide a comprehensive review of the literature.The particular question to be addressed here is the following: What kindof thing is a reason for action? More precisely: Are reasons for actionsubjective states of the agent, such as desires and/or beliefs? Or are they,

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rather, objective features of situations that favor certain actions (aboutwhich, of course, the agent may have desires and beliefs)? The suggestionin what follows is that neither strategy satisfies. What is needed is a thirdcategory for classifying reasons which makes them out to be neither purelysubjective nor purely objective. In brief, this is the proposal: a reasonfor action is a feature of the situation the agent finds herself in thatmatters to her. On this proposal, subjective states of the agent are indeedindispensable in characterizing reasons for action. Precisely which setof situational features matter to an agent—precisely what shape theagent experiences the situation as having—depends on her psychologicalmakeup. Those features themselves are not psychological states, however,and it is precisely those features that constitute her reasons for action.

This question about the nature of reasons for action is complicated bythe distinction between normative reasons, on the one hand, and explana-tory or motivating reasons, on the other. A normative reason is anythingthat in fact favors a particular course of action. Normative reasons aregood reasons for action. For example, that my friend is feeling down is agood reason to give him a call. The fact that he is down favors my callinghim. An explanatory or motivating reason is that which explains why theagent was motivated to act as he did. Here we must remember that such anexplanation must be pitched in terms of reasons for action, that is, in termswhich make the behavior of the agent intelligible as an action. But in somecases, the explanatory or motivating reasons cited might not be goodreasons—the reasons cited in the explanation of why the agent was moti-vated to act as he did might not favor the action. For example, that thegasoline-filled glass looks refreshing to me might explain why I am movedto drink its contents despite there being nothing that in fact favors thataction (see Williams 1980).

The distinction between normative and explanatory or motivatingreasons generates problems. On the one hand, we want to insist that it ispossible to explain why an agent is motivated to act in a certain way byappealing to normative reasons which favor the action. We want to beable to cite good reasons as the motivators that explain action. Citing myfriend’s depressed mood explains my phone call. On the other hand, wealso want to allow that agents are sometimes moved to act for no goodreason. Since we are still talking about actions in such cases, we must stillhave reasons in mind. But what kind of reasons for action are there incases where nothing actually favors the action? What reason for actionexplains my being motivated to drink the gasoline?

Here the temptation is to draw a sharp metaphysical division betweennormative and explanatory or motivating reasons. The things that favoractions are one kind of thing, and the things that explain action are,metaphysically, quite another. Normative reasons are, on this division,objective features of the situation faced by the agent, specifically, thosefeatures of the situation that in fact favor certain courses of action. On the

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other side of this metaphysical divide, we have explanatory or motivatingreasons, which are typically construed as psychological states of the agent,either beliefs or desires or a combination thereof. Call any view that treatsexplanatory or motivating reasons as psychological states of the agentpsychologism. Much of the debate about the nature of reasons for actionhas assumed psychologism and focused on the question of what kinds ofpsychological states are sufficient for motivation: is citing a cognitive statesuch as belief enough to explain why an agent was moved to act as shedid (as, roughly, Kantians suppose), or must we also cite a conative statesuch as desire (as, roughly, Humeans suppose)?1 Jonathan Dancy haschallenged the idea that we should accept psychologism of any stripe(see especially Dancy 2000). And the key premise in his argument againstpsychologism, as we shall see, is an attack on the aforementionedmetaphysical divide.

But before we turn to the problems with the division let us examine thereason for being tempted by it in the first place. The division allows us togive a consistent account of explanatory or motivating reasons. Ratherthan supposing, awkwardly, that actions are sometimes explained byciting a normative reason and sometimes, when a normative reason islacking, by citing some other kind of reason, we can consistently maintainthat all actions are always explained by citing psychological states. (Let usstick to beliefs only for ease of exposition.) The form of a reasons-explanation remains the same whether or not the agent has good reason toact as he does. There is a normative reason for me to call my friend,namely, his depressed mood, but what explains my action is my belief thathe is depressed. There is no normative reason for me to drink the contentsof the gasoline-filled glass, but what explains my being motivated to drinkit is my (false) belief that doing so would be refreshing. In both cases wecite a psychological state of mine, namely, a belief, in explaining myaction. My explanatory or motivating reasons for action just are thesepsychological states of mine. Whether or not I have normative reasons toact in these ways is a separate issue. So we gain a consistent story aboutexplanatory or motivating reasons by treating them, one and all, as psy-chological states of the agent and distinguishing them from normativereasons understood as objective features of the situation that favor theaction.2

But the cost of the division is prohibitive. If normative reasons andexplanatory or motivating reasons are two metaphysically distinct things,

1 Thomas Nagel is the quintessential contemporary Kantian, in this sense, and DonaldDavidson the Humean. See especially Nagel 1970 and Davidson 1963.

2 Michael Smith defends an interesting version of this strategy in Smith 1994. It isinteresting because the objective features that constitute normative reasons are themselvesunderstood in terms of idealized psychological states. Roughly, Smith understands explana-tory or motivating reasons along Humean lines (belief/desire pairs) and normative reasons asthe desires the agent would have if she were fully rational.

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and if accounting for a person’s action always involves an appeal to thelatter and never an appeal to the former, then people never act for goodreasons. This is the basic argument offered in Dancy 2000. Let us make theargument explicit:

(1) Making a bit of behavior intelligible as an action is a matter ofspecifying the reasons for which the agent acts.

(2) The reasons for which the agent acts that we cite in making a bit ofbehavior intelligible as an action are the things that explain why theagent is motivated to act as she does, that is, they are explanatoryor motivating reasons.

(3) Normative reasons and explanatory or motivating reasons aremetaphysically distinct; the former are objective features of situa-tions that favor certain actions, and the latter are psychologicalstates of the agent.

(4) Therefore, the reasons for which the agent acts are always psycho-logical states of the agent.

(5) Therefore, the reasons for which the agent acts are (almost) nevernormative reasons, that is, they are (almost) never things that favorthe action.

The qualification “almost” in (5) allows for those rare occasions whereone’s psychological state is the feature of the situation that favors a certaincourse of action. Dancy offers us the following example. Suppose that Ibelieve that the cliff I am about to climb is disposed to crumble and thathaving this belief makes me nervous about climbing it. In that case, thevery fact that I have that belief gives me good reason not to climb the cliff.My belief that the cliff is crumbly, whether true or not, makes me tooanxious to climb safely and hence favors my abstaining from climbing.But these cases are rare. Normally, the features of the situation that favoran action are not psychological states of the agent. What favors my callingmy friend is the fact that he is depressed and not the fact that I believe thathe is depressed. But this fact cannot be what explains my motivation tocall him, if psychologism is correct, since explanatory or motivatingreasons are supposed to be, one and all, psychological states of the agent,in this case, my belief that my friend is depressed. Since it is only veryrarely that such states are the things that favor actions, it follows that thethings that favor actions are rarely the reasons for which we act. That’s theproblem with psychologism.

In place of psychologism, Dancy offers us a robust objectivism accord-ing to which the things that explain actions are (very often) the very thingsthat favor actions. What explains why I am motivated to call my friend isthat he is depressed, not my believing such. This is a far more plausiblesuggestion. It sounds odd to say that the reason in light of which I phonehim is that I have a particular belief. Of course, I would not be motivated



to call if I did not believe that he was depressed. But, Dancy suggests, mybelief here is merely an enabling condition for that feature to count as areason. It is not, as such, part of my reason for action. The idea of anenabling condition is borrowed from elsewhere in Dancy’s account ofreasons for action (see Dancy 2004, 38–52). Consider an example: I havepromised to meet you at the coffee shop at 8 p.m. this evening. My havingpromised you this gives me a reason to head to the coffee shop when thetime comes. Of course, if I happen to break my leg, or a family emergencyarises, or a severe storms develops in the area, and so on for an indefinitelist of possibilities, then my having promised you is disabled as a reason tohead to the coffee shop.3 It seems odd, however, to suggest that theabsence of any of these conditions is part of my reason for action. Rather,Dancy suggests that the absence of these conditions enables my havingmade the promise to function as a reason for action, specifically, a reasonto head to the coffee shop. Similarly, in the absence of my belief that myfriend is depressed, my reason to call him, namely, his being depressed,would not be enabled. But the belief itself is not part of my reason for soacting. Thus the objectivist can say that it is, typically, certain objectivefeatures of situations that serve as the agent’s reasons for action and notthe agent’s own psychological states.

This robust objectivism, however, in not without its own problems. Forhow are we supposed to make sense of cases where there is no good reasonto act as the agent does? What explains my being motivated to drink thegasoline? Psychologism provides a straightforward answer by simplyciting a false belief. But our beliefs (and our own psychological statesgenerally) are very rarely the reasons for which we act, according toobjectivism. What kind of thing can be appealed to in these cases if neithera normative reason nor a psychological state?

Dancy’s suggestion is that we simply accept that reasons-explanationscan be nonfactive. Briefly, the idea here is this. To say that explanationsare factive is to say that in a good explanation both the explanandum andthe explanans are fact stating. If p is properly explained by appeal to q,then both p and q must be true. Dancy challenges the claim that explana-tions must be factive, and he offers us the following analogy (borrowedfrom Lloyd Humberstone) to back it up. We might explain someone’sbeing in prison by appeal to his having allegedly robbed a bank. Sincethere is no such crime as allegedly robbing a bank, the qualification“allegedly” cannot serve as part of the description of the explanans.Rather, inserting “allegedly” in the explanans, according to Dancy, sus-pends our commitment to its truth. The explanation is thus nonfactive.Similarly, we might offer the following explanation of someone’s havingreached for a gasoline-filled glass thinking it was a refreshing drink: Shereached for the glass because, as she believed, it was a refreshing drink.

3 It might still give me reasons to act in other ways, for example, giving you a call.

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Here too, according to Dancy, what we do with the insertion of “as shebelieved” is suspend our commitment to the truth of the explanans,namely, that the glass in front of her was a refreshing drink. The expla-nation, once again, is nonfactive.

In addition to being somewhat mysterious (how can a truth beexplained by a falsehood?), the suggestion that reasons-explanations canbe nonfactive gives up on the kind of consistency that psychologism offers.For now we shall have to say that some reasons-explanations are factiveand others nonfactive. And that seems much the same as saying that someexplanations appeal to objective states of affairs that favor the action andothers to psychological states of the agent.

So, on the one hand, we have a view (psychologism) that allows for avery consistent story about explanatory or motivating reasons but isunable to accommodate the important point that it is possible for us to actfor good reasons. And, on the other hand, we have a view (objectivism)that allows that we can and often do act for good reasons but gives up onconsistency and leaves us in the dark about cases where we act in theabsence of any good reason. Can we not do better?

Let us see how far the related ideas of feature salience and situationshape can take us toward a more palatable alternative. The situations thatwe face as agents are, we might say, charged. Various features of a situa-tion will stand out, petition for our attention, compete with other features,while some will be relegated to the background, perhaps not registeringwith us at all. These various features and their relative degrees of salienceconstitute the situation’s shape for the agent. Moreover, the shape thata situation has for an agent is dependent on his psychological makeup,or perspective. That is, the agent’s antecedent beliefs, desires, concerns,expectations, intentions, and so on, will influence, if not determine, whichfeatures of the situation will matter to him, and how much. But whilesituation shape is dependent on the agent’s existing psychology, it is stillprior to his forming final judgments about the situation, that is, judgmentsas to what is called for, all things considered, and intentions to act incertain ways.4 The way things strike the agent, the shape he encounters, isthe experiential basis on which he forms such judgments about the newlyencountered situation. These two aspects of the salience/shape idea—(i)the dependence of situational shape on preexisting psychology and (ii) thepriority of encountering a situation’s shape to forming new final judg-ments about the situation—are the key to abandoning the troublesomemetaphysical distinction between explanatory or motivating reasons andnormative reasons while retaining the insights of psychologism.

Ideally, we want to be able to say, on the one hand, that explanatory/motivating reasons can be normative reasons. We want to be able to cite

4 See Davidson 1970 for an account of how these two can be at odds with each other.Questions about weakness of will be put aside here.



normative or good reasons in explaining action. This is what the meta-physical distinction forbids. On the other hand, we want to say that theform of a reasons-explanation should not be affected by whether or notthe agent’s beliefs are true or false. We want reasons for action to be thesame kind of thing even when the agent acts for no good reason. This iswhat psychologism promises by appealing to the metaphysical distinction.It seems that we cannot have it both ways.

But perhaps we can have it both ways if we help ourselves to the ideasof salience and shape just sketched. For now we can identify an agent’sreasons for action with the salient features of the situation that shefaces. These are the features that matter to the agent. As such, identi-fying them is bound up with the attribution of psychological states. Therelevant features are salient for the agent, they matter to her, onlybecause of her preexisting psychological profile, or perspective. Matter-ing to the agent can serve as the common element in all reasons-explanations, thus satisfying the consistency requirement that motivatespsychologism. But unlike psychologism, the present account does notidentify the agent’s reasons for action with (some of) her psychologicalstates. What it is that matters to the agent are certain features of thesituation she faces, and it is those features themselves that constitute herreasons for action.

What happens, then, when the agent acts on what appears to be amistaken conception of the situation? How do we offer a reasons-explanation of someone’s reaching for the gasoline thinking that it willoffer a refreshing drink without resorting to psychologism or a nonfactiveexplanation? Here it is important to remember that the agent’s final judg-ments about the situation are formed on the basis of his experience of thesituation’s shape. So, in this case, we might say that the mistaken thoughtthat the glass promises a refreshing drink was formed on the basis of theagent’s experiencing as salient certain features of the situation, such as theproximity of the glass to the agent’s hand. This feature is salient, perhaps,because the agent remembers putting his drink down nearby. That recol-lection is part of his preexisting psychological makeup which shapes thesituation for him in this way. Or again, perhaps the fact that the liquid inthe glass is amber colored stands out because the taste of beer is stilllingering on his tongue.

As a first pass it is tempting to suggest that these features are respon-sible for the agent’s belief that there is a refreshing drink at hand and thatit is that belief which explains why he reached for it. But if we succumb tothe temptation we fall into psychologism’s trap and are forced to say thatthe fact of having that belief was the reason in light of which he acted. Sowe might be moved to appeal instead to that which the agent believes,namely, there being a refreshing drink at hand. But now our explanationis nonfactive. There is, after all, no refreshing drink at hand. Neitherstrategy satisfies. The proposal here is that we should appeal instead, in

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such cases, to something that lies beneath the surface, as it were. In suchcases, the only nonpsychological facts available to serve as the agent’sreasons for action are facts that are characterized in terms other thanthose purported by the false beliefs in his final judgments. And factscouched in terms of the agent’s experience of the situation’s shape, whichare prior to his final judgments, seem like promising candidates.

It might be objected, here, that the present account of reasons foraction gives up on consistency no less than Dancy’s robust objectivismwith its appeal to factive explanations in certain cases and to nonfactiveexplanations in others. For we now have to admit that in certain cases areasons-explanation cites the facts believed by the agent in her final judg-ments, while in other cases lower-level, or experiential, facts are cited.This would only be a cause for concern if the lower-level, experientialfacts were different in kind from the facts believed in veridical final judg-ments. But we need not suppose that any such difference exists. Considera simple modification of the gasoline example. I might just see that thereis a refreshing drink at hand in cases where there is a refreshing drink athand. That might be one of the salient features of the situation that Iexperience. I shall then come to believe, on the basis of that experience,that there is a refreshing drink at hand. The fact believed and the factexperienced are one and the same in that case. The agent who forms thefalse belief that there is a refreshing drink at hand, in the presence of thegasoline, does not have the same experience. For in that case, there is nosuch feature as there being a refreshing drink at hand to stand out.5 In thiscase, it is the aforementioned features of his experience (the proximity ofthe glass, the color of its liquid contents, and so on) that serve as hisreasons for action.

There are innumerable cases such as these where the agent forms afalse belief and then acts. The suggestion here is that it will alwaysbehoove us to search for something other than the belief to serve asthe agent’s reasons for acting in our reasons-explanation. Obviously, itwould be impossible to provide a formula that would determine inadvance exactly which situational features are the relevant ones in themany and varied situations that agents face. The relevant features will bedetermined by examining the details of the particular situation at hand,namely, the specific details about the agent’s psychology and her envi-ronment which together help us reconstruct the shape that the situationhas for her. But let us consider one more difficult case to shed some morelight on the proposal.

5 A disjunctivist view of experience is thus being appealed to here. Disjunctivists claimthat experiences are not to be individuated phenomenally or in abstraction from what theyare experiences of. The present account of reasons for action may be taken as lending indirectsupport to such a view. For a direct and extended defense of disjunctivism, see McDowell1996.



Suppose someone misreads a weather report in the newspaper.6 It says,“Very low chance of rain today.” The agent reads it as “Very high chanceof rain today” and grabs his umbrella before heading out to the office.What could possibly explain the agent’s action in such a case of blatanterror, other than his false belief that it will rain today? Certainly that beliefis a tempting candidate here, but we have seen why it is best to resist thistemptation. Indeed, if we push these difficult cases far enough, it is some-times best to say that the agent acted for no reason at all. This is what weshould say in the case of an outright hallucination. The agent himselfshould have no difficulty accepting such an account of his action once herealizes that he was hallucinating. If what he says, at first, is that he actedbecause he thought (that is, falsely believed) that he saw such and such,where he now recognizes not only that there was no such thing but thatabsolutely nothing in his actual situation stood out as salient, then itwould be pointless for him to keep insisting that he had a reason to act inthat situation. In this extreme case, where nothing can be cited as a salientfeature, “I acted because I thought I saw something” means no more than“There was in fact no reason for which I acted.” The action was as peculiaras the hallucination.

But the case we are at present considering need not be such an extremecase. What should serve as the explanans in our example depends, asalways, on the specific details of the situation, including details about theagent’s psychology. To provide a reasons-explanation here we need to fillin some of these details.7 Let us suppose further, then, that our agent hasrecently been caught in a torrential rainstorm without an umbrella, andthis just before a very important meeting. The unpleasant memory of thatevent, in conjunction with his false belief that it will rain, make theumbrella stand out as a comforting source of protection. He thus grabs iton the way out. Note that the false belief is indeed cited here, but not asone of his reasons for acting. Rather, it is cited as part of his psychologicalmakeup. The false belief, the unpleasant memory, and various features ofthe environment (for example, the newspaper report, the readily availableumbrella, and the clock indicating that it’s time to head out to work)make the umbrella, because of its characteristics, stand out for him. It isthe umbrella’s comforting protective qualities, that is, real features ofthe agent’s situation, that are cited here as his reasons for acting; reasonsthat explain his action in this situation and would justify similar actionsin others.

All reasons-explanations will cite the salient situational features, thefeatures that stand out or matter to the agent, as the agent’s reasons foraction. In some cases, the agent’s experience of the situation’s shape will

6 Thanks to an anonymous reader for suggesting examples of this kind.7 Again, if no relevant details are to be found in an actual case then it is best to say that

the agent had no reason to act, that is, it is best to treat it as an extreme case.

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lead her to veridical final judgments, in which case the facts purported bythe relevant beliefs will either be identical with or properly inferred fromher experience. In other cases, the agent’s experience of the situation’sshape will lead her to false final judgments, in which case, since we arelooking for something factive (and nonpsychological) to serve as theexplanans in our reasons-explanation, the facts purported by the relevant(false) beliefs will not be identical with her experience. In giving a reasons-explanation, we appeal to the same kind of thing in both types of case,namely, the features of the situation that stand out or matter to the agent.The consistency requirement is met.

The account of the nature of reasons for action that we have beenconsidering allows us to eschew the troublesome metaphysical distinctionwhile still according an important role to the agent’s psychology. When weexplain an agent’s action by citing the things that matter to him in somesituation, and those things really do matter, normative reasons andexplanatory or motivating reasons are one and the same.8 In such a case,the relevant situational features both explain and justify what the agentdoes.

East Carolina UniversityPhilosophy DepartmentBrewster A-327Greenville, NC [email protected]

Acknowledgments

Thanks to John Collins, Jonathan Dancy, Richard McCarty, MichaelPendlebury, and Michael Veber for helpful discussion and comments onearlier drafts of this article.

References

Beaulieu, Gerald. 2009. “Sinnott-Armstrong’s Moral Skepticism: AMurdochian Response.” Dialogue 48:673–78.

Dancy, Jonathan. 2000. Practical Reality. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.

8 Nothing has been said in the preceding about what does really matter, that is, aboutwhat makes something a good reason for action. A promising suggestion is offered by virtueethicists. Put in terms of the view on offer here, the suggestion is that good reasons for actionare to be identified with the situational features that matter to certain people, namely, thosewith virtuous characters. For a defense of this kind of view as a response to moral skepticismsee Beaulieu 2009.



. 2004. Ethics Without Principles. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Davidson, Donald. 1963. “Actions, Reasons, and Causes.” Journal of

Philosophy 60:685–700.. 1970. “How Is Weakness of the Will Possible?” In Moral Concepts,

edited by Joel Feinberg, 93–113. Oxford: Oxford University Press.McDowell, John. 1996. Mind and World. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press.Nagel, Thomas. 1970. The Possibility of Altruism. Princeton: Princeton

University Press.Smith, Michael. 1994. The Moral Problem. Oxford: Blackwell.Williams, Bernard. 1980. “Internal and External Reasons.” In Rational

Action, edited by Ross Harrison, 17–28. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press.

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Can Explanatory Reasons Be Good Reasons for Action?