Normativity, Commitment, and Instrumental Reason

Abstract

Abstract There are two tendencies in our thinking about instrumental rationality that do not seem to cohere very well. On the one hand, the instrumental principle— enjoining us to take the means that are necessary relative to our ends—does not seem to apply indifferently to any end that we might be motivated to pursue. There is, for instance, no genuine requirement to take the means that are necessary for realizing ends that one merely happens to desire. This encourages what we might call a moralizing tendency in reflection about instrumental reason: the supposition that instrumental requirements come on the scene only in relation to ends that have themselves been endorsed in some way by the agent, as ends that it would be good or desirable to achieve.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 78 citations exist upstream.