Music Appreciation Teacher Journal

6
Proleptic Reasons
Agnes Callard
The teacher of a music appreciation class is frustrated with those students
who are taking her class, as she puts it, “for the wrong reasons.” In her view,
the class offers students access to the intrinsic value of music. Students who
are taking it for “the right reason” will be taking it for this reason. But only
those who already appreciate music appreciate musical appreciation. Or, at
any rate, only they appreciate it correctly, for the reason for which (she
believes) one should appreciate it—namely, intrinsic musical value. The
problem is that if the intrinsic value of music is a reason you respond to, you
don’t need to take her class. You already appreciate music.
She wants students in the class who care about music. But she’s supposed
to be teaching them to care about music. Is she being unreasonable? The
problem does not go away once we admit of degrees or kinds of caring—it
does not help to characterize her job as that of getting people who care a
little (or who care in this way) to care more (or in that way). So long as
someone enters the class satisfied with his level or type of music appreciation, whatever that may be, the teacher will impugn his motives, whatever
they may be. The teacher is looking for students who want to care about
music more than, or in a different way than, they currently do. But, again,
she doesn’t want them to want this for some extra-musical reason. So it
seems that what she wants is for them to respond to musical value exactly to
the extent that they’re not yet able to.
This is a paradoxical way of putting an ordinary demand for the kind of
reason that is my topic. It is possible to have an inkling of a value that you do
not fully grasp, to feel the defect in your valuation, and to work towards
improvement. The reason for doing that work is provided by the value in
question, but the defect in your grasp of that value also shapes the character
of the activity it motivates. For consider what kind of thinking motivates a
good student to force herself to listen to a symphony when she feels herself
dozing off: she reminds herself that her grade, and the teacher’s opinion of
her, depends on the essay she will write about this piece; or she promises
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herself a chocolate treat when she reaches the end; or she’s in a glass-walled
listening room of the library, conscious of other students’ eyes on her; or
perhaps she conjures up a romanticized image of her future, musical self,
such as that of entering the warm light of a concert hall on a snowy evening.
Someone who already valued music wouldn’t need to motivate herself in
any of these ways. She wouldn’t have to try so hard.
The paradox arises from a dilemma concerning two kinds of reasons that
a potential student of such a class could have for taking it. There is, first, the
intra-musical reason, the having of which seems to mark the fact that the
class has come to a successful close. There is, second, any extra-musical
reason, the recourse to which seems to condemn someone to subordinating
the value of music to what the teacher would call “an ulterior motive.” In the
first case, the reason is not the reason of a student; in the second case, it’s the
reason of (what the teacher would call) a bad student. I will argue that this
dilemma is specious, because there is an agent—the good student—who
manages to combine extra- and intra-musical reasoning. Like the musiclover she will become, she is genuinely oriented towards the intrinsic value
of music. For instance, if offered some way of attaining good grades,
chocolate treats, etc. without coming to appreciate music, she would reject
it. And yet grades and chocolates are integral to the rational explanation of
her action of listening to music: she would be asleep without them. “Bad”
reasons are how she moves herself forwards, all the while seeing them as bad,
which is to say, as placeholders for the “real” reason.
One characteristic of someone motivated by these complex reasons, by
contrast with the simpler reasons of the bad student, on the one hand, and
the established music lover, on the other hand, is some form of embarrassment or dissatisfaction with oneself. She is pained to admit, to herself or
others, that she can only “get herself ” to listen to music through those
various stratagems. She sees her own motivational condition as in some way
imperfectly responsive to the reasons that are out there. Nonetheless, her
self-acknowledged rational imperfection does not amount to akrasia, wrongdoing, error or, more generally, any form of irrationality. Something can be
imperfect in virtue of being undeveloped or immature, as distinct from
wrong or bad or erroneous. (There is something wrong with a lion that
cannot run fast, but there is nothing wrong with a baby lion that cannot run
fast.) When the good student of music actively tries to listen, she exhibits
not irrationality but a distinctive form of rationality.
Her rationality is not, however, of the familiar, clear-eyed kind.
Anscombe’s Intention placed the ability to answer the “why?” question at
the heart of philosophical discussions of agency. The agent who can give an
account of what is to be gotten out of what she is doing grasps the value of
what she will (if successful) achieve through her action. Her answer to the
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“why?” question might not satisfy every interlocutor, but it is at least
satisfying to the agent herself: she takes herself to know why she is doing
whatever it is she takes herself to be doing. Of course, not every agent will be
able to satisfy herself in this way: some agents are not paying attention to
what they are doing, or are being impulsive,1 or experience a moment of
forgetfulness, or have simply failed to think things through sufficiently. In
some of these cases, the agent’s behavior is arational, since her ignorance is
profound enough to disqualify her from acting intentionally; in other cases,
her action is intentional, but irrational. The good student of music likewise
fails to be able to articulate, to her own satisfaction, what she expects to get
out of her music class. In her case, however, this marks neither the absence
of intentionality nor the absence of rationality.
If an agent finds her own answer to the “why?” question satisfying, she
must ascribe to herself a certain knowledge of value. Such an agent takes
herself to know both that some form of value is on offer, and that it is one
she herself does or will enjoy, appreciate, or find meaningful. And such a
person is often correct—agents often do have such knowledge. How did
they acquire it? Since knowledge of value is itself valuable, it stands to reason
that one way we acquire such knowledge is the way we acquire many other
valuable things: by acting in order to bring about that acquisition. The
problem is that unless one is equipped with an ulterior motive,2 the value of
knowledge of some value is not a different value from that value itself.
Therefore, those seeking to acquire the knowledge cannot take themselves to
know why they are doing so. And yet—I will argue—it is a fact of life that
we act not only from, but also, at other times, for the sake of acquiring,
knowledge of value.
If those actions are to be rational, then rationality cannot require accurate
foreknowledge of the good your rational action will bring you. Thus I will
defend the view that you can act rationally even if your antecedent conception of the good for the sake of which you act is not quite on target—and
you know that. In these cases, you do not demand that the end result of your
agency match a preconceived schema, for you hope, eventually, to get more
out of what you are doing than you can yet conceive of. I’ll call this kind of
rationality, “proleptic.” The word “proleptic” refers, usually in a grammatical context, to something taken in advance of its rightful place. I appropriate it for moral psychology on the model of Margaret Little’s phrase
1 Some, but not all, impulsive agents will take themselves to fail in respect to the “why”
question. “Just because I feel like it” might strike one agent as a perfectly good answer, and
another as no answer at all.
2 As in Frankfurt’s example of the doctor who treats drug addicts: he wants to
understand the appeal of drug addiction without actually wanting to become addicted.
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“proleptic engagement” (2008: 342), by which she refers to an interaction
with a child in which we treat her as though she were the adult we want her
to become.3 Proleptic reasons are provisional in a way that reflects the
provisionality of the agent’s own knowledge and development: her inchoate,
anticipatory, and indirect grasp of some good she is trying to know better.
Proleptic reasons allow you to be rational even when you know that your
reasons aren’t exactly the right ones.
A reason for action is a consideration in favor of acting in some way; if the
agent in fact acts in the way in question, she will be able to offer that reason
as an explanation of why she so acted. Sometimes we do something for more
than one reason: I might go to the store both in order to get milk and for the
exercise. Proleptic reasons are double in a more fundamental way. The good
music appreciation student is listening to the symphony assigned for her
class because music is intrinsically valuable, and because she wants a good
grade. If she merely cited the first as her reason, she would be pretending to a
greater love of music than she currently has; if she merely cited the second,
she would be incorrectly assimilating herself to the bad student. But her
motivational condition is also not one in which she has merely added the
first reason to the second, because that situation would describe a music
lover who is (strangely) taking a music appreciation class. The fact that
music is intrinsically valuable and the fact that she wants a good grade
somehow combine into one reason that motivates her to listen. The reason
on which she acts has two faces: a proximate face that reflects the kinds of
things that appeal to the person she is now and a distal face that reflects the
character and motivation of the person she is trying to be. Her reason is
double because she herself is in transition.
I will show, by generalizing the paradox described in my opening, that it
is not only the rarefied context of music education that calls for a proleptic
analysis. I argue that we must acknowledge the reality of proleptic reasons,
else we be forced to classify as irrational a large swath of human agency—
agency that is purposive, self-conscious, intelligent, and truth-sensitive, and
which constitutes a kind of building block of or prelude to everything else
that we do. I end with a discussion of the currently dominant moral
psychological thesis that what practical reasons we have depends on what
desires we have (internalism). I consider a few variants of internalism, and
3 Likewise Bernard Williams (1995) speaks of a “proleptic mechanism” by which he
takes at least some instances of blame to function. Williams asserts that a blamer’s
pronouncement that the blamee “ought to have φ-ed” can serve not as a description of
the blamee’s current set of reasons, but rather as a way of both anticipating and bringing
about the future state of affairs in which the blamee will be in a position to be motivated
by the reasons now being ascribed to him.
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argue that none of them can, as they stand, make room for the existence of
proleptic reasons.
6 .1 L A R G E – S C A L E T R A N S F O R M A T I V E P U R S U I T S
I adopt the phrase “large-scale transformative pursuits” to describe such
significant life changes as: attending college, moving to a foreign country,
adopting a child, becoming a painter or a philosopher or a police officer,
achieving distinction in athletics or chess or music, becoming a sports
fan, an opera lover or a gourmet, befriending or marrying or mentoring
someone, etc. The two features uniting this class of pursuits are that one
cannot know beforehand all that one is to get out of them, and that they
require years of sustained effort, both in the form of preparation and in the
form of the work attending the completed state. They are both transformative
and large in scale.
Some ends are transformative but not large in scale: riding a roller coaster
for the first time or trying a new flavor of ice cream. In these cases, I don’t
know quite what I’m getting myself into. I ask the world to, as we say,
“surprise me.” When we seek to be surprised in this way, we open ourselves
to having our tastes revised on the basis of new experiences. We will only be
able understand the value of these experiences after the fact and not while we
pursue them. It is because the set of actions we do “for the thrill of it” or “to
see what that is like” do not require years of intensive preparatory or
consequential effort that our reason for engaging them can simply be to
try something new. The value of novelty or surprise suffices to motivate and
rationalize only small-scale transformative pursuits. Becoming a police
officer, or adopting a child, is also “something new,” but we would not
view that as a sufficient reason to adopt such an end. It would often be
irresponsible to take up even a hobby, if one’s only grounds for doing so
were the whimsical attraction to new experience. When it comes to the kind
of reasons that might rationalize a transformative pursuit, scale matters.
Not many pursuits are large in scale without being transformative, but
some may be. Under some circumstances, making a lot of money might
qualify, especially if the motive were, for example, to secure the financial
future of one’s descendants. Craft-hobby activities such as assembling a
huge puzzle or adding pieces to one’s hand-built model railroad will also
often qualify. I suspect that some of the appeal of the repetitiveness of such
activities—restoring another classic car—is that they are virtually guaranteed
to be non-transformative. The same holds for the effort people put into
physical exercise done for the sake of maintaining fitness levels. The promise
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of a certain kind of ethical stasis can turn even intellectually or physically
strenuous engagement into a source of relaxation.
Transformative ends are recognized as such not only by those who have
succeeded in attaining them, but also by those who are on their way: one can
see in advance that one cannot see in advance all of what is good about
parenthood, or friendship, or scuba-diving, or emigrating to another
country. Transformative pursuits aim at values, the appreciation of which
is connected to the performance of the activity (or involvement in the
relationship) in question. Indeed, this is because the pursuits themselves
form a kind of value-education, gradually changing the agent into the kind
of person who can appreciate the value of the activity or relationship or state
of affairs that constitutes the end of the pursuit. In the course of becoming a
teacher or a friend or a reader of ancient Greek, one learns to appreciate the
values that are distinctive of teaching or friendship or reading ancient Greek.
But one does not fully appreciate them until one is at, or close to, the end
of the process of transformation. For it is the end-state (teaching, parenting,
translating) that offers up the actual engagement with the value on which
any full appreciation of it must be conditioned. The joys of teaching are best
known to teachers. Everyone goes to college “to become educated,” but
until I am educated I do not really know what an education is, or why it is
important. I may say I am studying chemistry in order to understand the
“structure of matter,” but only a chemist understands what it means for
matter to have structure (or, indeed, what matter really is). For the rest of us,
that phrase is likely to be backed by little more than an image of a tinker-toy
“structure” to which a mental label such as “molecule” is affixed.
The problem posed by large-scale transformative pursuits is this: they
require us to act on reasons that reflect a grasp of the value we are working so
hard and so long to come into contact with, but we can know that value only
once we have come into contact with it. And yet the cost of granting that
such ends are pursued for no reason, or bad reasons, would be to restrict the
scope of practical rationality very greatly. For most, if not all, of the
experiences, forms of knowledge, ethical and intellectual traits, activities,
achievements, and relationships that we value are such that the pursuit of
them is both large in scale and transformative. It is true that even if we were
forced to characterize the choices by which we move ourselves towards all of
those ends as irrational, we could still rationalize engagement with the ends
once achieved. But if this is all there is to practical rationality, we should be
disappointed. For every rational choice to continue φ-ing will be adventitiously predicated on a series of irrational choices to come to φ. We should
expect more from our reasons than maintenance of a mysteriously attained
status quo. I propose, therefore, to introduce a species of reasons to meet this
expectation.
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My music appreciation example built in a demand, on the part of the teacher,
that we not separate the rationalization of the pursuit from that of the end. This
kind of demand is generally appropriate for large-scale transformative pursuits.
We do not want to understand the agent engaged in a large-scale transformative
pursuit along the lines of someone who walks to the park for the exercise, but
stays when she sees they’re showing an outdoor movie. For in that case the agent
was not, when walking, pursuing the end of seeing a movie. It is possible
to rationalize both the walk and the movie-watching without rationalizing
anything we could call the pursuit of the movie. By contrast, large-scale transformational pursuits are characteristically aspirational: when the agent gets
where she’s going, she realizes that she has what she was after all along.
6.2 VAGUENESS, TESTIMONY, COMPETITION,
PRETENSE, APPROXIMATION,
S E L F -M A N A G E M E N T
We ought to demand a rational account of how someone can work her way
to the valuation characteristic of the various end-states to which we aspire.
Satisfying this demand, I claim, means postulating a set of reasons—I’ve
called them “proleptic reasons”—tailor-made to rationalize exactly these
sorts of pursuit. By way of argument for this claim, let us survey alternate
contenders, reviewing the kinds of factors we typically cite in explaining
such behavior: a vague grasp of the value in question, a precise grasp of a
value in close proximity to the value in question, reliance on the ethical
testimony of a mentor or advisor figure, imaginative engagement in a
pretense of being as one aspires to be, casting success at some activity as a
locus of social competition, recourse to self-management techniques of (dis)
incentivization. I’ll argue, case by case, that vague reasons, approximating
reasons, testimonial reasons, reasons of pretense, competitive reasons, and
reasons of self-management rationalize in the right way only insofar as we
help ourselves to a dedicated subset of each genus of reasons. It turns out
that in order to rationalize aspirational agency, we must invoke not vague
reasons but proleptically vague reasons, not testimonial reasons but proleptically testimonial reasons, etc. In the attempt to avoid proleptic rationality, we
find ourselves ushering it in piecemeal, through the backdoor.
6.2.1 Vague Reasons
Someone who has a “vague reason” for φ-ing φ-es with only a vague idea of
the value of φ-ing. It is certainly true that I have a vague idea of the value of
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all sorts of pursuits in which I am not currently engaged. For instance,
I think there are many valuable careers I did not choose, many valuable
hobbies I don’t pursue, many valuable books I’m not reading. One problem
with such ideas is that they are often not very motivating. I don’t plan to
read most of those books. Consider a bad student of music appreciation—
one intent on merely going through the motions necessary for fulfilling a
distribution requirement. He might happily grant that music appreciation is
a “good and valuable end.” He has a vague idea that music appreciation is
good. But that’s not enough to get him to do the homework, show up to
class on time, study for the exam, etc. A vague idea does not entail
willingness to put in effort. So let us suppose that the vague idea is not so
vague—in fact, let us posit that it suffices for motivation. There are many
non-aspirational situations in which I have only a vague idea of the value
I am motivated to get. I buy tickets to an opera I know I love, not knowing
exactly what I will love about this production. Such an activity is not
aspirational, because I’m satisfied with my vague idea. I don’t now feel the
need to work to make up the difference between the vague idea I have now
and the sharp one I will have later; I don’t experience that difference as a
defect in my current state. I need only wait for the world and my interests to
line up in such a way as to make it possible for me to do the enjoying or
appreciating that I’m already fully capable of.
The aspirant’s idea of the goodness of her end is characterized by a
distinctive kind of vagueness—one she experiences as defective and in
need of remedy. She is not satisfied with her own conception of the end,
and does not feel that arriving at the correct conception is simply a matter of
time. She understands her aspirational activity as work she is doing towards
grasping this end. So, while vague conceptions of value do help explain how
aspiration is possible, it is equally true that the phenomenon of aspiration
helps us understand a distinctive form of vagueness—a kind of eversharpening vagueness. Large-scale transformation pursuits are done for
those vague reasons that are proleptically vague.
6.2.2 Self-Management Reasons
My music student plans to reward herself with chocolate for getting through
the symphony. I might make plans with a buddy to go running in the
morning, so that she can “hold me accountable” for my plan. Reasons of
self-management show up whenever I am trying to get myself to do
something that I think I should do but may feel insufficiently motivated
to do. Some forms of self-management can be very mild, such as simply
resolving to (not) do something. In all these cases, I find some way to add
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motivational backing to a given course of action. Notice, however, that such
self-manipulation comes in two forms.
Suppose that Sue worries that she’ll be tempted to buy expensive holiday
presents4 for her friends, despite her lack of funds. So she adopts one or
more of such self-managing tactics as: choosing a thrifty friend as a shopping
partner, leaving her credit card at home, resolving not to enter a certain
expensive store. In the case I’m imagining, Sue does not see her temperamental generosity as problematic. She doesn’t have a systemic problem, she
just happens to be very short of funds at the moment. Reasons of selfmanagement are, in this kind of case, directed only at behavior on a given
occasion, or even a series of occasions.
A different kind of holiday shopper might, by contrast, be engaged in a
long-term struggle to curb her chronic overspending by learning to think
less commercially about how to make herself and those around her happy.
In that kind of case, self-management is directed primarily at changing how
the agent thinks, values, and feels. The music student described above
would presumably see it as quite problematic if, years hence, she were still
motivating herself to listen with chocolate. Or consider the case of moving
to a new country. I may, at first, have to “force” myself into social situations.
My hope is thereby to come to inhabit the new culture, language, etc. in
such a way as to become disposed to engage eagerly in such socializing.
I aspire to make this new place my home. This second kind of selfmanagement often goes along with a characteristically aspirational form of
practice. In some cases, doing something over and over again changes the
way I do it. And so by doing it, I hope to change my attitude towards it.
Sometimes I manage myself precisely with the aim of managing myself less
and less. And that is just to say: reasons of self-management, too, come in a
proleptic variety.
6.2.3 Testimonial Reasons
We often invoke testimony to explain how someone’s rationally held beliefs
can outstrip the cognitive resources that can strictly be called his own. There
is some controversy over whether such testimony is possible in a moral
context,5 but it certainly seems possible to heed the practical advice of your
elders and betters—even against your own instincts and inclinations. It is
also true that advisors or mentors often, even typically, figure in large-scale
transformative pursuits. But the mentor’s role in the life of the aspirant is
4 I would like to thank Kate Manne for the example, and for helping me to see its
importance.
5 See Wiland (2014) and McGrath (2011).
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not an unproblematic one. Unlike in other testimonial contexts, the aspirant’s goal is nothing other than coming to see the value for herself. The fact
that your role-model knows so much more than you that you are inclined to
defer to her advice means that contact with her is a constant reminder of
what you don’t have. You don’t aspire to do what she does; you aspire to do
what she does in just the way she does it—namely, independently.
What would the music appreciation teacher think of a student who takes
her class on the advice of his music-loving mentor? I think the teacher would
be satisfied with this reason to the extent that she felt the student wasn’t. I’m
happy to take someone else’s word on the truth of many of my historical or
scientific beliefs. I’m not, similarly, happy with my reliance on my mentor.
The species of testimonial reasons that figure in aspiration are special in just
the way that the vagueness of an aspirant’s conception of her end is special.
The testimonial element in aspiration is of a distinctively degenerative kind:
the present legitimacy and authority of the mentor’s voice is conditioned
on—indeed, anticipates—its gradual evanescence. And in characterizing
this curious species of testimony, we have, once again, helped ourselves to
a dedicated, aspirational species of the genus in question.
6.2.4 Reasons of Competition
Many large-scale transformative pursuits are, at some point or other, fueled by
a desire to position oneself at the top of some group of people engaged in a
similar pursuit. Wanting to be better than others at something is a very
powerful motive. The mathematician G. H. Hardy writes that he initially
“thought of mathematics in terms of examinations and scholarships: I wanted
to beat other boys, and this seemed to be the way in which I could do so most
decisively” (2005 [1940]: 46). We frequently encounter such competitiveness
in athletic, musical, intellectual, and artistic pursuits. People even get competitive about their hobbies. But there are—again—two kinds of competitiveness.
In one kind of case, I compete in order to display my excellence or submit
it for assessment. So: I would like my excellence to be praised, celebrated,
renowned to others. Or I would like to know how good I am, perhaps to be
reassured that I really am as good as people say I am. Competition can be a
way of gauging one’s excellence, by measuring it against the excellence of
others, or flaunting it, by demonstrating its superiority to the excellence of
others. Such flaunting can itself spring from a variety of motives—for
instance, I might want to flaunt my excellence as a physicist in order to
inspire other young women to become physicists. Whatever the ultimate
motive, competition of this kind is characterized by a desire to make known
to others or to myself a virtue that I already have.
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In another kind of case, the point of competition is to allow me to strive
for excellence in an open-ended way. The thought of being better than the
people around me is a powerful motivator for making something of myself
when I don’t know exactly what it is I want to make of myself. Hardy
recounts:
I found at once, when I came to Cambridge, that a Fellowship implied ‘original
work’, but it was a long time before I formed any definite idea of research. I had of
course found at school, as every future mathematician does, that I could often do
things much better than my teachers; and even at Cambridge, I found, though
naturally much less frequently, that I could sometimes do things better than the
College lecturers. But I was really quite ignorant, even when I took the Tripos, of the
subjects on which I have spent the rest of my life; and I still thought of mathematics
as essentially a ‘competitive’ subject. (1940: 47)
If the motivations driving Hardy to become one of the twentieth century’s greatest mathematicians were competitive in nature, this competitiveness must have been of a singularly hungry kind. In this kind of case,
competitiveness is a way of holding open a door for the person I’m trying
to become. I’m competing in order to become excellent, rather than in order
to show that I already am. When the prize arrives it turns out to be not what
I really wanted; I am already preparing for the next competition. The value
for the sake of which I compete is not one on which I have a good grip.
I compete for the sake of a future or anticipated value that I, as of now, only
incompletely understand. This form of competitiveness is proleptic
competitiveness.
6.2.5 Reasons of Pretense
David Velleman (2002) has proposed that we emulate ideals by pretending
to satisfy them. He offers as an example of pretense his own experiences of
mock-aggression in his martial arts class. He then analyzes a case of quitting
smoking as one in which the subject pretends to be a non-smoker and then
gets “carried away” (2002: 100 et passim) with the pretense. Velleman
acknowledges that, on his conception of it, such behavior is somewhat
irrational: “when a smoker draws on an ideal for motivation to quit, his
behavior is in some respects irrational” (2002: 101). He characterizes such
agents as “hav[ing] reasons to make themselves temporarily irrational.”
Velleman seems to think that the irrationality in question is only of a
harmless, temporary kind. I find it to be neither harmless nor temporary.
The whole idea of such an account is to sever someone’s “outer” reasons for
adopting the pretense from the reasons as they appear to him once he’s
inside it. Velleman’s thought is that the agent thereby makes a new set of
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reasons available to himself, which he can leverage into personal change. But
once one adopts an account of this kind, one cannot rely on the rationality
of the outer reasons to vouchsafe that of the inner ones. Consider that one
can have all sorts of reasons for “pretending” to be some way—someone can
pay me money, I can do it on a lark, I can be an actor in a play. If I get
“carried away” and fail to snap out of it, I seem to exhibit some kind of
mental illness. I’ve become trapped inside my own game. Velleman offers no
principled reason why we should not understand the smoker, and emulation
in general, as (possibly)6 luckier victims of the same deep and permanent
irrationality.
In aspirational cases, the failure to shed the pretense is salutary rather than
pathological. But this is connected to the fact that it is not mere pretense.
When I pretend or engage in make-believe, I close my eyes to the world
around me, sometimes literally, the better to imagine a world that isn’t
actually there. It is crucial to my willingness to engage in such activity that
I see it as temporary. Large-scale transformative projects—including that of
quitting smoking—are not like this. If I aspire to become a non-smoker,
I am not pretending to be one already. Rather, I want to come to see the
world in the way in which a non-smoker does, because I think that is the
right way to see things.7 I’m not closing my eyes, I’m fighting to open them
and to keep them open. Velleman’s conception of aspiration corresponds to
Iris Murdoch’s description of humanity in general: “man is the creature who
makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture” (1996:
252). I think the aspirant makes pictures of himself in order to resemble the
picture.
Pretending is different from trying, but I don’t want to deny that trying
can involve pretense of a special kind. Imagination does not function only as
momentary escape from reality; I can, perhaps, imagine my way into
becoming someone. Here the function of the imagination is not to fashion
a substitute world, but to help us move ourselves closer to some reality we
already have some grip on. I might, for instance, adopt the mannerisms of
the kind of person I’m trying to be. If this were an act of aspiration, it would
pain me somewhat to do so, because it is not enough for me to act like that
person when what I want is to be that person. We cannot analyze aspiration
6 Only possibly luckier, because there are both bad ideals and (morally) good roles for
actors.
7 I should note that not every would-be non-smoker aspires to quit. It is possible to
have a simpler goal of modifying one’s behavior, as in the case of Sue the overspender (see
above, p. 137). The aspiring non-smoker is marked by the fact that she wants not only to
behave differently, but also to come to see things differently, to cease seeing smoking as
attractive.
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in terms of pretense because the kind of pretense we would need to invoke is
an aspirational kind.
6.2.6 Approximating Reasons
Perhaps the value under which the pursuit is conducted is close, though not
identical, to the value of the end. At the end stages of a transformative
pursuit, I may have access to something close enough to the final value to
justify pursuit. So, for instance, I might appreciate Mozart’s light operas,
and this gives me reason to listen to his symphonies, and this leads me to
Bach. We might try to make up a kind of series of progressively approximating values to lead the music student from music she likes to the music
that the class is designed to get her to appreciate. Highlights of such a series
might look like this: Taylor Swift, the Beatles, Rogers and Hammerstein,
Gilbert and Sullivan, Puccini, Mozart, Bach. The question is: does this series
represent a subtle shift in value over time, or does it represent one single
value getting progressively clarified and approximated to? Does she say, at
the end, “now I see what I was after all along?”
In the first case—subtle shift—we should imagine the value transition as
analogous to a move from yellow to blue along the color spectrum by
imperceptibly different shades. But this is a variant of the “go for the
exercise, stay for the movie” scenario. For the reason grounding the aspirant’s activity when she’s in the yellow region diverges from the reason in the
blue region in such a way as to break up her pursuit into a series of rationally
disconnected activities. From the fact that it is impossible to say where one
ends and the other begins, it does not follow that there is no difference
between the two. If it’s a progressive clarification, there’s no such worry: the
gradual shift in value would be guided throughout by the agent’s sense that
some target value is being approximated, like an image gradually coming
into focus. But this is just what we mean in speaking of proleptic reasons.
For a proleptic reason just is a reason by which an agent grasps, in an
incomplete and anticipatory way, the reason that she will act on once her
pursuit is successful.
Recourse to other reasons, be they approximating or vague or testimonial
reasons, or reasons of pretense or self-management or competition, does not
obviate the need for introducing a distinctive proleptic species of reason.
I don’t claim that my list exhausts all possible alternatives, but I do think it
covers much of the rational territory. Moreover, there is a certain pattern
that repeats itself, indicating a general strategy which the champion of
proleptic reason should adopt in the face of some additional contender. If
someone says that large-scale transformative pursuits can be rationalized by
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familiar, X-ish reasons, the proleptic reasons theorist will try to demonstrate
that only a (proleptic) subspecies of X-ish reasons can hope to rationalize a
distinctively aspirational pursuit.
Proleptic reasons are—I conclude—the reasons that rationalize largescale transformative pursuits. A proleptic reason is an acknowledgedly
immature variant of a standard reason. It has the built-in structural
complexity of that which is, in essence, parasitic. A proleptic reasoner is
moved to φ by some consideration that, taken by itself, would (in her
view) provide inadequate reason for φ-ing. But she is not moved by that
consideration taken by itself; rather, she is moved by that consideration (be
it competitive, testimonial, approximating, etc.) as a stand-in for another
one. The proleptic reasoner uses the only valuational resources she has at
her disposal—namely, her current desires, attachments etc. both to mark
the inadequacy of those very resources and to move herself towards a better
valuational condition.
The reader may wonder why I invoke a new species of reason rather
than speaking of a proleptic grasp of a (standard) reason. I do not think
that much hangs on whether we attach the property of being proleptic to
a reason itself, as opposed to the quality of someone’s apprehension of
that reason. My interest is in a set of thoughts, actions, desires, choices,
and projects that neither exhibit a standard form of rationality, nor are to
be discounted as irrational. The distinctiveness of proleptic rationality is
my topic, whether we spell this out as a distinctive way of grasping
reasons, or a grasp of a distinctive kind of reason. But there are considerations that speak in favor of the latter formulation. One context in
which we might speak of proleptic reasons is to explain why someone did
what he did. In this kind of case, a proleptic reason lends intelligibility to
some bit of behavior. If we choose to speak of a “proleptic grasp” of a
reason, then it will turn out that in proleptic cases, reasons do not explain
behavior—rather, grasps do. And it is awkward to speak of actions as
being explained by grasps, and natural to speak of them as being
explained by reasons.
We also invoke reasons when we recommend a course of action. Suppose
a mentor tells her student to φ in such a way as to be making a proleptic
reasons statement: she can see, on the basis of what she knows about him,
and her expertise in φ-ing, that he ought to aspire to φ. She cannot be read
as saying that he has a proleptic grasp, for her point is to inform him about
something he is missing. Nor is she confessing to such a grasp—for,
presumably, she grasps that same reason non-proleptically. We could
describe her as asserting that he ought to have a kind of grasp that he
doesn’t yet have; but the more natural thing to say is that she is alerting him
to the presence of a special kind of reason.
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6 . 3 IN T E R N A L R E A S O N S
I have argued that proleptic reasons don’t fit into any of the categories of
reasons we are antecedently inclined to recognize; if I am right, there is a
lacuna in non-technical, ordinary thought about the kinds of reasons people
have for doing the things they do. My contention is that philosophers and
non-philosophers alike would do better to acknowledge that proleptic
reasons are a distinctive, but genuine, way to be rational. Elsewhere,8
I discuss the ethical import of such acknowledgement. I take as my example
an infertile woman who wants children, and show how certain characteristic
failures of empathy towards such a person are the product of our tendency to
turn a blind eye to such a person’s strong, though merely proleptic, attachment to the project and values of motherhood. Thus I believe that proleptic
reasons represent a philosophical contribution to everyday ethical thought.
I also believe that they represent a philosophical contribution to philosophical theorizing about ethics—specifically, to decision theory and moral
psychology. Edna Ullmann-Margalit (2006) has argued that decision theory
does not have the resources to account for the rationality of large-scale
transformative projects, because the decision theorist can only analyze the
rationality of decisions in which preferences, or at the very least core
preferences, remain fixed. As she correctly acknowledges, agents who
become parents, emigrate from their homelands, or take up new careers
not only experience fundamental shifts in preference, but often embark on
these projects precisely in order to experience these shifts. Since she takes
decision theory to be our only hope in this regard, she concludes that it is
impossible to pursue such projects rationally. Laurie Paul (2014) has offered
a similar argument, to the effect that it would be irrational to pursue these
projects on the basis of a projection as to what it will be like to be at the
endpoint.9 Though I am in broad agreement with the thrust of both arguments, I think, as should already be apparent, that it is possible to pursue these
projects in a rational way. I argue elsewhere10 that the rationality of large-scale
transformative projects is essentially extended in time, by contrast with
8 Callard (MS: conclusion).
9 Paul does not share Margalit’s skepticism, because she thinks that we can make these
decisions in a way which is rational at a second-order level: by determining whether we
prefer preference change, or preference stasis. I argue elsewhere (Callard MS: ch. 1) that if
this method were valid, it would, absurdly, entail that someone who has a reason to
embark on one large-scale transformative pursuit—say, to have children—also, therefore,
necessarily has a reason to embark on any other large-scale transformative pursuit—say, to
travel the world or, for that matter, to have herself sterilized.
10 Callard (MS: ch. 1).
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the synchronic (momentary) rational structure characteristic of decisionmaking. Ullmann-Margalit and Paul ask what it would take to be justified
in the decision to take a music appreciation class, go to college, embark on
some career, become a parent. I think this is the wrong question. The
rationality of these pursuits only becomes visible to one who examines the
agent over the extended period over which she is learning to become a music
lover, a college student, a professional, a parent. The upshot of my discussion
is to remove a burden from the decision theorist: it is not his job to explain
how one rationally becomes a mother, or a music lover. It is the theorist of
aspiration who, armed with proleptic reasons, is in a position to tell us what it
is for these large life transitions to be made rationally. Thus proleptic rationality narrows the explanatory scope of, and thereby contributes to our understanding of, formal decision theory.
I want to devote the remainder of this chapter to developing the moral
psychological implications of the theory of proleptic reasons. Proleptic
reasons constitute a new challenge to the thesis of internalism about practical
reasons.11 Internalism is a thesis about what it takes for someone to have a
reason to do something. Internalists hold that an agent’s reasons must in
some way be relativized to what she desires, where that term is construed
broadly to include interests, commitments, attachments, preferences, etc.
First espoused by Bernard Williams (1981), internalism has since found
wide acceptance, though at the same time many of those who call themselves
internalists are inclined to reject some element of Williams’ characterization
of the position.
Consider the following internalist theses:
motivation condition: if R is a reason for S to φ, S is such as to
be able to be moved by R.
(j) justification condition: if R is a reason for S to φ, R can be
arrived at by subjecting S’s set of desires to a rational procedure.
(m)
Internalists have traditionally held both (m) and (j), and expressed their
combination in some formulation such as this:
11 Externalists such as Parfit (2011) go beyond negating internalism when they assert
that not only are there external reasons, but all reasons are external—that is, not
relativized to motivation. Thus there is space between the two views, which is where
the proleptic reasons theorist must reside. For in proleptic cases, whether you have reason
to become a mother or a philosopher, take up knitting or piano, etc. does depend—
though not in the way an internalist can capture—on whether you are motivationally such
as to be able to come to enjoy the end-state. For it is in the activity of enjoying the end
that you derive meaning from the activity in question, and, at least some of the time, what
makes a project good or valuable just is the meaning that the agent derives from it.
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145
R is a reason for S to φ iff, were S to deliberate in a procedurally
rational way from his current set of desires, he would come to
be motivated to by R.12
Internalists have wanted both to deny that someone could be in the condition of being barred from access to his own reasons, and to insist that reasons
for action justify those actions in the light of the agent’s desires. In short,
I have whatever reasons would move me, if I were fully rational. Recently,
some philosophers have called into question whether internal reasons can do
both of these jobs. (mj) lends itself to the “conditional fallacy,” which
amounts to a kind of blind spot for reasons that depend on one’s irrationality.13 Richard Johnson (1999) describes someone who has a reason to see a
therapist, because he is deluded into thinking that he is James Bond. “James
Bond” cannot arrive at this reason himself: for if he were in a position to
reason correctly on this point, he wouldn’t (so the story goes) have any need
for therapy. Likewise, Michael Smith (1995) describes a sore loser so
incensed by his defeat that he is inclined to punch his opponent at the end
of the game. Given this inclination, he doesn’t have a reason to approach his
opponent at the end of the game for a handshake, though that is exactly what
his fully rational, and therefore less irascible, counterpart has reason to do.
Johnson has argued that the only way around the conditional fallacy is to
give up (mj) by giving up either (m) or (j); and Julia Markovits (2011a) has
recently made the case for the former option. She argues that we have
independent reason to give up (m), since there are circumstances in which
we aren’t, and shouldn’t be, motivated to φ by the best reason for φ. For
instance, a pilot executing an emergency landing might be well advised not
to act for the sake of saving hundreds of lives, because being motivated by
this reason might put so much psychological pressure on him as to interfere
with his performance of the task.14 She advocates for a weaker version of
internalism based only on (j).
12 By omitting reference to beliefs I elide the difference, here immaterial, between
subjective and objective reasons. A subjective reason would be one arrived at by deliberation
from the agent’s current set of desires and current set of beliefs, whereas objective reasons
would presuppose deliberating from a belief-set corrected for falsity and supplemented
with any missing (and relevant) true beliefs (see Markovits (2011b) for this way of
formulating the distinction).
13 Though Markovits (2011a) argues that one can broaden the class of counterexamples to include ones—such as Kavka’s toxin puzzle, or cases where one has pragmatic
reasons to hold a belief—in which the agent’s inability to access the relevant reason is due
not to her irrationality, but rather to certain strictures that rationality places on us.
14 I do have a worry here, however: in another paper, Markovits (2010) argues that an
action is only morally worthy if the agent is motivated by the reasons that morally justify
the action. It is not clear to me how weak internalism is consistent with that view, given
that Markovits presumably wants to claim that the pilot in this example is to be (morally)
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I will argue that internalists—even weak internalists—are guilty of selling
proleptic rationality short. But first some preliminaries. The weak internalist
takes it that the reasons we have depend rationally on our desires. Internalists
might spell out this rational dependence in a variety of ways: in terms of
instrumental rationality (Hume, as understood by Williams 1981), of the
presence of a sound deliberative route (Williams 1981), of the absence of
rational defects (Korsgaard 1986), of procedural rationality or the reasoning
of an ideally rational agent (Markovits 2011a and 2011b); of satisfying
norms of consistency and coherence in such a way as to be “systematically
justifiable” (Smith 1995: 114). All of these ways of cashing out the dependence point at some analog to formal validity: the method in question does
not add any content to one’s ends, but rather takes the content already
present in them and shows what reasons follow from it. The idea is: given
that “James Bond” has an interest in his mental health, and also has some
form of mental illness, it follows that he has reason to seek help—even if he,
himself, is not in a position to appreciate this reason. Seeking mental help is
the kind of behavior that would be consistent with the aim of mental health,
when it is combined with the presence of mental illness. We might also
speak of actions that answer or correspond to one’s ends. The weak internalist might put his point thus:15 you have the reasons that an impartial third
party observer would take you to have, if he were reasoning about what
reasons you have in a procedurally rational way from your desires.
One more quick point of clarification: internalists can—and do—offer us
internalist accounts both of pro tanto reasons and of all-things-considered
reasons. Take Williams’ (1981) example of Owen Wingrave, whose family
insists that tradition gives him reason to enlist, in spite of his deep hatred of
all things military. When Williams says that Owen has no reason to enlist,
does he means that Owen lacks even a pro tanto reason to do so? It is hard to
imagine someone who, in Owen’s circumstances, sees literally nothing
speaking in favor of enlisting: surely the fact that his family strongly wants
him to enlist is at least a (very weak) consideration in favor of doing so?
Presumably, even if he allowed that Owen saw some (minimal) reason to
enlist, Williams would still want to resist the family’s insistence that
credited with saving all those lives. Moreover, it seems to me that the considerations she
rightly adduces in favor of the conclusion of her 2010 paper—such as pointing out that
we are not always aware of the considerations that motivate us—cut against those she uses,
in Markovits (2011a), to argue in favor of not being motivated by the justifying reason.
15 Markovits puts the point in this way in a footnote (13) of her 2011b paper, though
the footnote appears only in the online version of the paper, available at https://sites.
google.com/site/juliamarkovits/research; as she points out there, both Smith (1994:
section 5.9) and Railton (1986: 174) offer re-formulations of internalism in the same
vein.
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enlisting is what he has an all-things-considered reason to do. For whatever
glancing respect he harbors for tradition, or whatever weak desire he has to
please his parents, is dwarfed by his powerful hatred of the military. In what
follows, we will set pro tanto reasons aside: “S has a reason to φ,” means,
henceforth, that φ-ing is what S has a reason to do, all things considered.
The problem is that the proleptically rational agent has a reason that not
only she, but even a fully rational third party observer, will have trouble
extracting from the content of her antecedent desires. Suppose the good
student of music appreciation has a choice between spending an hour of her
evening listening to a symphony, or devoting that hour to a hobby she
thoroughly enjoys. Let us assume that listening to music will not serve any
end of hers apart from her (still weak) interest in enjoying music for its own
sake. The internalist must direct her to pursue the hobby she already enjoys a
great deal over developing her nascent love of music. For that action coheres
better with her current set of desires and interests. But if this were always good
advice, we would hardly ever have reason to develop new interests, values,
relationships, etc., for there is virtually always something else we could be
doing that we enjoy more than, and which satisfies our other ends better than,
the new form of valuation we have yet to acquire fully.
The problem is not merely that she does not, from where she currently
stands, have a rational line of sight to the end whose value justifies her
activity. For weak internalists are willing to grant that agents have more
reasons than they can see their way to acknowledging. The problem is that
unlike in Johnson’s “James Bond” case or Smith’s sore loser case, the
impartial rational spectator is no better off than the agent herself. If he
could somehow reason from the person’s future condition, in which (let us
suppose) love of music has become the central aesthetic pleasure of her adult
life, it would be clear that she ought to listen to the symphony. But the
internalist is restricted to extracting what the agent should do by applying a
procedurally rational method onto her antecedent desires, cares, interest,
loves, etc. The internalist must counsel us to stick with immediate and
available pleasures over embarking on the arduous process of developing a
sensibility for new and perhaps higher ones. He seems to be giving us a form
of advice that would have irked no one so much as Bernard Williams
himself: be philistines!
My claim is that the internalist cannot capture the affective difference
between the person I have called the “bad student,” who is satisfied with her
minimal appreciation of music, and the person who likewise harbors a
minimal appreciation but aspires to become a music lover. I want now to
consider some responses on the part of the internalist—some desires that he
could point to in order to explain why the second has reason to listen while
the first might lack it.
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First, consider the desires that correspond to what I have called the
reason’s “proximate face.” The aspiring music lover has promised herself
chocolate for making it through the movement, and sustains her listening by
imagining making a dramatic entrance in a concert hall on a snowy moonlit
evening. The bad student lacks these forms of motivation. Will the internalist be able to point to these differences in their ends as accounting for the
differences in their reasons? No. In order to motivate oneself successfully
through some mechanism such as appetite or fantasy, the subordinate
reason’s motivational force must outstrip that of one’s ultimate aims—but
its justificatory force cannot do so. So, for instance, if I am trying to
motivate myself to lose weight by promising to buy myself a nice dress,
but losing weight will in fact frustrate more of my ends than it will satisfy,
then my desire for a dress cannot be a source of good reasons. For the very
fact that it is irrational for me to be trying to lose weight entails that it is
irrational for me to be setting up incentives for myself to facilitate that
project.
Alternatively, consider the class of desires that pertain, in a higher-order
way, to the distal face—for example, a desire to desire to listen to music
more than one does, a desire to see what all the fuss is about, music-wise, or
a desire to become a music lover. Even if it is true that the good student has
these desires, and the bad one lacks them, pointing to that difference cannot
help the internalist explain the fact that the good student has a reason to
listen. For the rational ground of these higher-order desires lies not in any
extraneous benefit that having a stronger desire to listen to music, understanding the source of the fuss, or becoming a music lover would afford her.
At least not in the case I’m imagining: someone who wants to become a
music lover in order, for example, to please her parents raises no problem for
the internalist. For her “additional desire” plugs into independent motivations that can indeed rationalize her choice in a straightforwardly internalist
way. But in the case of the good student, the rational ground of her higherorder desires—the reason why she has them—is once again simply the
intrinsic value of music. And this is a value she is, currently, ill-placed to
appreciate. So all of these desires bottom out in a valuation of music that is
(I posit) too weak, as it stands, to underwrite an internalistic justification of
doing much of anything in its service.
Perhaps, instead of claiming that the aspirant’s reasons are based in her
desires, we should allow that they might be based in her beliefs. There is a
kind of internalist16 who holds that one of the things that can rationally
16 Namely, the kind of internalist who thinks that beliefs can give rise to desires. See
Nagel (1970: ch. 5) for the canonical statement of this view.
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ground a desire (or a desire to have a desire) is a belief in the value of the
object that you desire (to desire). Why couldn’t an agent’s belief that music
is intrinsically valuable be justified independently of, and therefore underwrite, her project of changing her affective response to music? If this is
possible, and I think it is, then there is a version of this agent that is fully
analyzable in terms of internal reasons.
The person who believes that music is valuable, but doesn’t enjoy music
or doesn’t enjoy it very much, comes in two varieties. The first takes herself
to know perfectly well the value of music, despite the fact that she takes less
pleasure in listening to music than she thinks she could. She might work on
herself to try to get herself to enjoy music more (or at all), simply for the
reason that her life could contain more aesthetic pleasure than it does. Her
music listening is, indeed, rationalizable by way of internal reasons—but
those reasons are not proleptic, because she does not take herself to have
anything to learn, value-wise.17 Manipulating one’s affective responses so
that they match the way one independently knows they should be is a real
phenomenon, but it is not the one I seek to explain here.
If, on the other hand, she takes her own belief in the value of music to be
in some way a defective appreciation of its value, since full appreciation
would presuppose enjoyment of music, her belief will not suffice to rationally ground her attempts to access it. For she does not take her belief already
to afford her (full) rational access to the value she is working to come into
(better) contact with. This second case is the proleptic one that I claim
internalists cannot accommodate. Such a person is willing to work harder to
enjoy music than her belief can, by the logic of internalism, rationally
support. Her willingness stems from her sense that there is more value out
there than she has yet been able to take account of either cognitively or
conatively.
Why can’t the internalist simply allow that the good student has, in
addition to any of the desires mentioned above, an aspiration to appreciate
music? Internalists are famously open minded about exactly what forms of
motivation or ends or conation might constitute the ground of one’s
reasons. I have claimed to use the word “desire” broadly—as internalists
themselves often do—to cover all this whole class. They might suspect that,
in this discussion, I have actually used it more narrowly, in such a way as to
exclude unfairly the one kind of pro-attitude relevant to differentiating the
good student from the bad one. But this is not the case. I do not want to
deny the internalist recourse to the concept of being disposed to be
17 I discuss this phenomenon at greater length in Callard (MS: ch. 6), where I call it
ambition.
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motivated in a way that outstrips the reasons derivable from their current
motivational set. The problem is that she cannot make room for the fact that
any of those motivations is rational. For the internalist, letting “aspiration”
into one’s subjective motivational set simply means letting in a tendency to
be motivated in an incoherent and procedurally irrational way. What the
internalist cannot do is to derive the good music student’s reasons not
merely from her aspiration but from her rational aspiration. For her theory,
as I’ve been arguing, gives us no way to see how that phrase could be
anything but an oxymoron.
At this point, we may feel some nostalgia for old-school internalism.
Markovits ascribes reasons to me on the basis of what a third party,
impartial, perfect reasoner would take as answering to my present motivational condition. Williams, by contrast, is interested in what reasons I, with
all my imperfections, could arrive at. It is true that Williams must understand what I “could arrive at” in a way that includes the concept of
rationality—that is, as “could rationally arrive at”—but he nonetheless has
a broader and in a certain way softer construal of what it means to arrive
rationally at some conclusion. He doesn’t seem interested in specifying a
procedure that could be vouchsafed as formally valid, and therefore
employed in an identical form by any rational agent. Rather, he seems to
want to claim that an agent must be in a position somehow or other to see
her way to any reason we are to count as her own. Hence his famously—to
some, aggravatingly—open-minded conception of what such “deliberation”
consists in: “practical reasoning is a heuristic process, and an imaginative
one, and there are no fixed boundaries on the continuum from rational
thought to inspiration and conversion” (1981: 110).
Williams’ followers have tended to be much more restrictive than he was
in what they are willing to count as rational deliberation. It has seemed to
some that without such restrictions it is not clear what the theory means to
rule out, and thus what the contrast with externalism is meant to amount to.
Others have harbored substantive worries about some of the forms of
reasoning that Williams wants to admit. For instance, Smith objects that
“the imagination is liable to all sorts of distorting influences, influences that
it is the role of systematic reasoning to sort out” (1995: 116).18 Finally, as
I observed above, the conditional fallacy has driven still others, such as
Markovits, to place at the heart of internalism the idea of what can be
deduced by a valid procedure from a given set of desires.
Whatever the disadvantages of Williams’ internalism, it might seem to
be in a better position to accommodate proleptic reasoning than weak
18 This for a variety of reasons.
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internalism. Indeed, I believe Williams himself may have thought that by
emphasizing the role of the imagination in reasoning, he was skirting the
worry about philistinism I’ve been pressing here. When Williams warns
against an overly narrow conception of what a “sound deliberative route”
may consist in, reminding us that “the imagination can create new possibilities and new desires” (1981: 104–5), he may have large-scale transformative pursuits in mind. For it is true that we use our imaginations to grasp the
value that a radically new form of life has to offer us. The problem is that we
cannot do so well enough to generate an internal reason. The music student
uses her imagination to generate a fantasy about a snowy evening, and this
imaginative work may well be crucial to her forward progress. But she
cannot, in fantasizing in that way, foresee the real value that music will
bring for her. Imagination simply doesn’t have that power. No matter how
loosely we hold the reins, deliberation will not plot a course from the agent’s
present condition to what I have called the distal face of her proleptic reason.
We cannot attribute to the aspiring X-er imaginative or heuristic resources
that so far outstrip her current motivational condition that she is able to
imagine her way into the intrinsic value of X.
Internalists may respond to this line of reasoning by beginning to doubt
whether they want to accommodate proleptic rationality. There is no
knowing whether an agent’s course of action will end in φ-ing until the
course has, in fact, ended. Are we to ascribe proleptic reasons only retrospectively, on the basis of successful φ-ing? Internalists may raise the same
kind of objection to recognizing proleptic rationality that Smith raises to
Williams’ idea of the imagination as a source of reasons. They may doubt
whether there is a fact of the matter as to whether what an agent does in the
service of such an indeterminate goal is, or is not, proleptically rational.
They may question whether it is even possible to ascertain that someone
who takes herself to have a proleptic reason in fact does not, or vice versa.
I grant that in the early stages, proleptic rationality may indeed be
tenuous enough to be immune to rational critique. Aspiration begins as
something like wish or hope, and we would tend not to tell someone she
“shouldn’t” have such and such a long-term wish, or that her cherished
hopes for her future self are “irrational.” Rational criticism does, however,
eventually become appropriate. At some point on the way to her goal, the
agent enters a space in which it becomes fitting for someone—though,
perhaps, not just anyone—to say either “try harder, you can do this” or
“give up, this isn’t working for you.” These are the kinds of locutions by
which we key someone in to the presence or absence of proleptic reasons.
We can see the direction someone is heading, assessing her trajectory on the
basis of the work she has done so far. We gauge whether she has it in her to
make it to the endpoint, whether it is reasonable for her to proceed, or more
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reasonable for her to try something else. Or, rather, those of us with the
relevant expertise and the relevant familiarity with the aspirant do this.
Though proleptic reasons are amenable to rational critique, the character
who is in a position to offer this critique is not Markovits’ impartial,
detached, perfectly rational observer. This observation may further incline
the internalist to reject the rationality of proleptic reasons, but I think it
should instead lead her to question the unargued-for assumption that the
“perfectly rational agent” is the perfect arbiter of all practical reasons. If it
were true that excellence with respect to procedural rationality alone—a
kind of analytical prowess—puts someone in a position to determine what
reasons a person has, philosophers would be much better at offering advice
on any sort of practical topic than we in fact are. It is important to keep in
mind that the set of examples with which we, philosophers, discuss practical
rationality does not represent a random sample. Philosophers tend, quite
reasonably, to gravitate towards examples that provide immediate spectatorial access. The “impartial rational observer” can determine without wanting
anything, doing anything, or having any special expertise that breaking an
egg is a rational means to the end of making an omelet, and that leaving the
egg intact is not a rational means to the same end. In order to make the
relevant determination, all one needs is an understanding of what eggs are,
and what omelets are. When speaking to an audience—philosophers—
without any special practical competence, it is useful to avail oneself of
examples that can be assessed by any rational observer.
But we should guard against taking such armchair assessability to be a
feature of practical rationality itself. For instance, consider the difficulty of
determining whether it is an intensive course, years of casual listening, or a
season of concert-attendance that represent the rational means, for the
would-be music lover, to realize her aspirations. One doesn’t know the
answer to this question merely by knowing what the relevant items are. And
not even a master of procedural rationality should, I think, venture to
answer this question if she has never had any interest in music.
At least some forms of practical rationality or irrationality may only be
evident to those whose sensibilities—desires, emotions, intellects—have
been shaped by the practice in question. In addition, such judgments
often call for personal acquaintance with the subject whose proleptic rationality is being called into question. And even when an expert is assessing a
subject she knows well, she will often be unable to judge whether the
aspiration is rational or not until she has some actual extent of practice
before her. Thinking about whether or not something will work out is not
always a reasonable substitute for trying to work it out. It does not tell
against the rationality of aspiration that a judgment as to whether someone
has a proleptic reason is likely to be made on the basis of something like a
Proleptic Reasons
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trial period, or evidence of similar past attempts, and that it is likely to call
for personal acquaintance with and personal affection for both the subject in
question and her aspirational target. Judgments of practical (ir)rationality
sometimes call for practical experience.
We acquire most, perhaps all, of our practical knowledge by responding
to past experience. My interest has been in those cases in which the
experience that we respond to is one that we ourselves have sought out;
moreover, we sought it out for the (proleptic) reason that it produces this
response. In those cases, we have guided ourselves to the new values or
desires or commitments that our experience engenders. That process of selfguidance is a kind of practical learning. Because a process of learning some
new form of valuation is not the same as a process of articulating or
rendering consistent the values one already has, proleptic reasons break
every internalist’s mold.
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