- G. F. Schueler, University Of New Mexico

    The project described in this book involves rethinking the answer Donald Davidson gives to the question
he asks at the beginning of "Actions, Reasons and Causes": "What is the relation between a reason and an action when
the reason explains the action by giving the agent's reason for doing what he did?"  Davidson's own answer of course was
that such explanations are a variety of causal explanation.  And though Davidson's account of how this could be so has
been the object of serious criticism since he first proposed it (e.g. as entailing a form of epiphenomenalism), the heart
of his view, the so called 'belief-desire' account of reasons, has been very widely accepted by philosophers.  In
my 1995 book [DESIRE: Its Role In Practical Reason and the Explanation of Action - MIT Press/Bradford Books] I tried to
show that much of the plausibility of this sort of view depends on conflating two distinct senses of the term 'desire' (and its cognates).
 

    REASONS AND PURPOSES focuses on the thought that practical deliberation is central to explaining human
action. One common variety of the view that explanations of actions in terms of the agent's reasons are causal
explanations, frequently attributed to Davidson, has desires and beliefs as the main causal factors and says roughly that
what might be called a mechanical or 'non-purposive' account of desire-belief interactions underlies the surface and
(apparently) purposive explanation in terms of the agent's reasons.  This is the view that Michael Smith argues for
under the label 'The Humean Theory of Motivation'.  I argue that a view of this sort can make no sense in the end of a
common, and indeed essential, element in reasons explanations, practical reasoning itself.
 

    In the alternative account that I suggest, explanations of actions in terms of the agent's reasons have an
ineliminable teleological element, not explicable in terms of efficient causes, which stems from the central role of
practical deliberation in the genesis, and thus in the explanation, of actions.  Intentional actions are always
done for reasons, and I argue that the agent's reasons for doing what she did, even when there is no explicit
deliberation, are whatever led her to think that her action was what she should do.  So her reasons for doing what she
did are intelligible only as features of her actual or possible practical deliberation, which must therefore always
be at least implicitly referred to in explanations of her actions in terms of her reasons.  At the same time,
practical deliberation is inherently normative, both in the sense that the agent must employ evaluations in her
deliberation and in the sense that her reasons are automatically open to normative criticism from herself and
others.  Practical deliberation is the process of trying to figure out which of the actions apparently open to one 'has
the most to be said for it.'  Together these points provide the basis for an answer to Davidson's question which, while
still 'causal,' lets us make sense of the essential role of the content of the agent's reasons, and of their inherently
normative nature, in explanations of actions.
 

    Contents
 

Introduction                                                            p.   3

Chapter One:
Purposes, Causes and Reasons Explanations             p.  11

     1.  Purposes                                                      p.  13
     2.  Reasons and Causes                                      p.  25
     3.  Causes and Causal Explanations                     p.  33

Chapter Two:
Non Teleological Explanations of Actions                  p.  54

    4.  The Argument for
    'The Humean Theory of Motivation'                    p.  55
     5.  Are 'Causal' Explanations Unavoidable?          p.  93

Chapter Three:
Teleological Explanations of Actions                        p. 119

     6.  The Need for Teleological Explanations         p. 120
     7.  Character Traits                                           p. 143

Chapter Four:
Explanations in terms of the Agent's Reasoning        p. 173

     8.  Problems with The Practical Syllogism          p. 175
     9.  Practical Reasoning and
     The Explanation of Actions                                p. 211
     10. Practical Reasoning and Evaluations              p. 239
     11. The Principle of Charity                               p. 249

Chapter Five:
The Inherently Normative Nature
of Action Explanations                                            p. 259
 

     12. Normative Explanations I:
     The Deliberative Model                                     p. 260
     13. Normative Explanations II                            p. 290