SLAVES OF THE PASSIONS? ON SCHROEDER'S NEW HUMEANISM

In his impressive book, Mark Schroeder defends a Humean theory of normative reasons. He takes this to be the view that all normative reasons are to be explained by reference to some desire of the agent who has the reason. He calls his particular version of this theory hypotheticalism, and I shall do the same. His defence of hypotheticalism is clever, and the book is inspiringly clear. Those working on reasons for action cannot ignore this book, both for the excellent summation of the prior literature on the topic, as well as for a forceful, interesting, and original contribution to the area. However, I do not think that Schroeder’s defence of hypotheticalism succeeds. I have two main charges against his view. First, it violates a constraint on deliberation. If our desires have a special place in explaining our reasons (even if they are not themselves reasons), then they may sometimes feature in this special place in practical deliberation. But they should never feature in this special place: so they cannot explain our reasons. Second, it generates too many reasons. He claims that any proposition whose truth would explain why my F-ing increases the likelihood of my satisfying one of my desires is a reason to F. But this is far too permissive, since many propositions may feature in such explanations whilst not being reasons to act. I shall now make these two objections in greater detail. Some terminology: Schroeder uses “desire” to refer to the kind of psychological state, whatever it is, that plays a certain role in an example he uses throughout the book (p1). For simplicity, I shall instead use “desire” to refer to some particular kind of mental state, and will ignore the fact that it should play the correct role in his example. This does not substantially affect what I say below.