Volume 11, Number 3
May 2017
DISCUSSION

On Promoting the Dead Certain: A Reply to Behrends, DiPaolo and Sharadin

Volume 11, Number 3, May 2017, Pages 1–13
https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v11i3.191
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Abstract

According to Humean promotionalism about practical reasons, the fact that I have a reason to φ holds in virtue of the fact that φ-ing promotes one or more of my desires. The topic of this discussion note is the question of how best to understand the promotion relation. In particular, I defend a probabilistic understanding of promotion against a line of argument recently brought forth by Jeff Behrends, Joshua DiPaolo, and Nate Sharadin. Roughly, their argument is that probabilistic promotion leads to implausible results in cases in which the relevant desires are certain to be satisfied. In these cases, a probabilistic understanding tells us that we do not have a reason to φ because the probability of desire satisfaction is 1 already. Contrary to Behrends’s, DiPaolo’s, and Sharadin’s claims, I argue that this is precisely the result a Humean theory of reasons should generate. According to Humeanism, we have reasons for actions because these actions make a difference to the occurrence of desire satisfaction—where the causal route to desire satisfaction is normatively irrelevant. Thus, if desire satisfaction is dead certain, we have no reason to do anything.
Copyright © 2017 Stefan Fischer
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
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