Revisiting the Argument from Action Guidance

Philip Fox

doi:https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v15i3.467

Volume 15, Number 3
August 2019

ARTICLE

Revisiting the Argument from Action Guidance

Volume 15, Number 3, August 2019, Pages 222–254

https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v15i3.467

PDF

Abstract

According to objectivism about the practical ‘ought’, what one ought to do depends on all the facts; according to perspectivism, it depends only on epistemically available facts. This essay presents a new argument against objectivism. The first premise says that it is at least sometimes possible for a normative theory to correctly guide action. The second premise says that, if objectivism is true, this is never possible. From this it follows that objectivism is false. Perspectivism, however, turns out to be compatible with the plausible assumption about guidance. I defend the two premises on the basis of an account of what it is for a normative theory to guide action. Central to this account is the idea that correct action-guidance involves correct practical reasoning from a normative theory to an action, which requires (among other things) that agents have the capacity to believe for the right reasons. Since objectivists about the practical ‘ought’ are committed to objectivism about the epistemic ‘ought’, it follows that agents lack this capacity and so are in principle unable to be correctly guided by a normative theory. This shows that recent attempts to reconcile objectivism with action-guidance are unsuccessful, which all assume that, if objectivism is true, it is at least sometimes possible for a normative theory to correctly guide action.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.

|

Perspectivism and Rights

Daniele Bruno

Practical Commitment in Normative Discourse

Pekka Väyrynen

Evolutionary Debunking Arguments and Our Shared Hatred of Pain

Ben Bramble

Anchoring a Revisionist Account of Moral Responsibility

Kelly Anne McCormick

Objectivism and Prospectivism About Rightness

Elinor Mason

Objective Morality, Subjective Morality and the Explanatory Question

Dale Dorsey

“Ought” and the Perspective of the Agent

Benjamin Kiesewetter

Refining the Argument from Democracy

Gabe Broughton

Doxastic Partiality and the Puzzle of Enticing Right Action

Max Lewis

How to Be Morally Responsible for Another’s Free Intentional Action

Olle Blomberg

Actual Guidance Is Enough

Stefan Fischer

Action and Production

Stephen J. White