https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6875-8385
ABSTRACT
In ‘(Really) Defending Exclusionary Reasons’, Monti seeks to defend Raz’ notion of exclusionary reasons from the attack made by Daniel Whiting. Monti agrees with Whiting that exclusionary reasons cannot motivate and so suggests that they operate by guiding rather than motivating. However, Monti’s account of guiding omits the key feature that they can guide even when one’s action is the opposite to what the exclusionary reason seems to recommend. An amended account of what it is to be guided by exclusionary reasons is needed to give the Razian account the explanatory power it is due.
In his paper ‘(Really) Defending Exclusionary Reasons’, Ezequiel Monti sets out to defend Raz’ account of exclusionary reasons from the attack made by Daniel Whiting.Footnote1 For half of the paper, as Monti himself admits, he is explaining and offering further support for Whiting’s argument. The argument can best be reconstructed by using Monti’s example: You have promised your spouse not to do me any more favours. This promise doesn’t require you not to do what I ask you to do, only that you not do it because I asked.Footnote2 This promise serves as an exclusionary reason, a reason that excludes your doing certain things for certain reasons. But it doesn’t necessarily exclude you from doing those things for other reasons. I’m certainly on Monti’s side in this argument, but there are a few ways in which the Razian case can be strengthened.
Whiting’s argument is directed more generally against second-order normative reasons, which are considerations in favour or against acting for first-order reasons, with exclusionary reasons being prime examples of such second-order reasons. His argument is that for something to be a reason, it must be something that is capable of motivating agents to act on the basis of it.Footnote3 Note that this claim only requires that reason be capable of serving as a motivation. So something can fail to motivate an agent and still be a reason on this view, so long as the agent could have adopted it as a motivation. But this ‘motivation constraint’ doesn’t hold for second-order reasons as, according to Whiting, it is not possible to ‘do something for a reason for a reason’.Footnote4 This is because one cannot intend to form an intention. Intentions must be directed at actions, not other intentions. Hence, according to him, supposed second-order reasons, including exclusionary reasons, cannot be reasons at all.
Monti’s main defence of Raz comes from relying on a distinction between acting for a reason and being guided by that reason. Monti shows that the ‘motivation constraint’ that Whiting sets up (for something to be a reason to ϕ, it must be possible to ϕ for that reason) is not tenable because it can be replaced with a ‘guidance constraint’: for something to be a reason to ϕ, it must be possible to ϕ, guided by the consideration that the reason favours ϕing. He believes that this allows one to ϕ, guided by the reason in question, without forming an intention to ϕ.Footnote5
The problem arises with Monti’s presentation of what it means to be guided by an exclusionary reason in order to support the guidance constraint. Monti’s explanation of guidance is such that it would be impossible to be guided by an exclusionary reason unless one ultimately concludes that one should act in the same way as the valence of the exclusionary reason. To explain this, let’s say that the valence of the exclusionary reason is whether it is facilitating a given action or hindering it. Taking Monti’s example of promising your spouse not to help me just because I ask, the exclusionary reason given by the promise would be hindering your helping me since it would be excluding one reason in favour of helping me. Its valence would be against the action of helping. If instead we consider the action of refusing my request, its valence would be facilitating the action of refusing me as it would be excluding a reason against refusing me. Now Monti’s explanation of guidance requires that we accept one can be guided by an exclusionary reason only when concluding that, all things considered, one should act in accord with the valance of the exclusionary reason: ‘an exclusionary reason not to ϕ for certain first-order reasons guides us by us forming the belief that all things considered we ought to refrain from ϕing, and, in turn, by us forming the intention not to ϕ on the basis of (our belief in) that fact’.Footnote6
The problem with this explanation is that we can clearly be guided by an exclusionary reason without concluding that we should, all things considered, act in accord with it. If you help me for some reason other than that I asked, you’re still being guided by the exclusionary reason given by your promise to your spouse in that you are ONLY helping me because of the existence of some other reason and not because I have asked. You are guided by it even though its valence is in the opposite direction to the way you have concluded you ought, all things considered, to act; you are guided by it because you have to wait for some other reasons before you can help me.Footnote7 Hence, you are still acting guided by that reason even where Monti’s analysis does not describe the situation.
One might wonder whether this should still be considered to be a form of guidance. But the list of our possible relations to reasons is growing thin and the exclusionary reason is still clearly having its correct impact on our action. We are clearly not being motivated by the exclusionary reason here as Monti and Whiting have both shown that second-order reasons don’t directly motivate actions. It isn’t enough to say that we are acting in accordance with the exclusionary reason, as that would not require me to have the exclusionary reason factor in my action at all; my action in accordance with it could be a coincidence and I could be ignoring it entirely. When you resolve to help me only if and when there is some other good reason other than my request, you are using the promise to your spouse to exclude the first order reasons that they are supposed to exclude, so it is having its correct influence on your behaviour. It seems that guidance is the only explanation that reasonably fits with the description.
Granted, Monti’s goal in explaining guidance is to show how it is possible to perform an action while being guided by a reason without thereby forming the intention to perform that action. So it makes sense that he is focusing on situations where the action that would seem to be recommended by the second-order reason is eventually performed. However, this is supposed to be an analysis of guidance more generally in support and explanation of exclusionary reasons than for the use he hopes to put it against Whiting. Given this and since his example of the promise to the spouse specifically contemplates the possibility of respecting the promise while still helping the friend, his exclusion of situations where the second-order reason is met but the harmonising action is not performed is troubling.
For Raz’ theory, given that exclusionary reasons are supposed to explain moral as well as legal obligations, the inability to be guided by exclusionary reasons except when acting in the same valence would be potentially damaging. If we are only considering legal obligations, then it would be less problematic to understand guidance only where the eventual action is in the same valence as the exclusionary reason. This is due to the general feature of most legal systems that they are more concerned with actions than they are the reasons that guided or motivated agents to act. Even so, we can imagine possible legal systems that are more concerned with which reasons are guiding or motivating agents, and even in our more familiar legal systems there are situations in which the particular reasons on which agents act become relevant to making legal judgments. But in cases of moral obligation, as Monti’s own example shows, we can have obligations to exclude reasons, where doing so does not preclude acting in the same way those excluded reasons had recommended. To ignore this form of guidance therefore threatens the ability of Raz’ insights to be applied in these much more common cases.
One might also worry that Monti’s strategy would not be open to Raz given Raz’ dispute with HLA Hart over the distinction between exclusionary reasons as Raz understood them and peremptory reasons as Hart understood them. Hart thought that authoritative directives gave subjects peremptory reasons, which were supposed to cut off deliberation about what do.Footnote8 For Hart, what is excluded by this kind of reason is further consideration, which thereby prevents it from entering the agent’s motivational set. But Raz thought it was mistaken to treat such directives as cutting off deliberation and instead thought that what he called pre-emptory reasons were meant merely to prevent acting on the excluded reasons.Footnote9
Scott Shapiro, commenting on this dispute, thought that Raz was unfair to Hart in that deliberation is supposed to be action-guiding in the sense that it is directed at forming an intention.Footnote10 Cutting off deliberation regarding a reason would prevent it from becoming the basis of an intention to perform the action it recommends. But Shapiro thought that Raz was correct in that pre-emptory reasons would not simply preclude forming an intention to act on the excluded reason(s) but would rather replace them. Whiting also notes that we cannot understand second order reasons as reasons against deliberating as Hart says of peremptory reasons, as doing so would rather make them into first order reasons not to perform a certain mental act of deliberation.Footnote11 The key is then to understand what is meant by ‘acting on (or for) a reason’, where some are being excluded.
That requires us to understand the relation between exclusionary reasons and pre-emptory (Razian authoritative) reasons, on the one hand, as distinguished from peremptory (Hartian authoritative) reasons, on the other. Raz notes that exclusionary reasons are ‘reason[s] for not following (that is, for not acting for) reasons that conflict with the rule’.Footnote12 So exclusionary reasons exclude acting on some reasons (pre-emptory reasons exclude acting on all of some class of reasons), while peremptory reasons prevent deliberation on certain reasons.
Monti’s explanation of guidance, if broadened to incorporate situations where one acts in the opposite valence of the exclusionary reason but only where non-excluded reasons are favouring the action, might then help to flesh out Raz’ picture of what it means to act on a reason by showing how exclusionary reasons relate to motivation. If we are going to agree with Monti’s response to Whiting, that a ‘guidance constraint’ can replace a need for reasons always to be potentially motivating, we would thereby embrace the idea that second-order reasons can act as gatekeepers as to which first-order reasons enter the agent’s motivational set when resolving upon an action.
I think it is important to think about the reasons one acts upon as a ‘motivational set’ precisely because I don’t think that that human motivation is usually (or ever) as cut and dry as many of these discussions would lead us to believe. We are nearly always acting for a wide variety of reasons at any given time, and of some of these reasons we may only be dimly aware. When we correctly attend to valid exclusionary reasons, Monti is clearly right to say that they are guiding us rather than motivating us directly. We attend to them correctly by keeping the first order reasons they exclude out of the motivational set upon which we act. If this is correct, it suggests that Raz was correct in his difference with Hart: exclusionary reasons don’t necessarily prevent us from attending to the excluded first order reasons, assessing their weight, or even from determining what one would have had greatest reason to do in the absence of the exclusionary reason.
The common example (mentioned by Monti) of confronting the antecedent promise to meet the friend when one has greater reason to rest or work highlights this: One can do all the deliberating that one wants. In the deliberation, the promise may function merely as one data point, even as one affords it great weight. Doing so might lead the agent in either direction as she is still including the reasons that Hart would have had us understand to have been excluded. But, if we assume the promise was valid and still operative, then correctly attending to it means not allowing those excluded reasons to factor into the motivational set when one settles upon how to act.
There is another small issue in Monti’s treatment of creditworthiness as an argument against Whiting. Whiting believes that if one does an action appropriately guided by an undefeated reason then that person is creditworthy. The only way to understand this is to note that whatever credit the person deserves is modulated by the reason acted on by the agent and not by the action itself. Some undefeated reasons are better than others for acting. So if one acts on an undefeated reason that would strike others as being the strongest or most moral, one deserves more credit than when one acts on an undefeated reason that is not the most pressing in favour of the action. And there could be cases in which failure to act on the strongest reason suggests that the agent isn’t being sufficiently reasons-responsive, thereby undermining the agent’s creditworthiness.
However, another aspect of this is that this credit is simply the general credit one gets for being reasons-responsive and isn’t necessarily moral credit, so you can get credit for following prudential reasons. For example, someone might give you a high five for extricating yourself from a dangerous situation or completing a difficult task.
Both Monti and Whiting seem to ignore this by using examples where the undefeated reason against an immoral action isn’t as strong as the moral reason. Whiting specifically declares in a footnote that he is generalising creditworthiness ‘more broadly’ than moral worthiness,Footnote13 so his failure to appreciate the possibility of some creditworthiness in a non-moral case is confusing the issue. In Monti’s example, ‘John is angry at his neighbour Paul. The thought of smashing Paul’s car crosses his mind. But he decides to refrain from doing so just for the reason that he would probably be fined if he were to do so’.Footnote14 But, Monti notes, ‘John is not creditworthy for refraining from smashing Paul’s car’ in this case. This seems to assume that creditworthiness must be only reserved for acting on moral reasons, at least in situations with a moral dimension. Nevertheless, there is a sense of creditworthiness where John still deserves some credit, the credit he deserves for correctly responding to prudential reasons, even as we correctly condemn him morally for failing to act on the moral reasons that were in play. When an agent is failing to act on moral reasons in play, any credit she deserves for responding correctly to prudential reasons is eclipsed by the moral judgment that she is not correctly treating the moral reasons as more pressing or exclusionary. So in cases where moral reasons are in play but the agent responds instead to prudential reasons, our intuitions about whether an agent is creditworthy are suspect precisely because we are likely (but correctly) to ignore any non-moral credit that she otherwise deserves.
In conclusion, I echo Monti’s appreciation for the vast contribution that Raz has made to the theory of practical reason and the fact that Raz’ introduction of exclusionary reasons represented one of the most important advances made by philosophy in the understanding of normativity to date. As Monti notes, there are still those who resist the explanatory power of exclusionary reasons for our normative lives and his contribution in responding to their arguments is very helpful. However, in our defence of exclusionary reasons we must remain vigilant that our explanations remain faithful to the full breadth of explanatory power that Raz had for them.
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Notes
1 Daniel Whiting, ‘Against Second-Order Reasons’ (2017) 51 Nous 398.
2 Ezequiel Monti, ‘(Really) Defending Exclusionary Reasons' (2024) 15 Jurisprudence 48 [this issue], 49–50
3 Whiting (n 1) 403.
4 ibid 404. See also Monti (n 2) 57–58.
5 Monti (n 2) 59–60.
6 ibid 60. Note also the biconditional specification of the conditions for what it is to be guided by exclusionary reasons, the first of which is that one must refrain from performing the action the exclusionary reason militates against.
7 Granted, the reasons may already be present, in which case the wait has no length.
8 HLA Hart, Essays on Bentham: Jurisprudence and Political Theory (Clarendon Press 1982) 253–55. See also Scott J Shapiro, ‘Authority’ in JL Coleman and S Shapiro (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law (Oxford University Press 2002) 389.
9 Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Clarendon Press 1986) 39. See also Shapiro (n 8) 406.
10 Shapiro (n 8) 406–07.
11 Whiting (n 1) 402 (citing Joseph Raz, Practical Reason and Norms (2nd edn, Princeton University Press 1990) 48), 405.
12 Joseph Raz, ‘The Problem of Authority: Revisiting the Service Conception’ (2006) 90 Minn L Rev 1003, 1022.
13 Whiting (n 1) 406 n 23.
14 Monti (n 2) 65.