Varieties of Practical Reasoning

Elijah Millgram (ed.)

Cambridge/London: MIT Press, 2001
ISBN 0262632209 (pb), pp. 487, £23.95

Practical Philosophy  (Book Reviews) Spring 2003 Volume 6.1

Reviewed by: David Arnaud

This is an anthology of papers written over the last forty years on practical reasoning - the study of figuring out what to do. This is certainly a topic that a practical philosopher who wants to think about the ways in which clients can be helped in their figuring out what to do might well be interested. So is there material in this anthology that will help the practical philosopher?

The anthology begins with an excellent orientating article by Elijah Millgram which provides an introduction to historical and current theories such as nihilism (there are no legitimate forms of practical inference), instrumentalism (all practical reasoning is means-end reasoning), the problem of the incommensurability of ends, and how the various articles fit into these themes.

The essays themselves are written by first-rate theoretical philosophers so rigour is taken for granted. Happily many (but not all) essays both focus on the central questions (rather than being side-tracked into exegetical analysis and debate) and also illustrate their ideas with examples having psychological realism (no critique of why people wouldn’t want to spend their lives wiggling their toes in the mud).

This collection is a rich repository of ideas for how to enable people to figure out what to do. Millgram reflects on the role of pleasure as a guide to the choosing of ends (rather than being an end in itself). Thagard identifies the strengths and weaknesses of making decisions by reason and intuition and suggests how to get a win-win combination of both. O’Neill explores what Kant means by acting on the basis of a maxim and how this can be used to hunt out internal (and sometimes hypocritical) inconsistency in our beliefs and actions. Fehige and Schmidtz reason about how to reason about ends, respectively suggesting that we can do this by (i) fully representing our ends to ourselves and modifying our desires to suit ourselves and the world, and (ii) by understanding how we can come to acquire settled ends, and how ends can be modified by other ends we have.

 

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