WiP - Wooram Lee / The wrong kind of reason as useless reasons
WiP - Wooram Lee / The wrong kind of reason as useless reasons
September 16, our WiP meeting welcomes Wooram Lee from Seoul National University, who will persuade us to see "The wrong kind of reason as useless reasons."
The Wrong Kind of Reasons Problem consists in offering a principled distinction between the right and the wrong kind of reasons. One response to the problem is wrong kind of reasons skepticism, according to which the putative wrong kind of reasons are not genuine reasons for the relevant attitudes. This paper develops a novel argument for this view. The first premise is what I call the justificatory usefulness constraint: a consideration is a reason for an attitude only if it is capable of providing some justification not only for the attitude itself, but also for its characteristic manifestations. This constraint, I argue, explains some central aspects of ordinary justificatory practice and reflects the normative significance of attitudes. The second premise states that the putative wrong kind of reasons for an attitude fail to satisfy this constraint. I defend this premise against an important class of counterexamples involving ambidextrous reasons. I conclude that the putative wrong kind of reasons are best understood not as reasons for attitudes but as reasons for bringing about those attitudes.