Review of Dancy, Practical Shape

Review of Jonathan Dancy, Practial Shape Euan K. H. Metz Ethical Theory and Moral Practice An International Forum ISSN 1386-2820 Ethic Theory Moral Prac DOI 10.1007/s10677-018-9962-y 1 23 Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Nature B.V.. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com”. 1 23 Author's personal copy Ethical Theory and Moral Practice https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9962-y Review of Jonathan Dancy, Practial Shape Jonathan Dancy, Practial Shape, Oxford University Press, 2018. Hardcover (ISBN 9780198805441). £30.00. 208pp. Euan K. H. Metz 1 Accepted: 20 November 2018/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2018 Jonathan Dancy is known for defending bold and often controversial positions. Practical Shape, in which Dancy defends what he calls a ‘Neo-Aristotelian’ theory of reasoning, is no exception in that regard. Let me first sketch what I take to be the most important claims advanced in Practical Shape, and then raise some general worries with the resulting account. There are two chief reasons that Dancy associates the theory with Aristotle. First, Aristotle famously claimed that practical reasoning, via a syllogism, concludes in an action. Though, for Dancy, practical reasoning is not syllogistic, he claims that we can nevertheless reason ‘directly’ to an action. Thus, practical reasoning need not (necessarily) conclude in mental state which acts as intermediary for action. Second, for Aristotle, practical and theoretical reasoning bear the same fundamental underlying structure, chiefly because both forms of reasoning can be cast in syllogistic form. Again, Dancy repudiates Aristotle’s explanation, but agrees that reasoning is unified. A third important claim made by Dancy, perhaps the most controversial claim defended in the book, is that inference is of far less significance, as a structural feature of reasoning, than many would think. We are led (or rather, misled) into the difficulties which beset practical reasoning, conceived as a basically inferential process, by conceiving of practical reasoning in light of theoretical reasoning. Instead, we ought to see things the other way around. We should first understand practical reasoning in its own terms, and model our theory of theoretical reasoning on our theory of practical reasoning. A fourth important claim is that Dancy’s theory of reasoning is avowedly realist. It is realist because reasoning is responding correctly to a state of affairs, where that state of affairs has a ‘normative shape’ insofar as it stands in various normative relations, centrally the favouring relation. Dancy does not defend this realist position in Practical Shape; it figures as a central background assumption of his theory. A fifth important aspect of the book is not a claim, but a methodology. Dancy spends some time persuading us that his theory of reasoning is not in the business of providing necessary * Euan K. H. Metz e.metz@reading.ac.uk 1 University of Reading, Reading, UK Author's personal copy E. K. H. Metz and sufficient conditions for reasoning. Rather, his alternative ‘focalist’ strategy is to identify central cases of reasoning, and then to theorise about what explains the similarities between the central cases, and how they relate to peripheral cases. In sum, the Neo-Aristotelian theory implies (1) normative realism; (2) that action can be a direct response to reasoning; (3) that practical and theoretical reasoning are fundamentally similar in structure; (4) that inference has much less importance to reasoning than has been previously thought. How then does Dancy make good on these claims? His theory – simplified greatly – can be summarised as follows: reasoning to a response, whether that be an attitude or action, consists in responding appropriately to the normative reasons which most favour that response. Reasons are subject to conditions and modifiers, and are generally understood along holistic lines. The discovery of this overall normative picture reveals the ‘practical shape’ of the situation that faces the agent, and in light of which she is to respond. Granted this structure of reasoning, it becomes apparent how reasoning is not primarily concerned with inferential relations (vindicating claim 4). Rather, reasoning is primarily a matter of responding correctly to the reasons which face us. We can reason directly to action because we can act as a direct response to those reasons which favour acting in that way (vindicating claim 2). Further, theoretical and practical reasoning are similar in the most fundamental way: both are a matter of responding to sufficient or conclusive reasons (vindicating claim 3). After spending time explaining that view, Dancy applies it to a number of different forms of reasoning, and then defends his view against criticisms from two rival positions. Let me articulate a few general worries with Dancy’s approach by reference to the important claims noted above. First, I wonder whether Dancy’s framework for reasoning is too concessive to rival views. In discussing deductive reasoning to a belief Dancy faces a putative problem. According to his view, the structure of reasoning is revealed by the shape of the normative situation that faces the agent. But the structure of deductive reasoning appears to have nothing to do with favouring, enabling, intensifying, but rather involves deductive logical relations, such as entailment. Dancy deals with this problem in the following way. The underlying structure of deductive reasoning is still explained in terms of the favouring relation: in particular, that p, and that ‘if p then q’ counts in favour of believing that q. However, there is a further question of what explains what Dancy calls ‘the ability’ of these considerations to favour believing that q. Those considerations favour believing that q precisely because those three propositions stand in a deductively valid relationship to one another. I think there are worries on this score about whether this is a genuine form of favouring, and whether the explanation comes out in the right way, but that is not my focus here. What I want to highlight is that we have a straightforward way to build inferential relations into reasoning on Dancy’s framework. The first worry is that a theorist wedded to understanding reasoning on an inferential model (such as Audi1) can agree entirely with Dancy, as long as each explanation of favouring represented in different forms of reasoning is cashed out in terms of inference. The second worry is that, if such explanations of favouring in terms of 1 See, for example Audi, Robert (2005). Practical Reasoning and Ethical Decision. Routledge. Author's personal copy Review of Jonathan Dancy, Practial Shape inference are not only available, but plausible, then that should make us worry that the important structure underlying reasoning is not revealed by favouring, but instead by the inferential processes which explain the favouring. So even if we accept Dancy’s framework, we may have no reason to accept (4). For all that we accept Dancy’s framework, inference may be as fundamental as ever. Moreover, there is nothing in the inferential view per se that undermines the practical/theoretical reasoning analogy. Thus, Dancy’s issue with the inferential view is not that it cannot secure (3), but rather that it cannot secure the claim that we can reason to action (claim 2). What, then, about (2)? A worry here is that the arguments provided by Dancy are not sufficient to convince us that action can be the direct result of reasoning in the sense analogous to the idea that an action is the conclusion of a piece of practical reasoning. Joseph Raz argues that practical reasoning must conclude in a normative belief, because you can fail to act on the basis of (completed) practical reasoning where you are physically prevented from so acting.2 But that in no way impugns your reasoning. On the other hand, your failing to believe the entailed conclusion of an argument clearly makes you irrational. Action cannot be the conclusion of practical reasoning because, if it were, your failing to act given your reasoning to a normative belief ought to be irrational. But it is not always irrational, so action cannot be the conclusion of practical reasoning. The crux of Dancy’s response to this argument is to stress that (i) theoretical reasoning can also fail to conclusively establish a conclusion, and thus the concluding belief can fail to be drawn without irrationality, and (ii) that practical reasoning can never conclusively establish a conclusion, so we should not expect the failure of performance of the ‘concluded’ action to impugn one’s rationality. However, (ii) seems vulnerable to the complaint that we can gerrymander cases in which the failure to perform a favoured action is clearly irrational unless physically prevented. If leaving by the ground floor window is the only way to save yourself from the fire, all else equal, you are clearly irrational if you fail to leave. Your reasoning here is as conclusive as we could want. But there is clearly nothing wrong with that reasoning in the case in which the window is stuck shut. So I am not yet persuaded that action can be a direct response to one’s reasoning. That said, I have only just scratched the surface of Practical Shape, which contains a wealth of interesting arguments for positions that I have not even considered here. Of particular interest is Dancy’s defence of a value-based explanation of the normativity of reasoning, as well as detailed analyses of probabilistic reasoning, moral reasoning, and, especially interesting, his analysis of instrumental reasoning, which introduces some welcome complications into this field. Practical Shape is a far-ranging and ambitious book. It will surely generate renewed interest in the broadly Aristotelian view that Dancy advances upon. 2 See Raz, Joseph (ed.) (1978: pp. 5–7). Practical Reasoning. Oxford University Press.