The direction of fit for belief

It’s non-instrumentally good for me to believe truly and it’s non-instrumentally bad for me to believe falsely. Does that give you non-instrumental reason to make p true?

Saying “Yes” is counterintuitive. And it destroys the direction-of-fit asymmetry between beliefs and desires.

But it’s hard to say “No”, given that surely if something is non-instrumentally good for me, you thereby have have non-instrumental reason to provide it.

Here is a potential solution. We sometimes have desires that we do not want other people to take into account in their decision-making. For instance, a parent might want a child to become a mathematician, but would nonetheless be committed to having the child to decide on their life-direction independently of the parent’s desires. In such a case, the parent’s desire that the child become a mathematician might provide the child with a first-order reason to become a mathematician, but this reason might be largely or completely excluded by the parent’s higher-order commitment. And we can explain why it is good to have such an exclusion: if a parent couldn’t have such an exclusion, she’d either have to exercise great self-control over her desires or would have to have hide them from their children.

Perhaps we similarly have a blanket higher-order reason that excludes promoting p on the grounds that someone believes p. And we can explain why it is good to have such an exclusion, in order to decrease the degree of conflict of interest between epistemic and pragmatic reasons. For instance, without such an exclusion, I’d have pragmatic reason to avoid pessimistic conclusions because as soon as we came to them, we and others would have reason to make the conclusions true.

By suggesting that exclusionary reasons are more common than I previously thought, this weakens some of my omnirationality arguments.

Exclusion of reasons and purity of heart

Patrick is an attractive man and a good philosopher. His colleague Jenny, who is married to someone else, now has two reasons to talk to Patrick. Here we don't, I think, want to say that the problematic reason is overridden or defeated. For if Jenny's practical reasoning in favor of talking to Patrick includes "Patrick is attractive, but I'm married to someone else," her practical reasoning takes Patrick's attractiveness in favor of talking with him, and that's unfaithful--there is at least a moral imperfection there, even if not a sin. (One can act or reason viciously without actually sinning.) Rather, the reason should be excluded in the Raz sense. Jenny has a second order reason not to let Patrick's attractiveness count even pro tanto or defeasibly in favor of spending time with him, just as when an army commander tells one to take yonder hill, one has a second order reason not to let personal inconvenience count even pro tanto or defeasibly in favor of staying put.

In practice, it's hard to really exclude reasons, we often do not know all our motives, and self-deceit is easy, which is why we have practices of self-recusal when one has strong excluded reasons. It is important enough in some cases not to risk acting on excluded reasons that one removes oneself from a position where one would be making a decision where the excluded reasons are relevant.

Another practice besides recusal is working on one's psychology so that the excluded reason in favor of an action count against the action. Thus, in the above example, that Patrick is attractive would start counting as a defeasible reason against talking with him for Jenny. When she does end up talking to him, it will perhaps no longer be partly because of his attractiveness, but despite it. Such a practice of overcompensation is not abstractly ideal--a morally perfect being would have no need for it. Moreover, in some cases the equivalent of recusal is more appropriate: a judge should not overcompensate for the fact that she'll benefit monetarily from a verdict by biasing herself against that verdict, but should recuse herself. But in some cases, overcompensation seems an appropriate solution.

However, human capabilities for self-deceit are enormous, and one cannot count on overcompensation to do the trick by itself. For it had better not be the case that Jenny is in fact consciously or unconsciously weighing three reasons in favor of talking to Patrick: the philosophical reason for talking with Patrick, the attractiveness reason in favor of talking with Patrick and the attractiveness reason against talking with Patrick, even if the third reason overcompensates for the second. For if she is acting on these three reasons, she is taking Patrick's attractiveness in favor of spending time with him. But perhaps a habit of overcompensation can give rise to genuine exclusion of the excluded reasons.