Reasons and direct support

A standard view of reasons is that reasons are propositions or facts that support an action. Thus, that I promised to visit is a reason to visit, that pain is bad is a reason to take an aspirin, and that I am hungry is a reason to eat.

But notice that any such facts can also be a reason for the opposite action. That I promised to visit is a reason not to visit, if you begged me not to keep any of my promises to you. That pain is bad is a reason not to take an aspirin and that I am hungry is a reason not to eat when I am striving to learn to endure harship.

One might think that this kind of contingency in what the reasons—considered as propositions or facts—support disappears when the reasons are fully normatively loaded. That I owe you a visit is always a reason to visit, and that I ought to relieve my hunger is always a reason to eat.

This is actually mistaken, too. That I owe you a visit is indeed always a reason to visit. But it can also be a reason—and even a moral one—not to visit. For instance, if a trickster informs me that that if I engage in an owed visit to you, they will cause you some minor harm—say, give you a hangnail—then the fact that I owe you a visit gives me a reason not to visit you, though that reason will be outweighed (indeed, it has to be outweighed, or else it wouldn’t be true that I owe you the visit).

In fact, plausibly, that an action is the right one is typically also a moral reason not to perform the action. For whenever we do the right thing, that has a potential of feeding our pride, and we have reason not to feed our pride. Of course, that reason is always outweighed. But it’s still there. And we might even say that the fact that an action is wrong is a reason, albeit not a moral one, to perform that action in order to exhibit one’s will to power (this is a morally bad reason to act on, but one that is probably minimally rational—we understand someone who does this).

All this suggests to me that we need a distinction: some reasons directly support doing something. That I owe you a visit directly supports my visiting you, but only indirectly supports my not visiting you to avoid pride in fulfilling my duties.

But now it is an interesting question what determined what reasons directly support what action. One option is that the relation is due to entailment: a reason directly supports ϕing provided that that reason entails that ϕing is good or right. But this misses the hyperintentionality in reasons. It is necessarily true that it’s right for me to respect my neighbor; a necessary truth is entailed by every proposition; but that my neighbor is annoying is not directly a reason to respect my neighbor. One might try for some “relevant entailment”, but I am dubious. Perhaps the fact that an action is wrong relevantly entails that there is reason to do it to exhibit one’s will to power, but that ϕing is wrong is directly a reason not to ϕ, and only indirectly a reason to ϕ.

I suspect the right answer is that this direct support relation comes from our human nature: if it is our nature to be directly motivated to ϕ because of R, then R directly supports ϕing. Hmm. This may work for epistemic support, too.