Practical Reality [antikvár]

PREFACEThis book brings together two large and distinct areas of enquiry. The first is the nature of good reasons for action, where we ask what it is for something to give us a reason to act in one way rather than another. The second is that part of the theory of action that asks what it is to act for a reason. It would not be quite correct to say that what is being offered here is a combination of value theory and the theory of motivation, for value theory is distinct from the theory of reasons. But there are views on which the distinction between values and reasons becomes pretty slight, and the view presented here is one (but only one) of those.In broad outline, the first part of the book makes claims about the nature of practical reasons, those reasons that favour one action rather than another. The second part uses those claims to support an unfamiliar account of what it is to act for a reason, and to undermine more standard accounts.The discussion is conducted at a fairly high level of abstraction, with few of the sort of examples that discuss the doings of Peter, Jane, and John that one often finds in contemporary philosophical writing. This has given me one problem. 1 speak constantly of the agent's reasons, of things that are reasons for an agent, and of reasons why the agent acted. As a result, I have been forced to choose between two practices. The first is that of allotting this abstract but omnipresent agent a gender and sticking to it; the second is that of varying the gender from case to case, in hopes of doing so arbitrarily. The second option, when I tried it, seemed to me to be just confusing and artificial, creating two abstract agents in the mind of the reader when it would be better to have only one. So 1 decided to think of this agent as effectively an abstract representation of myself, and as a result itnow heis of the male gender throughout. To those whom this irritates, or worse, I apologize. I suppose I am hoping that after about twenty years of variable genders it might be possible for all authors now to write in terms of their own gender, without raising hackles.