Instrumental Reasoning Essays -- Philosophy

Can Instrumental Reasoning Stand Alone? I. IntroductionThere is something appealing about ordinary bicycle slavish or means-end soiling. One begins with a want, a goal or a desire and considers visible(prenominal) options as means to its satisfaction or achievement. If, among the available options, one is the best or however way to satisfy the desire or achieve the goal, one has a reason to select it. If two or more options both seem to lead to the goal, they may still differ in other ways, e.g., in the probability with which they lead to the goal in which skid (if that was the only difference) one would have reason to choose the option which led to the goal with higher probability.To consider things in the simplest form possible, consider a organism with only a single desire. Suppose that this being wants nothing but to break a street-lamp. Even in so simple a case, we finish begin to say what he ought to do. Any number of things may be effective. If he has no other goals n ot even going unapprehended so that he can do it again with some other street-lamp he may use a rifle, a pistol, throw rocks at it, climb the lamp-post to bash it with his fist, etc. But we can say that there are some things that, in terms of his goal, he ought not to do, for example, that he ought not to try breaking it (because he wont succeed) by throwing feathers at it, one by one.It looks as though, even in this deliberately simplified case, means-end reasoning, combined with some knowledge of the world, is liberal to tell us something about what he ought to do. This is not, to be sure, a moral ought, but we seem to have generated a normative conclusion, an ought-judgment of a modest sort, without appealing to any mysterious non-natural properties ... ...h a person? Perhaps, a real example of an existentialist chooser would say that there is not even a reason for committing oneself rather than not one just does (or does not).15 This is not being offered as a solution to the central problem that Korsgaard has raised. I am, as stated earlier, only assuming that there is some solution. Rather, I am trying to show that, given the existence of some solution to that problem, though we need some tho normative principle, it does not have to be one that picks out certain ends for us. In short, we can do almost what could have been done had the defenders of the autonomy of instrumental reasoning been correct. (In fact, I think we can do quite a bit more than we could if they had been correct but thats a topic for other paper.)16 And I do not in any case have non-dialectical proofs that they are mistaken.