Buss, Sarah - Needs (Someone Else's), Projects (My Own), and Reasons

01/05/2007

Journal of Philosophy August 2006

Note: In this paper much of the academic argument against Susan Wolf, Harry Frankfurt, Shelly Kagan, and Bernard Williams is done in the footnotes, along with much more contentious argumentation.

Author begins by noting that she could have picked an occupation that was more 'helpful'. 'Helpful' is undefined, other than something that does more to help those in need. She contrasts this on a very personal level, with her choice of philosophy. She immediately claims that any profession she chose would provide the same level of personal satisfaction, thereby dispelling any 'tradeoff' between being helpful and being happy. She concludes that there are very minor, 'messy' reasons for her choice of a 'relatively unhelpful' profession.

Author doesn't believe her only reason is to be moral, or to subsume all her needs/desires for others. But given the prima facie truth that she has good reason to help another in pressing need, doesn't she have good reason to change her commitments so that she does help others in pressing need? The main point is that she is asking for justification for her current commitments that are relatively unhelpful. [Justification calls for reason-giving and standards-holding-- what if, on this level of structuring commitments, there are no substantive reasons, only structural ones?]

Author examines other possible replies to there is a good reason to be helpful. First is that there is no strong reason to help those in pressing need, or that this strong reason is overridden easily by one's own needs, whatever they may be, because of some special status they have by virtue of being mine. This argument tends to assume there is a contrast between a 'subjective' and 'objective' reasoning, and that there should be some special bridge ('why be moral?') that one has to cross in order to go from the subjective to the objective form of reasoning, and that there is no good reason to do that. Author tries to stay away from this talk of 'subjective' and 'objective' by framing everything in the subjective.

What doesn't work 1: 'There is normative force behind our commitments because they are what we favor.' Author: this doesn't answer our question, since we are asking what we think gives us reasons to do, what interests we find reason-giving for action. And surely being helpful to those in need is reason-giving. [not if we do not rationally decide on what we favor-- what if what we favor is arbitrarily defined, then repeated, then reinforced?]

What doesn't work 2: 'Our commitments make us who we are in a substantive way. To alter them is to abandon oneself, and to question them may be unintelligible.' Author: people can radically change. Offering 'I am what I am' is a cop-out since it doesn't account for the ability to rationally question the justification of what you are. Author: I am a living thing, and then I have commitments. I have reason enough to go on living, and from there to make commitments. If I abandon my commitments, I am still a living thing (the grounds for living aren't gone), so I can form new commitments. (Weird arguments going on pgs 386-387-- this part involves a supposed 'transcendental argument' made on 387 and footnoted in footnote 30. The transcendental argument goes as follows: 'since I believe that life is worth living, I have good reason to make commitments in my life.' Contrast this to: 'It is the commitments in my life that make it worth living.'

What doesn't work 3: 'There is inherent value in variety.' (Wolf?) Author: get over yourself.

What doesn't work 4: There is no over-arching standard by which various commitments can be held up and scrutinized. Just about any commitment is ok. Author: (391) Just because there is no final, ultimate criterion doesn't give us license just to chose willy-nilly. There are reasoned choices to be made, relative weights to be measured, and some will be better than others, even though there is no final scale. Sometimes we can pick the relative merit of some commitments vs others, even if sometimes we can't. Also, the above argument now justifies evil commitments!

Author: beware the trick of our own desires. They are reason-giving, but not especially reason-giving for me just because I happen to have them. The things we rational agents need in order to start to examine our commitments is magnanimity and forgiveness (400). [This could be possibly the weirdest ending to a strong paper.]