Agnes Callard
speaker
832 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2009
last heard Jun 2020
Agnes Callard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Now, my view is you are acting on a proleptic reason.
But suppose you were to say you're acting on, you don't have a reason.
It's not to say it's irrational, but irrational.
It's something in effect that happens to you more than something that you do.
Well, now suppose we take the case of somebody who wanted to have a child, but she can't.
On the view where she never had a reason for having a child in the first place, she also has no reason to be upset about not being able to have a child.
So what I argue in the conclusion of the book is that if you deny the existence of proleptic reasons, you're going to have ethically the wrong sorts of responses to such a person.
You're going to think, for instance, she's being irrational when she's upset.
Now, you might still be nice to her, and you might be so nice that you're not going to tell her she's being irrational, right?
But that's the wrong ethical relation in which to stand to such a person.
And the point generalizes to aspirants more generally.
Aspirants are directed to some goal, right?
And I think if they are cut off from that, they will experience a form of grief that is rational, that makes sense.
And it makes sense in the mode of rational agency.
And so one cost of denying the rationality of aspiration is that you are cutting off those emotional reactions from their source of rationality.
What we might want to do is think about how these two things are connected.
One, the question of whether the aspirant is active or passive in relation to her goal.
And two, the question of whether she has any grasp of the goal in advance or something like that, right?
And...
I was talking in a way about the second thing and about how someone could rationally pursue a goal that they didn't grasp well.
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