Joshua Knobe argues that psychological subjects regard an action as intentional if they are willing to use an "in order to" construction to explain the act, where the act in question appears on the right hand side of the construction. His research suggests that psychological subjects' moral views do affect whether they use the "in order to" construction in this way. Here I argue that subjects regard an action as intentional if they are also willing to place the act on the left hand side of an "in order to" construction. My research suggests that psychological subjects' moral views do not affect whether they use the "in order to" construction in this way.

Abstract

If practical reasoning deserves its name, its form must be different from that of ordinary (theoretical) reasoning. A few have thought that the conclusion of practical reasoning is an action, rather than a mental state. I argue here that if the conclusion is an action, then so too is one of the premises. You might reason your way from doing one thing to doing another: from browsing journal abstracts to reading a particular journal article. I motivate this by sympathetically re-examining Hume's claim that a conclusion about what ought to be done follows only from an argument one of whose premises is likewise about what ought to be done.

No abstract

No abstract