Ryan Soucy’s Reviews > Slaves of the Passions > Status Update

Schroeder defends Hypotheticalism against Instrumentalist objections. He lists 6 propositions in descending strength which the Humean is thought to accept. He argues that it is only the last, "You can't have any reason to act if you don't have any desires." that Hypotheticalism must be committed to. He then summarizes the discussion and defends the motivation for accepting a Humean theory on its explanitory nature.

Schroeder discusses desire as well as defends the Attitude-Content view which claims that acting for a reason is taking a salient consideration to be a reason for action. He then elaborates and responds to issues in moral epistemology and shows the underlying Aristotelianism of Hypotheticalism, something I find to be a huge virtue to the theory.

Schroeder develops and elaborates a very intuitive and satisfying view on the weight of reasons. Where sets of reasons of the right kind in favor of some X to do A are contrasted with sets of reasons for some X against doing A. I had thought I was disagreeing with Schroeder on the issue of the weight of reasons, but it appears that his system is actually a better formalization of the one I was considering!

Schroeder distinguishes the Too Many and Too Few Reasons objections to the latter being about agent-neutral and the former agent-relative. He goes on to characterize just how different agents can have agent-neutral reasons which are universal and reasons for everybody given any desire. I think this is successful, but with interesting consequences.

Schroeder has attempted to show that the Too Many Reasons objection can be adequately faced by Hypotheticalism. The Too Many Reasons objection claims that any Humean theory basing reasons in desires will lead to unintuitive claims about reasons where we would supposed there simply are none. Schroeder says that Htpotheicalism does lead to more reasons, but this is unobjectionable when looked at properly.

There are properties of the normative which are not captured by a non-normative referent. Schroeder agrees with the force of the objection, but hopes to avoid this with his notion of reductionism and constitutive explanation. I'm assuming he'll say, his reductionism is non-eliminating and reducing the normative to the non-normative is to analyse how they are opposite sides of a biconditional.

Example: I say murder is wrong, by this I mean pigs are mammals. Pigs are in fact mammals, therefore murder is wrong. The problem is the truth value is not in virtue of the normative wrongness of murder, nor is it relevant to the claim at all. For there to be any truth value assigned to normative properties, it should be in virtue of those properties.

Structured properties and constitutive explanations fit well together. The structured properties just are what makes some x an x. He goes on to discuss normative reductionism. An anti-reductionist objection is to say that normative claims ought to eerie their truth value from normative properties and considerations, if reduced to non-normative, realism would be too easy to come by and miss the point of moral truth

Biconditional seems to be a good positive thesis for the Humean theory. I'd still like to see my objections answered, however. Schroeder believes that any version of Humeanism ought to be reductive about reasons. He discusses what reductionism is in terms of constitutive explanations (I find this appealing), it reveals the structure of properties which are things had in common with other things (another view I like