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Wittgenstein, Korsgaard andthe Publicity of ReasonsJoshua Gertaa Department of Philosophy, College of William andMary, Williamsburg, Virginia, USA.Published online: 18 Jun 2013.

To cite this article: Joshua Gert (2015) Wittgenstein, Korsgaard and the Publicityof Reasons, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 58:5, 439-459, DOI:10.1080/0020174X.2013.776297

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Inquiry, 2015http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2013.776297

Wittgenstein, Korsgaard and thePublicity of Reasons

JOSHUA GERT

Department of Philosophy, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, USA

(Received 13 December 2012)

ABSTRACT In The Sources of Normativity (Korsgaard, Christine. The Sources ofNormativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Christine Korsgaard triedto argue against what she called the privacy of reasons, appealing to Wittgensteinsargument against the possibility of a private language. In recent work she continuesto endorse Wittgensteins perspective on the normativity of meaning, although she nowemphasizes that her own argument was only meant to be analogous to the private lan-guage argument. The purpose of the present paper is to show that the Wittgensteinianperspective is not only not useful in support of Korsgaards general project, but that itis positively inimical to it, in two ways. First, Wittgenstein opposes views on which prin-cipled or rule-following behavior requires that one be guided by anything like a mentalrepresentation of a rule or principle. But for Korsgaard, human action essentially requiresthis. Second, Wittgenstein systematically attempts to de-emphasize the importance ofthe first-personal perspective, and to emphasize the social functions even of concepts thatmight seem deployed primarily from that perspective: for example, concepts of sensa-tions and intentions. This is the reverse of Korsgaards emphasis. The paper also argues,however, that the private language argument does have some implications for a theory ofrationality and reasons.

I. Introduction

Something over fifteen years ago, Christine Korsgaard tried to argue againstwhat she called the privacy of reasons, appealing to an interpretation ofWittgensteins argument against the possibility of a private language.1 This

Correspondence Address: Joshua Gert, Department of Philosophy, College of William and Mary,PO Box 8795, Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795, USA. Email: jngert@wm.edu

1Korsgaard, Sources of Normativity, 13145.

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argument of Korsgaards sparked a good deal of commentary.2 I, amongothers, argued that she had confused Wittgensteins sense of privacy, whichis close to incommunicability, with a very distinct sense, which might moreclearly have been called agent-relativity.3 In particular, Wittgenstein mightbe useful in showing that if I have a normative reason, it must be possibleto explain, in public terms, what would count as acting against that reason.But no argument analogous to Wittgensteins argument about the public-ity of meaning could possibly show that the reason might not be somethingagent-relative, such as the fact that the action will give me, the agent, a lot ofpleasure.4

In recent work Korsgaard has expressed the view that some of her criticswrongly took her to be suggesting that the publicity of meaning somehowdirectly entailed the publicity of reasons.5 But that was not, and is not, mycriticism. I took her point to be that an argument analogous to the privatelanguage argument could be mounted in the case of normative reasons, invirtue of the normativity of both reasons and meanings. I still think that thiscannot be done. But it is not the point of this paper to repeat those argu-ments. Rather, its purpose is to show that the Wittgensteinian perspectiveis not only not useful in support of Korsgaards general project, but thatit is positively inimical to that project, and in two ways. First, Wittgensteinopposes views on which principled or rule-following behavior requires thatone be guided by anything like a mental representation of the rule or princi-ple one is following. But for Korsgaard, human action essentially requires this.Second,Wittgenstein systematically attempts to de-emphasize the importanceof the first-personal perspective, and to emphasize the social functions even ofconcepts that might seem deployed primarily from that perspective: for exam-ple, concepts of sensations and intentions. This is the reverse of Korsgaardsemphasis. Despite all this, however, the final substantive section of this paperargues that there is a connection between the private language argument anda correct account of practical reasons, and offers a sketch of this connectionand of the sort of view it supports. But first it is necessary to give a briefpresentation of the relevant parts of Korsgaards view.

2Gert, Korsgaards Argument; Nagel, View from Nowhere; Coleman, Public Reasons; Hurley,Kantian Rationale; LeBar, Korsgaard, Wittgenstein; Wallace, Publicity of Reasons.3Recently, however, Jay Wallace has helpfully made the following terminological suggestion.Publicity can be taken to be the thesis that any consideration that is a reason for me must also bea reason for you. Agent-neutrality adds to publicity the further thesis that this shared reason sup-ports our performing the same kind of action: for example, alleviating my pain. Wallace himselffocuses on publicity, not agent-neutrality. Wallace, Publicity of Reasons, 481.4This same error seems to appear in Korsgaards discussion of a potential Wittgensteinian worryabout her account of instrumental reason. Korsgaard, Constitution of Agency, 59.5Korsgaard, Self-Constitution, 196.

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II. Korsgaards View

One way to explain Korsgaards view of human action is to present it asan account of the ways in which such action differs from the action ofnon-human animals. On her view, animals are in some sense bundles ofembodied instincts. When they represent the world in certain ways, that isenough to prompt them to respond in certain corresponding ways. For a frog,characteristic shapes moving in characteristic ways are represented as food,and they prompt getting-and-eating behavior. The patterns of response hereare the principles of the frogs nature. We human beings, on the other hand,are aware of our tendencies to act on the basis of certain perceptions, andour reflective awareness of these tendencies in particular cases opens up whatKorsgaard calls a reflective distance, which we need to cross before we act.Here is another way of describing the same view. Our nature is to see certain

thingsKorsgaard calls them incentivesas potential grounds for action.Our awareness of such factsfor example of the fact that there is anotherserving of fried rice in the pan, and that it would be nice to eat itis aware-ness not only of the food but also of what Korsgaard calls an inclination toeat it. This inclination is the object of our reflective awareness. By itself it can-not move us to act. Rather, it presents itself as something like a proposal. Andwhen reason says yes to this proposal, we act. These endorsements of incli-nations do not simply fire off at random, however: they are like judgmentsthat the action would be worth it. And it does not really make sense for some-thing to be worth it on one occasion, but not on another. Korsgaard doesnot regard this requirement of consistency as mandated by a need for onesjudgments to reflect some kind of external, objective, normative truth, how-ever. Rather, the explanation of the requirement is that if we are to conceiveourselves as agents, as having effects that are distinctively our own, we have toadopt principles that will allow this. These are principles by which we consti-tute ourselves as agents and give ourselves a unified identity. Contradictory,conflicting or self-defeating principles do not allow it.How does all of this yield a view of normative reasons? Korsgaards view

is that one does not count as acting unless one is an agent, and that to be anagent, one needs to be unified by ones practical principlesthe set of whichconstitute ones practical identity. That means that a constitutive norm ofaction is that one chooses principles that do in fact unify one as an agent.One can do this well, or poorly, and that is the difference between good andbad action.6 If one violates the constitutive norms too severely, one is not evenacting at all: rather, one is being overmastered by a fear or a compulsion. Butas long as one is coming close enough, one is acting. And in that case, theobject of the inclination can be cited as ones reason, since it is that object

6For present purposes we need not differentiate between morally good and bad action andprudentially good and bad action.

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that makes the principle of ones action seem eligible. When the principle is infact in line with the constitutive normwhen it does in fact unify one as anagentthen the reason is a good one.In order to make her view clearer, Korsgaard frequently appeals to Platos

analogy between a person and a polis. If we are to attribute an action to thepolis, rather than to a rogue soldier or a despotic ruler, the whole polis must beable to see itself as playing its appropriate role in the generation of the effect.In the case of the polis, this means that the workers propose something, therulers decide whether it would be worth it, and if they decide it is, then theauxiliaries carry it out. In the case of human action, it is desires that makethe proposalswhich appear to reflective consciousness in the form of incli-nations, which reason can consider. If reason decides that such an inclinationis worth acting on, spirit implements it, and weunified agentsact.

III. General Wittgensteinian Worries

In his discussion of rule-following, before the private-language argument getsgoing, Wittgenstein is very clear that, in trying to get clear on our capacityto follow rules, we cannot generalize from the special case in which we havedoubts about the implications of a rule and pause to work it out via someinterpretation. After all, in the very act of working it out, we will be followingstill other rules, and if we needed to work out the implications of those rulesbefore applying them, we would never get anywhere. As a result, he concludesthat there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but whichis exhibited in what we call obeying the rule and going against it in actualcases.7 Importantly, the we here are those of us who may be observing therule-following of other people. I come back to the importance of the third-personal perspective in the next section.One of the errors Wittgenstein is trying to help us avoid is an unwarranted

move from a contingent fact that happens, typically, to be instantiated whenone is theorizing (e.g. because one is introspecting or because one is con-sidering what one takes to be somehow the most characteristic cases) to afalse theoretical claim that that (contingent) fact is a necessary one.8 Let us

7Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 201. See also Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books,34. Though they do not mentionWittgenstein, this same point about regress and automatic pro-cesses is echoed very clearly in Arpaly and Schroeder, with the idea of rule-following replaced bythe idea of acting for reasons, and the idea of interpretation replaced by the idea of deliberation:acts of deliberation are performed for reasons (good or bad) in virtue of something other thantheir relation to deliberation. Arpaly and Schroeder, Deliberation, 223.8Compare the following claim of Korsgaards, made in support of her general view that self-consciousness requires us to unify ourselves by endorsing the principles on which we act:The phenomenology of deliberation, especially in hard cases, bears this out. Korsgaard, Self-Constitution, 126 (my emphasis). But hard cases of the sort she is considering are very rare in thelife of a human being, and though they do highlight certain distinctive human capacities, they

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call this sort of error the philosophical fallacy, because it is an occupa-tional hazard of philosophizing that, by engaging in that very activity, oneoften creates this kind of distorting context.9 I suspect that the philosophi-cal fallacy is behind the following claim of Korsgaards: you do not think ofyourself, or experience yourself, as being impelled into action, but rather asdeciding what to do.10 It is true that when one pauses to observe ones action,to see what happens when one acts, it is likely enough that one will observea decision, or at least some reflection on whether a certain impulse seemsworth following. But the vastly greater part of a human lifeincluding thedistinctively human actions it contains, such as answering a question, tryingto remember something, following the rules of the roadare not like this.11

Korsgaards insertion of a decision into every action can be seen as a philo-sophical response to what Wittgenstein calls an architectural requirement.The hypothesized decision is an ornamental coping that supports nothing.12

Its function is to allow for a picture of human actionalas, a false onethatis more satisfying and less vertigo-inducing than one on which our ability tothink and act relies, at bottom, on automatic and unconscious processes overwhich we have virtually no control.One part of Wittgensteins argument about rule-following obviously

appeals to worries about a regress. As he puts it, at the conclusion of his attackon a mental process conception of rule-following:

it can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the mere factthat in the course of our argument we give one interpretation afteranother; as if each one contented us at least for a moment, until wethought of yet another standing behind it.13

If Korsgaards argument has the same form, we should expect to find the samekind of problem. And we do. The endorsement of an impulsesaying yes toan inclination and thereby adopting it into the maxim on which one actsis itself an act and needs to be explained by reference to some antecedentinclination and its endorsement. But then we need some form of endorsementof the inclination to endorse.

should not be taken as simply clearer instances of typical human action. Typical human actionneed not involve any deliberation at alllet alone difficult deliberation.9I discuss this fallacy in another context in Gert, Brute Rationality, 4367.10Korsgaard, Constitution of Agency, 109.11Cf. At the very moment at which Harold consciously tries to call to mind competing promisesthat would prevent him from promising to meet his son in Calgary, he is not (if he is anythinglike us) consciously evaluating the reasonableness of this conscious search of his memory. Arpalyand Schroeder, Deliberation, 223.12Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations, 217. Cf.Wittgenstein,Blue and Brown Books, 1718,Zettel, 31315.13Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 201.

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One might try to interpret Korsgaard in such a way that endorsement isnot itself an action, and is not chosen. For example, one might take endorse-ment to be unreflective and automatic in the Wittgensteinian sense in whichmost of our behavior, including the following of rules, is unreflective and auto-matic. But this is very far from Korsgaards intent. If we simply respondedautomatically to the goodness of acting on a certain inclination by acting onit, we would not be acting in a distinctively human way, but would be likeanimals, whose behavior is to be explained in terms of certain constitutiveprinciples that give them their ends.14

Korsgaards appeals to Plato and to the analogy between a just state and ajust person paint a vivid picture (the kind of picture Wittgenstein constantlywarned us against) in which automatic responses have no place. On such apicture, to understand how it is that a human being can perform a certainkind of action (e.g. applying a mental picture of a cube in order to identifysomething as a cube), it becomes necessary to postulate that the very samekind of action is performed (e.g. applying a picture that represents the correctmethod of application of the picture of the cube). In Platos case, the priorinstance of action that helps explain the action of the state is the action of therulersthemselves creatures with the same sort of structure as the state. Thekind of homunculus-theoretic view of action that Plato is offering, and thatwas offered by sense-data theorists in the case of perception, is the result oftrying to avoid a regress by locating the second instance of the regress-starter(an action or a perception) in a smaller and more internal entity. But, as criticsof the sense-data theory have successfully shown, the regress still exists.15

Korsgaard does say some things that seem to be intended to avoid the prob-lematic regress. They all have the following tendency: to deny a distinctionbetween the endorsement of acting on a certain inclination, and acting onthat inclination. Here is a pair of representative claims.

[T]he judgment that the action is good is not a mental state that precedesthe action and causes it. Rather, [the agents] judgment, his practicalthinking, is embodied in the action itself. Thats what it means to saythat the action is motivated and not merely caused.

14Korsgaard, Constitution of Agency, 226.15Cf. Blackburn, Ruling Passions, 2506. Interestingly, Korsgaard herself criticizes dogmaticrationalist realists about values or reasons for having a homuncular view. But although it is truethat the faculty of reason on such views is, in a sense, an internal representative of an externalstandard of reason, these views are not homuncular in the sense of having a little internal agentwhose presence explains our capacity to act, or a little internal perceiver whose presence allowsus to perceive. Platos view is homuncular in this sense, as Korsgaard presents it. And so, I think,is Korsgaards. Korsgaard, Self-Constitution, 6.

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[B]eing motivated by a reason is not a reaction to the judgment that acertain way of acting is good. It is more like an announcement that acertain way of acting is good.16

I think it is true that if we simply describe stopping at a red light as anannouncement that doing so is good, or as an embodied endorsement of theimpulse to stop, then the regress is avoided. But the problem is then that wehave distorted the notion of an announcement or an endorsement to such adegree that the rest of Korsgaards theory no longer applies. On her theoryit is important that we choose the principles on which we actin the normalsense of choose. That is what differentiates us from the animals, who alsohave principlesbut whose principles are given to them by nature.17 Here is afairly clear statement of this difference:

What would have been the cause of our belief or action, had we stillbeen operating under the control of instinctive or learned responses,now becomes something experienced as a consideration in favor of acertain belief or action instead, one we can endorse or reject.18

This distinction between animal and human action simply would not makesense if we identified the endorsement of the consideration with the per-formance of the action that it favors. In human action there is somethingextra: the endorsement of ones principle of action. It is only because of thisendorsement that the principle then yields action in something like the way inwhich an animals action flows from the instincts and learned responses thatconstitute its nature. One might try to defend Korsgaard by claiming that sheis only trying to characterize a special subset of human actions: those that areself-conscious or deliberated. The rest are in all essentials the same as animalaction. But this strategy for avoiding regress would require that even deliber-ated action bottom out in animal action. And this seems far from the spiritof Korsgaards view. Moreover, it is hard to see how we could be responsiblefor most of our actions, if they typically resemble the instinctive or learnedresponses of animals.19

Korsgaard might dispute my presentation of this last point. In the samepaper from which the above passage is taken, she also writes the following:

16Korsgaard, Constitution of Agency, 2279. See also Korsgaard, Self-Constitution, 127.17Korsgaard, Self-Constitution, 108.18Korsgaard, Activity of Reason, 32.19This seems true even on Korsgaards attractive view of responsibility, which takes responsibilityfor omissions as the general model for moral responsibility for bad action. For, unless our actionsinclude some non-trivial reflective distance, it is hard to see how it would be legitimate to hold usresponsible for failure to pick up the reins and take control of [our] own movements. Korsgaard,Self-Constitution, 175.

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the picture I have in mind is not that there is a two-step process: stepone, you first choose some way of identifying yourself, and step two, youproceed to act in accordance with its principles, like someone followinga list of rules.20

But what Korsgaard is really denying here is that action is a three-step pro-cess: (1) choosing a way of identifying yourself; (2) looking through the listof associated rules; and (3) acting on the inclination that figures in the rele-vant rule. The two steps she wants to collapse are (1) and (2). That is, as sheputs it, adopting maxims or practical principlesis at the same time engag-ing in the work of identity construction.21 I am happy to collapse these twosteps. But it remains true that the act of endorsement is in an important senseprior to the action that flows from the endorsed principle. And it is prior toeach action; one cannot choose once and for all, since the removal of anactual endorsement from ones subsequent actions would close up the reflec-tive distance that differentiates human action from the learned behavior ofanimals.

IV. Wittgenstein and the First-Personal Point of View

Despite my initial criticisms of Korsgaards appeal to Wittgenstein, and mycurrent worries about the role that reflective endorsement could possibly playin an account of reasons, I have come to agree with Korsgaard that there is arelation between the private language argument and a correct view of practicalreasons. I present my view of that relation in the next section. In this section,however, I argue that an appreciation of one of the main points of the privatelanguage argument undermines an important starting-point of Korsgaardstheorizing: reflection from the first-person point of view.One of the things the private language argument highlights is that language

is a practice. If our use of words were not rule-governed, it would not countas a practice, and the words themselves would not count as meaningful. Theuse of a word being rule-governed in the relevant sense amounts to there beinga distinction between acceptable and unacceptable uses of that word. This inturn requires that there be publically observable criteria that enable people toteach the meaning of that word, and to test whether someone has masteredthat meaning. In the case of a private language, we lack the possibility of anindependent way to test for mastery of its words. This means we lack a realdistinction between acceptable and unacceptable use and have no reason toregard the words of such a language as words at all. It is worth emphasizinghere that none of these points makes trouble for the language of sensation or

20Korsgaard, Activity of Reason, 36.21Ibid., 367.

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other psychological terms with which we describe our experiences. There areindependent ways of testing for mastery of such locutions as I feel a tickle onmy arm, though I know nothing is touching it or the water seems warm tome, though I know that to everyone else it seems cold. Although there maybe no way to test for appropriate use in a particular case, we certainly do haveways of knowing that someone has mastered the relevant general techniquefor making such claims. Nor does the view of language as a practice rule outthe possibility of a language being developed by a solitary person on a desertisland. It only means that it must be possible to explain, in public terms, whatit means to say that this person has mastered this or that word in his solitarylanguage. One way of putting this is to say that it must be in principle possiblefor an anthropologist to come to learn this language.All of the above points may seem relatively trivial to many contemporary

philosophers, when they are made explicit. But there is still a persistent ten-dency to forget them and to think of language as a sort of vehicle for solitarythought and reflection. This is the real point of contact between the privatelanguage argument and criticisms of overly individualistic accounts of practi-cal reasons. Private language can seem more plausible if one theorizes aboutlanguage by imagining a solitary being, thinking to himself about the worldin which he finds himself, wondering, perhaps, whether there is an objectiveworld out there causing the patterns in his stream of private experience:a stream he describes to himself with words in a private language. And ifone theorizes about practical reasons by imagining a similarly solitary being,thinking to himself about what he ought to do, it can seem that the pri-mary use of the concept of a practical reason is to figure in first-personaldeliberation. And this does seem to me to be the way Korsgaard often is the-orizing. Consider her claims that the normative force of reasons, obligations,and values, is force that is felt by a deliberative agent and is imperceptiblefrom outside of the deliberative perspective and that obligations exist in thefirst-person perspective.22 Korsgaard does not entirely disregard the third-personal perspective, but it is clear that for her that perspective is theoreticallyless important. As she puts it:

It is certainly true that from a third-personal point of view, when we callpeople vicious or irrational, we mean that they fail to conform to cer-tain standards. But that failure is the outward manifestation of an innercondition, and these theories do not tell us what that inner conditionis.23

22Korsgaard, Sources of Normativity, 124, n. 39, and 257. See also Korsgaard, Self-Constitution,104, 126. It is true that Korsgaard emphasizes the phenomenon of our reasoning together. Butthis is still first-personal; it is just first-person plural.23Korsgaard, Self-Constitution, 67. Nor is she alone. Jay Wallace, despite his doubts aboutKorsgaards appeal to Wittgenstein, endorses what he calls the priority of deliberative judg-ment. This thesis holds that the claims we endorse in deliberation . . . should be taken as

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This last remark should call to mind Wittgensteins constant battle againstthose who take introspection to be the best source of insight into the natureof other normative notions, like those of meaning and understanding, and hisadmonition that An inner process stands in need of outward criteria.24

First-personal theorizing about practical reason is even more prevalentthan first-personal theorizing about language, perhaps because it is obviousthat at least one important function of language is to communicate informa-tion between people. But in both cases, the first-person perspective restrictsour view to cases in which one actually is acting on a reason, or actually isusing a word. And this makes it much easier to conceive of the normativityof the reason or the meaning as a kind of psychological forcethough, obvi-ously, a queer one, since it must be present even in cases in which it is totallyineffective because the agent is irrational, or has misunderstood the mean-ing of the word.25 This may help explain Korsgaards puzzling claim that thenormativity of obligation is, among other things, a psychological force andher talk about its manifestation as a psychological force.26 The highlightedphrases indicate that normativity is more than, or that it somehow standsbehind, certain psychological forces. This hesitation to embrace a simpleidentity between normativity and something psychological is understandable,since the normativity of a reason or an obligation does not disappear, evenwhen it is completely unrecognized and exerts no psychological force at all.But it is difficult to see how something that is not itself psychological canman-ifest as a psychological force. And it is equally difficult to understand how thefact that normativity ismore than just a psychological force can help deal withthe problems that arise if one says that it is at least a psychological force.

authoritative characterizations of the nature of our reasons for action. Wallace, Publicity ofReasons, 484. Of course I do not think we should ignore these first-personal judgments. But Ido think that if a priority thesis of relevance to proper methodology is in the offingand that iswhat Wallaces thesis isthen third-personal judgments are going to be more illuminating of thenature of reasons.24Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 580. See also Wittgenstein, Zettel, 469. Regardingthe temptation to think of understanding as an introspectable mental process, and the idea that theprocess of remembering is visible from the first-person perspective, seeWittgenstein, PhilosophicalInvestigations, 1534 and 305, respectively.25Cf.: Then what sort of mistake did I make; was it what we should like to express by saying: Ishould have thought the picture forced a particular use on me? How could I think that? Whatdid I think? Is there such a thing as a picture, or something like a picture, that forces a partic-ular application on us; so that my mistake lay in confusing one picture with another?For wemight also be inclined to express ourselves like this: we are at most under a psychological, nota logical, compulsion. And now it looks quite as if we knew of two kinds of case. Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations, 140; see also 1956.26Korsgaard, Self-Constitution, 34 (my emphasis). The conflation of normativity with theparticular psychological force of motivation has been noted before, most effectively in Parfit,Normativity. See, for example, pp. 33643.

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Here is a point that might help break the spell of the first-personal whentheorizing about practical reason. The words reason, rational, ought,and their everyday cognates, are words in public languages. But all publiclanguages are social practices, performing largely social functions, and thewords they contain are tools or pieces that we use when participating in thatpractice. This very general point supports the idea that the first place to lookfor an explanation of the emergence of a particular vocabulary in a publiclanguage is in the social tasks that vocabulary allows us to perform. In order tosee this point more concretely, consider the actual law: not the self-legislationthat figures in Kantian moral theorizing, but the sort of law that is createdby politicians and written in law books. The function of such law is obviouslysocial. The need for this sort of lawwould not arise for a solitary human being.This does not prevent the law from being normative, and from giving us legalobligations.Whether or not I happen to havemade the law, and whether or notI happen to endorse it, I still am bound by it in an important sense. PerhapsI am not morally bound by it. Perhaps, in many cases it would not be irra-tional to disobey it. And perhaps, in some odd instances, it might actually beirrational to obey it. But those are separate issues. Rather, the important pointis that in virtue of my membership in a community, certain laws apply to me,and if I violate them I have acted illegally. There is no temptation to locate thesource of legal obligation from within a first-personal perspective. And partof the reason for this lack of temptation is the manifestly social purposes thatthe law serves.Now, in the case of morality, the general Wittgensteinian emphasis on the

social nature of language and on the concepts that our linguistic practicesallow us to master suggests a fairly strong analogy with the legal. Why, that is,do we have moral concepts: concepts of moral obligation, moral excuse, andso on? Very plausibly, we have these concepts for many of the same reasonsas those that explain the emergence of the law. Indeed, morality is easily andplausibly viewed as an informal legal system. True, it is not written down inauthoritative form. But the difference here need not be much greater thanthe difference between an oral tradition and a written canon. It is true thatwe sometimes use moral concepts from a first-personal perspective: conclud-ing that a certain action would be morally wrong may well prevent us fromperforming it. But of course the very same thing can be said about the law.Whether it functions in this way depends on how much respect the relevantfirst-person happens to have for morality, or for the law. Some may object thatthis story cannot account for the truth of the idea that we always have suffi-cient reason to behave as morality requires. But in fact it will turn out thatthis charge is false. Inasmuch as morality is a public system that we encour-age people to follow, the account of rationality and reasons I offer below willentail that moral requirements are always backed by reasons that are sufficientto render them rationally permissible.

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It is relatively easy to maintain the Wittgensteinian third-personalperspective on the law and on morality.27 But when it comes to the widerdomain of practical rationality and general practical reasons, it very easy tolose that perspective. One reason for this is that morality is something likean enforceable system, and this makes its social nature manifest. There is,very plausibly, a conceptual connection between immoral behavior and liabil-ity to punishment.28 But practical rationality is not like this. When someonebehaves irrationally, this does not call for punishment. Moreover, a personcould behave irrationally while alone on a desert island, butat least onmany plausible moral viewssuch a person could not behave immorally. Still,the Wittgensteinian perspective encourages us to look for the social purposesserved by all kinds of talk: talk about colors, desires, numbers, streets, lengths,individual people, and so on. OnWittgensteins view, the words we use to talkabout these things are best viewed a tools for getting practical tasks done in acommunity of language speakers. Color talk exists not because we needforour own private purposesto categorize objects as red, green, blue andyellow.29 Rather, the emergence of these words allows us to ask for certainthings, respond to certain requests, issue certain warnings, and so on.What practical tasks might be facilitated by the introduction of terms that

mean irrational and reason into a community of language speakers whodid not initially have them? I address this question in the next section. Fornow I just want to stress that, in offering our descriptions of such a com-munity before the introduction of these terms into their vocabulary, nothingprevents us from using the same vocabulary. Just as we can use terms such assick or male or female to describe sheep and cowsbeings that do nothave any vocabularywe can describe the people in our thought experimentsas rational or irrational even prior to our imagining that they themselves arecapable of similar descriptions.30 I hope it is clear that the introduction of thevocabulary of rationality and reasons will not make the members of this com-munity act significantly more or less rationally. If someone is suffering from amental illness, or is in a temporarily overwhelming rage, the mere availabilityof the concepts of rationality and reasons is exceedingly unlikely to act as acure or a balm.31 People are typically motivated by considerations that can be

27Although Wittgenstein himself spectacularly failed to do this. I do not know what to sayabout this except that this lecture was delivered originally in 1929, well before his mature phase.Wittgentstein, Lecture on Ethics.28Mill, Utilitarianism; Gert,Morality.29Indeed, many languages do not have these particular categories.30At least this is true if rational and irrational action do not require the deployment of conceptsof rational and irrational action. But if one appreciates the primarily third-personal nature ofthese concepts, it becomes very implausible that this could be required.31Of course in some limited cases it might. The availability of a new vocabulary allows for newforms of motivation: no one can be motivated by the thought this would be irrational withoutpossessing that concept. But let us leave these cases to the side.

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conceptualized without the aid of any normative vocabulary: by opportuni-ties to get food, affection, sleep, knowledge or relief of discomfort. This is notto deny that human societies involve complex and contingent social norms,and that internalization of these norms also explains a lot of action. But anorm has been internalized precisely when the objects of that norm begin toprovide direct motivation, just as thoughts about food or sleep provide directmotivation without the need for socialization. An intermediate conclusionat this point is the following: the introduction of the vocabulary of reasonsand rationality is not plausibly seen as essential to the production of rationalaction.I hope that the preceding conclusion seems plausible. Its plausibility should

help to diminish the attraction of a widespread conception of the natureof reasons and rationality, according to which reasons motivate those whohave them partly in virtue of being perceived as normative. Korsgaard herselfendorses this view, which she puts in the following way: people are inspired todo things by the normativity of the reasons they have for doing them, by theirawareness that some consideration makes a claim on them.32 This thesis caneasily pass as a truism, and I think Korsgaard takes it to be fairly straightfor-ward. But on reflection it should seem extremely difficult to understand.Whatis this property of normativity that a reason has, perception of which is sup-posed to motivate us? The clearest proposal I have seenand I am neitherendorsing nor disputing itis that a concept is normative if its instantia-tion entails the existence of reasons.33 Obviously, this is not much help inexplaining the normativity of reasons themselves, which is the issue here.Korsgaard sometimes describes the normativity of reasons in a metaphori-cal way, as that the reason calls out to [the agent] that a certain action isto be done.34 This description should bring to mind Wittgensteins descrip-tion of the tempting picture of rule-following, on which a rule forces itselfon the rule-follower in some mysterious way. Indeed, the mysterious forcethat Wittgenstein is describing is aptly described as the normativity of therule. And Wittgenstein is tryingas I amto dislodge the temptation toget clear on this normativity by viewing it from the first-personal perspec-tive. Korsgaard takes the picture of a reason calling out to an agent tojustify the following methodological conclusion: we should identify as rea-sons the kinds of items that first-person deliberators take to be reasons, thekind of items that play a role in deliberation.35 To the degree that one agrees

32Korsgaard, Constitution of Agency, 209 (my emphasis). See also pp. 21415.33Skorupski, Irrealist Cognitivism. Korsgaard sometimes seems to endorse this conception ofnormativity. See Korsgaard, Constitution of Agency, 106.34Korsgaard, Constitution of Agency, 210.35Ibid. Korsgaard even seems to attribute normativity in this sense to the representations thatanimals use in navigating the world, explaining instinctive action as involving a sense that a

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with the Wittgensteinian view of language as a social practice, one should besuspicious of Korsgaards methodology.I have been comparing Korsgaards theorizing about normative reasons

with the interlocutors theorizing about the way that we manage to followrules. One advantage of making this comparison is that those who have feltthe strong intuitive pull of the interlocutors position, but who also have man-aged to break free of it, may not yet be immune to the temptations at workin making Korsgaards position as intuitively plausible and attractive as it is.And I should emphasize that it is attractive. Indeed, it is seductive. Once oneis willing to visualize the soul as Korsgaard does (aided by lucid interpreta-tions of Plato and Kant), all sorts of explanations of all sorts of phenomenaseem to followparticularly with regard to the phenomenology of reflectiveaction. So it is important to see that the same is true of the picture of rulesoffered by Wittgensteins interlocutor: the picture of rules as rails, of mean-ings as entities that one can grasp, of understanding and meaning as mentalprocesses, of the meanings of words as parts of the meanings of sentences, andso on. The stories these pictures suggest seem much more plausible, on theirsurface, than the story Wittgenstein himself offers. These pictures are so per-suasive because the metaphors they embody are so simple, clear and resonantthat they have found a useful place in the language. Moreover, the resonanceof these metaphors is often due to their getting something important right, soit is no surprise that Korsgaards books are virtually overflowing with pene-trating insights, clearly and persuasively presented. Despite this, I think theoverall picture she presents is seriously mistaken.Instead of seeing useful metaphors in the language, Korsgaard sees some-

thingmore literal. She endorses Socrates view that terms such as self-controland self-command are tracks or clues that the virtue of temperance has leftbehind in language to show us that the soul has both a ruled and a rulingpart.36 I would not want to deny that the terms that appear in human lan-guages are often clueseven that they are clues about human nature. Forexample, the existence, in most languages, of words for the various coreemotions tells us that human beings have typical patterns of response to cer-tain states of affairs. But the existence of the phrase I grasped his meaning ina flash is not a clue of this sort, and nothing but confusion can result from thepicture of our minds reaching out with something like a mental hand to graspthe abstract entity of someone elses meaning. Korsgaard plausibly claimsthat Socrates interpretation of the language of self-command is echoed inKants remarks about the idea that we impose duties on ourselves. In Kantscase, the relevant phrase is I owe it to myself.37 Given the problems that arise

certain response to an incentive is appropriate or called-for. Korsgaard, Self-Constitution, 111.Cf. Shemmer, Desires As Reasons, 3356.36Korsgaard, Self-Constitution, 145.37Ibid., 146.

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when one takes such metaphors too literallyone needs to be both passive,in being bound, and active, in bindingit is no surprise that this talk leadsKant to an antinomy, and that the resolution of this antinomy requires anappeal to the mystery of the noumenal self. Nor is it a surprise that bothPlato and Kant end up appealing to metaphor and allegory in explaining thepossibility of evil choicechoice that fails to meet the constitutive standardsfor choiceand offer accounts of its origin that even Korsgaard regards aselaborate and rather bewildering.38

V. A Wittgensteinian Suggestion

Here is an alternative proposal for understanding the notions of reasons andrationality: a proposal that gives priority to the third-personal perspective.At its core, the proposal is that the notion of the irrational is useful to usbecause it allows us to pick out and talk about the behavior of other people forwhich we cannot see adequate reasons.39 The ability to pick out such a classof action is important for a variety of reasons.40 One reason is that the personmay actually be acting irrationally. In that case it is important to draw atten-tion to this fact, and perhaps to try to figure out the source of the irrationality.On the other hand, a third persons behavior may fail to make sense to us onlybecause we do not have all of the relevant information; we cannot see all ofthe reasons for which the person might be acting. By expressing our initialsuspicion that the person might be acting irrationally, we are also inviting acorrection of that suspiciona correction that would work by citing a cer-tain class of considerationsreasons for actionof which we were ignorant.At the end of a discussion of the rationality of a third persons action, wemight then have a satisfying understanding of the considerations that aremoving her to act. Surely the ability to express the relevant form of puzzle-ment, and the ability to dispel that puzzlementor to be confirmed in itareas useful as the ability to describe the colors and shapes of plants. It is there-fore unsurprising that such a vocabulary should have evolved and persistedin human languages. But the usefulness here has nothing to do with first-person deliberation, or with our own ability to act. On the present hypothesisirrational has a function similar to ill. And the notion of a practical reason

38Ibid., 164.39Here and elsewhere, we should be interpreted as we human beings as a group, not each ofus, individually.40In fact, this proposal is similar in spirit to one that Korsgaard herself makes about the notionof the defective: we need the notion of the defective for all sorts of purposes. Korsgaard, Self-Constitution, 34. Moreover, Korsgaard rightly links the notion of the defective with the notionof normativity. Taken together, these points seem to support the idea that we have the notionof normativityof something being a reason for or against, or an actions being rational orirrationalfor the same kinds of pragmatic social purpose for which we need the notion of thedefective. But of course that is not the way Korsgaard proceeds to argue.

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is an important tool in our efforts to come to accurate beliefs about the ratio-nal status of the actions of other people. And just as the notion of illnesshas primarily a third-personal role, so too do the notions of irrationality,rationality and reasons.I do not mean to suggest that all, or even the most important, roles for the

notions of reasons and rationality make sense only in contexts in which weare puzzled by the behavior of a third party. I might be wondering about yourbehavior, and you might offer me the sorts of reasons that allow me to makesense of your behavior. But that is consistent with the social nature of lan-guage. It is simply an acknowledgement that the object of interest, in manyconversations, is often one of the people in that very conversation. I do notwant to suggest that second-personal uses of the notions of reasons and ratio-nality are unimportant. But I do want to make this claim about first-personalusesat least when the importance is with respect to theoretical matters.In fact, attention to first-personal uses is worse than unimportant; it is mis-leading. It obscures the social function of the relevant concepts by removingthose functions from direct view. It is true that once one has mastered thenotions of practical rationality and practical reasons, one can turn an eye onones own behavior. And inasmuch as those who care about us do not wantus to act irrationally, they will teach us to avoid irrational behavior, and toresist the short-term emotional impulses that sometimes cause it. That is, theywill help us cultivate what one might call a de dicto aversion to irrationalaction.41 As a result, my own assessment that the course of action I am aboutto embark on is irrational might, in some cases, trigger this aversion. Thatmay be of some practical importance. But it does not help us understand thenotions of reasons or rationality.A focus on the third-personal perspective makes it clear that I can regard

something as a reason quite independently of its connection either to myown motives, or to the motives of the agent whose behavior I am assessing.Rather, the role of reasons in assessing the behavior of third parties suggeststhat certain substantive considerationpractical reasonswill place an actin need of justification (by other reasons). For example, if I see someone act-ing in a way that will obviously cause her a great deal of pain, or that risks herlife in an avoidable way, or that will cause her to lose certain abilities, and ifI cannot see any similar substantive considerations on the other side, I willclassify her behavior as irrational. These harms therefore count as practicalreasons against the action. And it will not do anything to help me understandher behavior to be toldeven in a convincing waythat this person simplytends to seek pain, death and other such evils, or that she desires them for theirown sake, or that she endorses such desires wholeheartedly. If you manage to

41I take this use of de dicto fromMichael Smith, who argues against the idea that the character-istic concern of a morally good person is a de dicto concern with moral rightness and wrongness.Smith, The Moral Problem, 802.

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convince me of these things, I will only be more firm in my opinion that theagents behavior is irrational. The desire-independence of the relevant con-siderations here is the same as the desire-independence of what counts as anillness. The general Wittgensteinian perspective therefore yields a conceptionof practical reasons that includes at least a large class of objective reasons.Moreover, sinceas a matter of contingent human natureit makes sense tous that someone would make a sacrifice to spare some other person one of thesubstantive harms that appear in descriptions of these objective reasons, wecan also say that the Wittgensteinian perspective yields a large class of public(agent-neutral) reasons as well.Korsgaard herself says a number of things that are surprisingly congenial

to the perspective I am offering here: a perspective from which we explainthe emergence of certain concepts by reference to the practical usefulness oftalk that makes use of those concepts. For example, here is a remark of hersthat helps explain certain features of our practices of causal attribution: Whythen do we say that the knife, rather than the state of the world a nanosecondago, is the cause of the cutting? That is easybecause we can use the knifefor cutting.42 I think Korsgaard would agree that this same remark also helpsto explain why we have such concepts as knife in the first place. That is,it is not as if we can simply take it for granted that we have the conceptsknife and state and world and nanosecond and cause, and only have todecide which is the cause of the cuttingthe knife or the state of the world ananosecond ago. Rather, it is our own need to use things to get things donethat helps explain why we have these concepts, and why they fit together asthey do.43

As Korsgaard almost claims, a practical perspective on language andconcept development can be used to explain the concept of a person andof an action as well. That is, we have the concept of a person not becausewithout such a concept we would not be people, but because we have tointeract with people. And we have the concept of an action not becausewithout such a concept we could not act, but because the people around usbehave in various ways, and some of them are usefully categorized togetheras actionsbecause of the practical differences between those behaviors andother ones. Primarily, we can systematically influence actions in certain ways:by communicating information, making requests, threatening, and so on.None of this has to do with how we must think of our own action, but ofcourse it has its effect on how we do this, since we impose the same catego-rization on our own behavior as we do on the behavior of others. Korsgaarddoes not quite say this. Rather than focusing on the third-personal use of thenotion of a person or an action, she makes her knife point about the con-cepts of I and you: Why do I say that I was the cause of the cutting, or

42Korsgaard, Self-Constitution, 89; see also 114.43For her presentation of this sort of view in Kant, see Ibid., 389.

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that you were? For the same reason: so that we can act and interact.44 This isright, but it is also dangerously liable to misinterpretation. That is, it is rightthat the concept of I is important in social interactions. But Korsgaards wayof putting the claim suggests that I need the concept of I simply in order toenable me to act. As a result, she claims that The ideal of agency is the idealof inserting yourself into the causal order, in such a way as to make a genuinedifference in the world.45

What I think she should have said instead is very similar, but explicitlythird-personal: it is that the idea of agency is the idea of an agent beinginserted into the causal order, in such a way as to make a genuine differ-ence in the world. It seems to me that this is in fact what she does say aboutanimals. It is obvious that no self-conception is operative in the scurrying of aroach. Still, a roach has a form, and instincts, and therefore some principles ofbehavior that make some of its movements into actions, and others not. Thoseprinciples help us understand and control its behavior in certain characteristicways, and that is why we regard the roach as a (very primitive) agent.

VI. Conclusions

Lest my focus on Korsgaards Kantian view be taken to suggest that I favora Humean view, let me emphasize that Humeans typically suffer from thesame misplaced emphasis on the first-personal perspective, and on the roleof reasons in deliberation. It is true that Humeans recognize a third-personalrole for reasons, in providing explanations. Indeed, this is part of what theytake to support their view: the idea that a link to the agents desires isrequired for reasons to play this explanatory role.46 But the problem is thatthis explanatory function is performed even more effectively by a distinct con-cept: the concept of a desire or motive. Normative reasons only connect withactual behavior under certain conditions, which may well not obtain. Forexample, the agent may simply be ignorant of the consideration that wouldprovide motivation if she were aware of it and were to engage in sound delib-eration. Moreover, by emphasizing the explanatory role, the Humean robsthe concept of a normative reason of much of its utility in assessing behav-ior as crazy, stupid, wrong-headed, and so on. For example, if someonesinsanely self-destructive behavior happened to line up with her insanely self-destructive subjective motivational set, a Humean such as Bernard Williamswould be unable to explain the craziness of the resulting actions in terms ofreasons against performing it.47 But surely we do use the notion of a norma-tive reason in offering assessments in such cases, and not merely in cases in

44Ibid., 89.45Ibid.46Williams, Internal and External Reasons, 82.47Ibid., 86.

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which the agent frustrates her own ends. That is, we often assess action ascrazy or stupid in virtue of the ends at which it is directed, or the ends towhich it is insufficiently sensitive. It is true, as some Humeans have empha-sized, that these latter criticisms will not be effectively directed against theirrational person herself if they do not hook up in some way with her presentmotives.48 But that does nothing to undermine their utility from the third-personal standpoint, in which you and I are discussing the nature of someoneelses irrationality. Nor does it mean that their use from the second-personalperspective is mere bluff. When we tell someone she has a reason to behavein a certain way, we need not even be pretending that this will get her to act inthe relevant way. We may be trying to convince her that she has an affectivedisorder and should get some treatment. Or we may simply be trying to bringcertain rationally permissible options to her attention.On the Wittgensteinian view, practical reasons are not things we create as

individuals, as Korsgaard or the Humean would have it. In some sense wemight say that they are still our creations, but the our here is wider, andthe creation is not of the same sort. Rather, human nature being what itis, we have developed the notions of reasons and rationality that we have.But the same is true of the notions of red and green as well. And given theseconcepts, it is not up to any individual or to the human race as a whole todecide whether blood is red or grass is green. Neither is it therefore true thatanything we decide could make it cease to be true that the prospect of painprovides a reason to avoid a certain action.One worry Korsgaard expresses about her own viewand to which she

thinks she has an answeris that if all reasons are public, it looks like thereis no room for personal projects. Any reason I have to pursue some goal willequally be a reason for you to help me to pursue it. And if the goal is to bringabout some state of affairs, then you will have a reason to bring it about aswell.49 Given this, there seems to be no room for an agent to dedicate himselfto a set of particular goals, ignoring most of the public reasons provided bythe goals of other people. This problem might seem to require Korsgaardto change her view to allow at least some privateagent-relativereasons,as she notes that Thomas Nagel did in response to the same problem.50 Thatwould allow us to say that you have agent-relative reasons to engage in certainprojects without entailing that other people, even in their idle moments, haveany reason to provide you with active support. But Korsgaard is right to saythat our mere desires, intentions or commitments do not seem to be whatprovides us with reasons for our particular projects. Rather, we think of our

48Ibid., 87.49Korsgaard, Self-Constitution, 207.50Nagel, View from Nowhere, 16474.

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projects as being supported by the agent-neutral values of the objects of ouraffective attitudes. Here is how Korsgaard puts the point:

Although I may not suppose that the happiness of my loved ones isobjectively more important than that of anyone else, I certainly do sup-pose that their happiness is something for which there is public reason.So the structure of reasons arising from love is similar to the structure Ihave proposed for the case of reasons of personal ambition. I think thatsomeone should make my darling happy, and I want very much to bethat someone.51

But the question remains for Korsgaard how this very much wanting ratio-nally allows one to respond to the public reasons one prefers to respond to, tothe exclusion of otherand more numerouspublic reasons of which one isaware. How can one spend ones afternoon in a workshop placing the frets ona guitar when one knows that one could be responding to public reasons thathave to do with such things as preventable hunger, sickness and death? Surely,if the hunger, sickness and death were ones own, one could not rationally passthe afternoon in the workshop in this way. And if all reasons are public, it ishard to see how the location of the reason could make any such difference.The third-personal perspective on reasons and rationality has no analogous

problem. On such a view it is only certain considerations that place an actionin need of justification by reasons in the first place: risk of pain, death, injury,and so on, to the agent. But this does not mean that all reasons are agent-relative. For, in the case of actions that do risk these things, we can see themas making senseas being rationally justifiedwhen the risk is run for thesake of something that is worth it. And while such justifying considerationsof course include benefits such as pleasure and knowledge for the agent, theyalso include the prevention of harms for other people, or even to non-humananimals. The fact that these agent-neutral considerations are worth itthatthey provide reasons that can justify the choice of an action that we know willinvolve our own sufferingdoes not entail that they require us to make thosesacrifices. Nor does it entail that they require us to abandon the pursuit of ourpersonal projects.

Acknowledgements

I thank Victoria Costa and Christopher Freiman for helpful written com-ments on an earlier version of this paper. Thanks also to Hector Arrese Igor,Diego Lawler, Glenda Satne and Bernardo Ainbinder for the invitation to

51Korsgaard, Self-Constitution, 211.

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speak at SADAF in Buenos Aires, and to them and the other participants forhelpful discussion.

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