On Promoting the Dead Certain: a Reply to Behrends, Dipaolo and Sharadin

CCORDING TO HUMEAN PROMOTIONALISM about practical reasons, the fact that I have a reason to φ holds in virtue of the fact that φ-ing promotes one or more of my desires.1 The topic of this discussion note is the question of how best to understand the promotion relation. Finlay (2006) and Schroeder (2007) have developed two similar probabilistic accounts of promotion. According to their views, promoting a desire is increasing its probability of being realized (relative to some baseline). Behrends and DiPaolo (2011) have formulated an argument against understanding promotion in purely probabilistic terms. The same argument was later taken up (and further elaborated) by Coates (2014) and Sharadin (2015), who both develop their own understandings of promotion based on the criticism the argument delivers. Recently, in more exchange about the issue,2 interesting alternative accounts of promotion have been proposed and more problems regarding a purely probabilistic understanding have been brought to the fore. However, here, I would like to turn back the clock a little and call attention to a problem I see with the original argument against probabilistic accounts. More precisely, I am going to argue that the criticism as presented in Behrends and DiPaolo (2011) and in Sharadin (2015) fails. My argument is based on what I am going to call the Humean Core Idea.