Instrumental Desires , Instrumental Rationality

The requirements of instrumental rationality are often thought to be normative conditions on choice or intention, but this is a mistake. Instrumental rationality is best understood as a requirement of coherence on an agent's non-instrumental desires and means-end beliefs. Since only a subset of an agent's means-end beliefs concern possible actions, the connection with intention is thus more oblique. This requirement of coherence can be satisfied either locally or more globally, it may be only one among a number of such requirements on an agent's total set of desires and beliefs, and it has no special connection with reasoning. An appreciation of these facts leads to a better understanding of both the nature and the significance of instrumental rationality. A number of theorists have recently attempted to account for the normativity of instrumental rationality.' Though there are significant differences, their explanations all share a common feature: each assumes that the requirements of instrumental rationality are normative conditions, of some sort, on choice or intention. If instrumental rationality were limited to situations in which we make choices or form intentions then these explanations would have some chance of being correct. But instrumental rationality is not limited in this way. My aim in the present paper is thus to lay out an alternative explanation, one that accords instrumental rationality its proper scope. I proceed by spelling out the alternative in the form of a series of assertions which I expand upon and justify. I do not claim any originality, as the ideas on offer will be familiar from standard accounts of decision theory. My reason for putting 1. Christine Korsgaard, 'The Normativity of Instrumental Reason' in Garrett Cullity and Berys Gaut (eds.), Ethics and Practical Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); John Broome, 'Normative requirements', Ratio 12 (1999), 398-419; R. Jay Wallace, 'Normativity, Commitment, and Instrumental Reason' in Philosophers' Imprint, 1 (2001), 1-26. This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.52.61 on Sun, 11 Nov 2012 17:25:05 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions