Mark Schroeder, "Reasons First" (Oxford UP, 2021)

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Hello and thanks for joining us for this episode of new books in philosophy, which is part of the new books network. I'm Robert Tolis. I'm professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University. I co-host the program with Carrie Figter, Malcolm Keating, and Sarah Tyson. My guest today is Mark Schroeder. Mark is professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California. Mark specializes in metaethics and practical rationality. But in addition, he also focuses on the relations between different kinds of normative inquiry. His new book, which has just been published with Oxford University Press, is in this vein. It's titled "Reasons First." Now, a leading approach in ethics takes the reason as in some sense primary or basic. This approach claims that a range of moral concepts are ultimately to be cashed out in terms of reasons or what we have best reason to do. For example, this approach says that what we ought to do is to be explained in terms of what our best reasons support us doing. It may also say what is valuable is to be cashed out in terms of what our best reasons tell us to value and so on. Now, although this approach is controversial among metaethicists, it nonetheless is among the leading proposals in contemporary metaethics. However, a reasons first approach is largely absent in the neighboring normative discipline of epistemology. This is despite the fact that epistemology has had plenty of controversy recently about where it should start, about what is epistemically basic. Now, in the book "Reasons First," Mark imports a compelling version of the reasons first view from metaethics into epistemology, arguing that epistemology has much to gain from adopting a reasons first perspective. Now, as usual, there's a lot to talk about. But why don't we begin as we normally do with our guest? Hi, Mark. Hi, Bob. How are you doing today? Oh, I'm doing great. How are you? I'm pretty good. Yeah, thanks for having me on. No problem. It's a real pleasure to talk to you. You know, we usually start these interviews, but I asked the author to say something about himself. So why don't we continue the tradition? Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Sure. So I teach at the University of Southern California. I've, this is my 16th year here. I taught for a couple of years at the University of Maryland and in my PhD before that at Princeton. But I think the most helpful place to start is with my undergraduate career. I was an undergraduate student in the late 90s from 1996 to 2000 at Carlton College in Minnesota. And my very first exposure to philosophy was exposure to a way of thinking about metaethics. Where the problems of metaethics were thought of as very general. In a way, this is, was an important thing that was happening in the 1990s. Is that throughout the 20th century, philosophers were concerned with understanding not just what's right and wrong, what's good and bad and why. But with what it means to call things right and wrong, with what it means to think that things are right and wrong, with how we find out about them and what the nature of more reality is. And in the 90s, many philosophers were starting to think, hey, these are actually very general problems. The things that are so distinctive and interesting and difficult in metaethics, the distinctive problems recur in many other normative domains. So my very first philosophy course was we read a bunch of historical texts, but we thought of them in a very general way. My junior year again with the same professor, professor Jennifer Manion. We read Christine Korskars, the sources of normativity, and we thought about normativity in a very general way. And then in my junior year, the epistemologist Keith Lair came to visit Carlton and spent 10 weeks teaching a course about the analysis of knowledge. And Lair was of course one of the most active plaiters in trying to deal with the follow of M and Gettier's article about knowledge in the 60s and the 70s. And Keith Lair made the whole excitement of trying to respond to the Gettier problem. In the 60s and the 70s come alive for us as undergraduates at Carlton College in 1999. And so those features of my undergraduate experience really come together, I think, in this book. And I think of it in a way as a delayed term paper for Jennifer Manion and Keith Lair, where a lot of my training going back to before even started graduate school, I was really interested in concerned with thinking about normativity as a general problem. And about what's distinctive and interesting about the analysis of knowledge, and I feel like writing this book has been an opportunity for me to finally put it together in a way that I've been wanting to do for close to 20 years. Well, that's fabulous. And I'll just say this. It is. One gets the sense throughout the book that you are getting something off your chest that's been that you've been working on for quite long. I mean that in a good way. I mean that, you know, just the scope of the ambition that drives the book is is evident. And it's evident that the scope is kind of broad, which is, I'll just say from my own perspective, kind of refreshing. So all that sounds good. Now, I want to ask a couple of questions to start that have more to do with the background to the book. So pick up on some of the remarks you were just making about your own work. I suspect that, you know, some of our listeners, perhaps many of our listeners, will know, you know, your work in meta ethics, where you have championed a certain view of moral reasons and such. But I want to sort of maybe pick up on the genealogy of the interest that drives the new book. Can you tell us a bit more about the animating thought that it seems to me is driving the book reasons first. And that epistemology is fundamentally a normative enterprise. Now that strikes me as true, by the way. So I'm not, you know, leading you down a garden path. But it does strike me that it's a kind of commonplace today that that that epistemology is normative. But it still strikes me also as a kind of recent development that it's commonplace to think that that that's not an outlier view. And that it's the normativity or the normative aspects of epistemology are now so central to epistemology self conception. That seems to me to be recent. So can you say something more about that conception of epistemology and how you understand the trajectory by which the idea that epistemology is a normative domain has become central to the epistemologist. Yeah, fantastic. So it's right that the animating conceit of the book is that epistemology is normative enterprise ethics is a normative enterprise. And therefore the two we ought to expect them to have much in common. And what I call the book's core conjecture is the idea that we should therefore expect that that. But insofar as the epistemology and ethics are not consistently informed by an appreciation of each other's problems, that either one, although my focus on the book is on epistemology, might suffer from failure to appreciate the generality of these issues that come up in both places. So why should we think that epistemology is a fundamentally normative enterprise? Well, epistemology we're concerned with all kinds of questions like what ought I to believe, what does rational belief update look like? One is it located doubt, what is justified, what do I know? All of those questions, except for what do I know, are obviously belong on the list of normative questions. They use words like "ought", "rational", "should", "justified". Those are all distinctively normative questions that use the same normative vocabulary that we use in ethics, and they use it in distinctively normative ways to evaluate or grade. So what about knowledge? Well, traditionally knowledge has been thought of as also something that matters is a way of evaluating or judging. But of course it's possible that knowledge is just normatively important, it's the kind of thing that matters. And an example I often use is "death". It's very important, it matters normatively, but it's not intrinsically normative. It's not that the question of whether somebody is dead is a normative question, rather the question of whether they will die is normally important. You might think that knowledge is like that. So that's a possible view, that's a view that's in the background of much that's going on in the book, and that's a view that I ultimately try to argue against by the end of the book, and so I don't take that as ultimately settled before we start. But I do want to push back against the. So here's what I've said, I said that "pistomology is a fundamentally normative enterprise, that the core conjecture of the book relies on that." And I agree that this can feel like a recent development. After all, because of the central role played by knowledge in epistemology, and because knowledge itself is less obviously normative, it's how by some philosophers to be normative, by others to be only death, that thing that's obviously normatively important. But I think that this is actually an outlier. The last 50 years have actually been an outlier in the history of philosophy and how knowledge has been conceived in this way. 1969 was when I quite published epistemology naturalized, and shortly after that epistemologists began to defend a range of what we call pure externalist approaches to the analysis of knowledge, trying to understand knowledge in terms of causation, in terms of counterfactuals, in terms of reliability, in terms of information. And those approaches to the analysis of knowledge were inspired by the idea that knowledge is a scientific concept, that is a concept that should be able to make sense of in the terms of science, and we should be able to place it in the natural world in its own right. And those, what I would call pure externalist approaches, have been followed in the last two decades by Timothy Williamson and his successors who have thought of knowledge as a kind of mental state, not as a kind of normative status, but as a mental state on a par with other mental states, perhaps more central than belief, desire, hope, and other kinds of mental states. But I actually think this is this recent development is an all-around history of philosophy. Plato was concerned with what we should believe Aristotle discusses epistemic virtues, Occam's eraser is a principle not about what is true, but what we should believe is true. Dick Hart at the beginning of the meditation talks about what he must do going forward. Kant is concerned with knowledge and with what we should believe. Gettier's original article about the analysis of knowledge, his targets are in Chisholm, both defended obviously normative accounts of knowledge. And even in the 80s, the main criticisms that have traditionally been leveled against the coin's project of epistemology naturalized is that it leaves out normativity. So I think that although it hasn't been part of the explicit conception of epistemology that it's a normative discipline on a par with ethics, it always has been a normative discipline with this very contentious, exceptional string. And it's going to be no coincidence to readers that the proponents of this exceptional strain, the so-called pure externalists and the Williamsonians are in fact some of my main opponents in the book, especially in chapters 3 to 5 and in the later chapters. But I think that epistemology is still full of the views on which epistemology is centrally normative. Alongside proponents of what I call pure externalists views, there are plenty of people who think that justification and rationality are central epistemology. Virtue epistemology is very important. And again, it won't be a surprise that the virtue epistemology are many ways closer travelers to me than many of the other views. And so I think that's always been there. One of the things I think is different is that, as I mentioned in describing the way it came into philosophy's undergraduate, is that the 1990s were full of people trying to say what was special and difficult about metaphics, to sort of trying to crystallize what its distinctive problems were in a way that could lead us to think about different views as options in dealing with those distinctive problems and classify them and think about the wealth of strengths. And that process, I think, led people to recognize that those distinctive problems arose in other disciplines. And that's when it became common, I think, for people to use the word normative as a kind of label for what those distinctive problems were that arose in different places. So I think it's more that we have this, it's not that it wasn't there all along, but this explicit self-conception, I think, comes in a way out of people trying to label what the distinctive problems of metaphics were, and then developing a better vocabulary for it that we could apply to say what they are that are right in both epistemology and epithets. Fabulous. All that seems right to me. I would just add the writer. I don't know why one has to read the coin essay in the way that it got taken up. But if epistemology is a branch of the study of human behavior, or maybe the study of human behavior is itself a normative enterprise, and so it seems to me that one didn't have to take that route with the naturalized epistemology. But regardless, let me ask sort of a second kind of orienting background question just for listeners who, for whom this might be helpful. And it tells us a bit about reasons, particularly about your particular view of reasons. In the book, and here I'm just talking about, you know, the view of reasons that you develop as a promising kind of approach in the metaphysical domain and then try to, in the course of the book, proceed with into the epistemic domain. You lay out a few properties of reasons in the relevant sense. You say that they compete, that they are act oriented rather than outcome oriented, and that we can act on them. Can you tell us a bit more about that sort of broad conception of reasons, and then we can get into some of the nitty gritty about what it would mean for reasons to come first? Absolutely. So, in previous work, earlier in my career, I spent a lot of time worrying about what reasons are, whether the reason relation can be analyzed, what the relata, the reason relation are, what kinds of things can be reason, what their entology is. And many others have, you know, in relying on work about reasons, made assumptions about worsen, what's called, you know, the canonical ways to speak about them. And in this book, instead of trying to analyze reasons or lay down general principles about their entology, or I can't go ways to speak about them, I really try to take a relatively ecumenical approach. The most ecumenical approach that I can in order to raise the topics that I want to pursue in the book. And that's to be as inclusive as possible with respect to people who can disagree about many important questions, about what kinds of things reasons are, under what conditions the reasons, what the background conditions are, what the, so there's a lot of different questions that we could fill books with. And so what I really try to isolate are three distinctive features that you got to have going in order to think about reasons the way that I do in the rest of the book. And as long as you have those things going, then I think that you can pursue and consider all of the explanatory strategies that I pursue and consider and that the issues feel pressing in the same way. And those three issues are what I call competition being act oriented, and that they can be acted on. So let me say something about each of those features. So when I say that, reasons are subject to competition, what I mean is that there can be reasons for and against one in the same thing, and that it can matter how those reasons count up. So suppose I'm considering going to a party as one does, and I find out that the party that will be dancing, and so I'm thinking, oh, that's great. That's the reason to go to the party, and now I'm inclined to go to the party. That seems like the thing to do. But then I find out that some former X of mine is going to be at the party. And that seems like a reason not to go to the party for me, given my relationship with that person. And maybe I'm thinking, well, I've got one reason four, I've got one reason against, but the reason against is better than the reason four. I could dance somewhere else. I don't have to be around that person. And then I might find out something else. I might find out that 10 of my best friends are going to be at the party. And now I get more reasons to go to the party. And now it seems like I should go. So the idea that reasons compete is the idea that what the relationship is, toward what you want to do, can depend on how they stack up against one another. And that's the phenomenon that I said is illustrated by the case I just described. So second feature are reasons that I think is a little bit more controversial and a little bit more abstract. Is that reasons are act oriented? So here's what I mean by that. So reasons I think support ways of being not ways the world can be. They support properties rather than propositions. So contrast that claim about reasons with how goodness works. What things that are good are ways things can be. It can be good that child poverty has been reduced. It can be good that I'm happy. It can be good that you are happy. And if it's good that I'm happy and good that you're happy, the goodness of my being happy and the goodness of you are being happy aren't things that are for me or they're for you. If that matters for what each of us should do, each of them should matter in the same way. But if you have a reason not to kill and I have a reason not to kill, all reasons concern are own actions. So we have the same reason, a reason not to kill. But the fact that we both have this reason not to kill doesn't give me any reason to prevent you from killing. What I've reason to do is not kill. I don't have a reason that you not kill. So I think it's important for the way that reasons can help us to answer the paradox of deontology that we understand them as act oriented rather than as outcome oriented. So that was a little bit abstract. That they're unfortunately easier than they can be acted on. So you can do things for reasons. You can go to the party. If you go to the party, there could be reason for which you go. If you go in order to dance, you go in order to see your friends. You go both in order to dance and to see your friends. And when you do something for a reason, philosophers typically say that the reason for which you do it counts as your motivating reason for doing it. On some views, motivating reasons and normative reasons, reasons that count in favor of your doing it have the same ontology that it could be literally true that the reason for which you do it and the reason for you to do it are identical. In the book, I don't require that. What I do assume though is that whatever the ontology of motivating normative reasons is, it can make sense to say that there was this great reason for you to do it and you did it for that reason. Even if strictly speaking, we don't say that the reason for what you did it and the reason to do it are literally identical. We at least have to be able to make sense of that way of speaking, that not only do we act for motivating reasons, but sometimes we count as acting for the very things that support doing something. Right. Good. So last sort of orientation then. So we've got a general view about why epistemology should be regarded as normative. We've got a thumbnail sketch of what we're talking about, how we're talking about reasons, when we're thinking about what it would mean for reasons to come first or when we're thinking about making reasons come first or putting reasons first. So next orientation. So I suspect again, many listeners are going to be familiar with reasons first as a broad program and meta ethics, but maybe not everyone. So can you give us a little bit of that background? Well, I think that reasons, rather than say the analysis of goodness or rightness or duty or something like that. Well, I think that reasons should come first in meta ethics. Excellent. So, you know, it's really important to emphasize that nothing has to be first. Right. There's a pattern in the history of moral philosophy of some kinds of theorists thinking that something some important moral or normative concept or property does come first. But what the views that say that something comes first have is they have a kind of subject matter answer to what normative inquiry has in common. So we ask all kinds of normative questions. We ask what's good, what's bad, what's right, what's wrong, what's just, what's unjust, rational, irrational, what there's a reason to do. But the firster, the thing that all the firsters have in common is they can say that what all of this discourse has in common is a distinctive subject matter. And the subject matter is the thing that comes first. So if you're not a firster, then you get a different answer to what's distinctive about normative discourse. And it won't be a virtue of being about the same thing that it has something in common, because it'll be about things that are different. The different things, each of which come first. And so you want to say what each of those things have in common that isn't a common subject matter. So that's just to clarify that, you know, nothing has to come first, but also to say what's appealing about, from a very abstract perspective, both the idea that something does come first. So let me just give a comparison to Moore, who in print could be Attika tells us that Attix is about the good, by which he means the intrinsically good. So according to Moore, all of Attix, all claims in Attix are fundamentally claims about intrinsic goodness and about the relationship between intrinsic goodness to matters of fact, which are often contingent. Moore has this kind of distinctive answer to what Attix is about. And reasons first, first off offer the same kind of answer to what Attix is about, but also to what epistemology and parts of aesthetics that are normative and parts of practical rationality, they're not just ethnically ethical. What they all have in common and what they all have in common on the reason it's first serves you is not that they're about what's good, but rather that they're about reasons. Now why I think why prefer reasons to value or good or to obligation? Well, the appeal, the idea that reasons come first, I think starts with the observation that reasons offers so much more promising explanation of what we ought to do and what's right than goodness does. So go back to the case where you're trying to decide whether to go to the party. Whether you ought to go to the party can depend on all kinds of things. You can depend on things like whether you promise not to go to the party, whether you're having a strange ex who's going to be at the party, whether you like to dance and they'll be dancing there, whether your friends will be there, whether your friends will be there, but you've also promised those friends to complete their work assignment for tomorrow. And so they'll find out if you're not, if you're at the party. There's so many things that can depend on that is very hard to formulate general principles about what we ought to do or what's right that are going to explain why that's the case. So that makes it difficult to think that rightness or the question of what you ought to do is primary because it's going to be very difficult to understand how it is that that question of what you ought to do applies in that case. So reasons are going to help and this is a motivation that comes from WD Ross. I call it the classical argument for reasons first. Reasons are going to help because we can think of reasons as a beating competition and what you ought to do is just a matter of what the balance of reasons supports, the winner of the competition between the reasons. So go back to the question. the case of going to the party. If your estranged X is going to be at the party, I don't know how it can switch from being my estranged X to your estranged X. But your estranged X is going to be at the party and there's dancing there. In that case, you ought to not to go. But if both of those things are true and you have 10 other friends who are going to be there, then you want to go. And what's the difference between those two cases? The difference is that in one case, the balance of the estranged X wins. But the estranged X does not win out over both the 10 friends and the dancing. Put together the 10 friends and the dancing win. And so now we can really explain some powerful things. We can explain why it is that as you increase the significance of the reasons to do something, it takes better reasons not to do it to make it the case that you ought not to do it. And so the classical argument says that's a powerful kind of explanation of what you ought to do. Now, Sidrick had a very similar kind of explanation about why ethics is complicated. About why in many cases it's not clear what you ought to do and it depends on a lot of things. Sidrick's explanation was you told Tarion. Sidrick said, "Well, look, all those things affect what's going to create happiness." And so it's going to make you happy to dance. It's going to make you unhappy to be around this estranged X. It's going to be happy to be around your friends. And so all of those things count, but they're all about happiness. But Ross really had a great answer to Sidrick. And Ross's answer to Sidrick was that the very same kind of things that are intuitive counter-examples to the idea that you ought to always keep your promises or always tell the truth. Where we come with counter-examples by having good benefits on the other side. The classic counter-examples to you, to turn is exactly like that. We come up with cases where something improves the most happiness. But it does so by breaking a promise. And so the very same way that we have of having counter-examples to very simple principles, but we ought to do that for previous theorists, including Sidrick, had motivated you to turn his on. Ross says, "That's the same problem with you to turn his on." So the utilitarian is not going to have a great answer. But we know. And Ross should have known because he came along a long time after more that we can be a consequentials without being a utilitarian. And non-utel-turned-consequentials, pluralist, consequentialists, can try to revive Ross's argument by saying that what's at stake are different values. They're not reasons, but they're goods. They're good things to be achieved by going to the party. You achieve, you know, exercise and you achieve friendship. And those are different things. And there are bad things that happen. Strife with this estranged X or the like. And those things count against. But when we weigh these different goods, it's still going to turn out that the goods can compete, just like reasons can compete. And here's where I think it's really important that reasons are act oriented. When consequentialists try to explain what we ought to do in terms of the goodness of what's going to happen if we do it, they become committed to claims about the relative goodness of different outcomes. And then we can exploit their claims about the relative goodness of those outcomes in order to generate counter examples where those outcomes are something that are allowed rather than created. So if we explain why I ought not to murder, by appeal to the badness of death or the badness of killing, once I have the opportunity to prevent five murders by murdering one, we now have five against one. The goods are stacked up in that way. And the reason that consequentialism has that trouble is because it says that what matters are the goodness of outcomes, what happens, that's that there is a murder or that someone's a murder. But the reasons theorists can give the same kind of explanation in these kinds of cases without having that bad result. Because according to the reasons theorists reasons are act oriented rather than outcome oriented. So just because weeks so we explain why it is that you ought not to murder, by appeal to the reason not to murder. And that doesn't explain why it's the goodness of other people's not murdering effects you. The claim that you have reason not to murder, by generalization to other people, is going to require that other people also have reasons not to murder. But their reasons aren't your reasons and then with the goodness effects you. So I think you really appreciate the poll of the reasons explanation of what we ought to do. We need to put together Ross's classical motivation, that reasons compete with this observation that reasons as opposed to values are act oriented. And when you put those two things together, I think it is a very forceful reason to think that it's an excellent explanation of what we ought to do across the wide range of cases that we ought to do is just what the competition of reasons supports. And that's what I call the classical argument. Now in the book, I also tried to sketch an alternative motivation for reasons first, what I call the fundamental argument, which trades on the act of the future of reasons that you can act on them as well. And that comes in in later chapters and I think it's a little bit more more complex. But I think this this gets us warmed up for thinking that reasons that got to be important they have to explain and explain something. No, it doesn't tell us Bob. It doesn't tell us that reasons are absolutely fundamental among the normative. Maybe reasons explain what you ought to do and something else explains reasons. But this is the thing you have to understand to get warmed up to the peel that reasons plan explanatory role. Can I just ask you a sort of maybe an odd question because it does, you do mention it. It's kind of impassing in the book, but it comes up more than once about the the way that this sort of very broadly speaking sort of, well, just stick with the Rossian sort of motivation seems to capture the phenomenology of moral. Yeah, yeah, even some of our gestures when we're in the grip of a moral, when we're in the grip of deliberating about a moral quandary, you know, we've got these sort of like we we move our hands up and down in ways that suggest that we're weighing thing. I mean, they're all kinds of respects in which, you know, thinking that what we're doing in moral thinking, we're trying to figure out or decide what we ought to do involves settling some competition between things that are pulling us in different directions. You know, strikes me as a pretty, maybe strikes me as a pretty compelling sort of like first move. In making this very what we might say the sort of warming up case to the idea, but you say that's right. Oh, absolutely. I do think that I mean, obviously as philosophers, we have many tools that are disposal to explain that phenomenology without saying that it is an accurate representation of the metaphysics of what's going on. But, but I do think I do think that that it warms us up. And then the first few pages of the book, I go through an extended example of someone trying to decide what to do and feeling the pull of different considerations. I think it helps to at least, you know, whatever you want to reject about this picture, it helps to get your head around somebody who lives inside this picture to to sort of walk yourself into the phenomenology. Right. Very good. Very good. Okay. So let's turn to the epistemology, which is really what the core of the book is about. It's an attempt to sort of take the approach from metaphics and apply it to or inhabit it within some of the leading problems of epistemology. So you argue then in the book that although reasons first, as an approach in moral philosophy has all this intuitive pull sort of built into it of the kind that you were just describing. It confronts a couple of obstacles when we take it up in this neighboring, we might say normative discipline of epistemology. And you're concerned with two sort of core obstacles to reasons first as an approach to epistemology. What you call the problem of unjustified belief and the problem of sufficiency. So let's take them in the order that you take them up in. So let's start with the first thing, the problem of unjustified belief. What's the problem? And how does that problem or how does unjustified beliefs as a phenomenon? How does it pose a problem or an obstacle to adopting reasons first as an option for epistemology? Fantastic. Great question. So the problem of unjustified beliefs arises because it doesn't seem like we should be able to bootstrap ourselves into having evidence or justification or knowledge. and something merely by unjustifiably adopting other beliefs. Okay. So if the way that we're going to explain justification or knowledge is in terms of reasons, and the reasons that are going to explain justification won't just be things that are true that you don't know about. They're going to have to be reasons that some people would put it that you have, or as I would put it, they have to be your subjective reasons. They have to be, in some sense, within your grasp. It seems like we need to place a high bar on what kind of grasp of them you have to have. It's not enough to merely believe things which could be reasons to support something. If you unjustifiably believe them, that should not lend additional support to what they support. So here's where the problem for reasons first comes from. The explaining why it is the unjustified beliefs don't give you subjective reasons. It seems like it's going to require reeling them out because to have subjective reasons you have to have justified beliefs, not just beliefs, or that you have to know, and not just belief. But if they can strengthen unsublective reasons as knowledge, then we can't use them to explain knowledge. We've already built knowledge in to our kind of sub-equip reasons. If they can strengthen unsublective reasons, then we can't use them to explain justification. If they can strengthen rationality, we can't use them to explain rationality. So whichever way it goes, it seems like we're not going to be able to use them to explain everything important and central and epistemology. And therefore reasons wouldn't be first. Yeah. So reasons wouldn't be first. You know, justification or knowledge would be first after all. So I argue in chapter -- the second main part of the book in chapters three to five takes this up and argues that the idea that sub-equip reasons have to be justified or known creates its own troubles. It plays, you know, at least some role in some puzzles about basic perceptual epistemology. And I think it should be rejected. So my solution is really simple. I say that, yes, this was a problem. We should definitely not allow that merely unjustifiably believing something, unless you bootstrap yourself into justification or knowledge. But I say that instead of building in justification or knowledge into sub-equip reasons, instead we can rule out this kind of objectionable bootstrap being by deriving it from the mechanics of how reasons compete. So if we think through why it is that reason supports something, as long as it turns out that when a belief is something that you should not have, in equilibrium we're not going to draw the conclusion that you should believe stuff that follows from it. We're still going to be able to allow those reasons into the competition, and we'll specify how it is that reasons compete in a way that makes them drop out. And that's the sort of basic structure of the solution. Can you say a little bit more because this is where the idea of a world implicating. Reason comes in, can you spell it out just a bit more? Yeah, so the world implicating thing comes in a slightly different place. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, it's very closely related. The challenge in chapters 3 to 5, the reason I say that we should reject this solution where we build justification or knowledge into the reason is because I think that it contributes in an unacceptable way to a basic puzzle about how having perceptual experiences puts us in a position of having great evidence about the world. And in chapter 3, I sort of walk through how it is that if we assume that reasons that evidence has to be true, then it's a way that limits our options in thinking through what our basic evidence is. That could explain why it's rational to draw conclusions about the world, both in the case of vertical perceptual experience and non-verbal perceptual experience. In chapter 4, I argue that we shouldn't think that reasons of evidence have to be true. And I connect the idea that they must to the idea that they can strengthen on some reason's, subritor reasons is knowledge. So that's the connection to the source of the problem. And then in chapter 5, I defend a view about what the evidence is for basic perceptual beliefs that I think is made possible by having this solution to the problem of unjustified beliefs. That allows us to say that we have this non-factive evidence that's shared in good and bad cases, and that explains rationality of conclusions about the world without explaining knowledge in both the case. Good, good. And that view is, I say that perceptual experiences all represent themselves as vertical. And that is the key to giving an account that is defeasable in the right way. And I argue that alternative views of a basic perceptual justification have a lot of trouble with being defeasable under the right conditions. Right, good, good. That's helpful. So let's turn then to the second obstacle or challenge to reasons first in epistemology, which is the problem of sufficiency. What is it and how do you address it with reasons first? Awesome. The problem of sufficiency is the challenge to say what makes reasons good enough to justify a belief without defining it backwards in terms of justification. So the problem is if we can't define sufficiency independent justification, then we can't analyze justification in terms of sufficiency of reasons. So why I think this is so hard? In ethics, we don't think we need to define sufficiency of reasons in terms of ought or right. But that's because in ethics, we tend to think that all it takes to be sufficient is to beat all commerce. Whichever side of a choice is supported by more reasons, that's the choice that we ought to take. That's all it takes. So in ethics, we usually work with a purely comparative notion of reasons. There's just competition and whatever wins the competition, that's what you ought to do. But the puzzle behind the problem of sufficiency is that most epistemologists don't think that reasons for belief work that way. The obvious sort of reason for belief that matters in epistemology for knowledge and justification for rational belief is evidence. And it's never rational to believe something, just because it's supported by slightly more evidence than the alternative. Typically in such cases, we think that the only rational course is to withhold belief and wait for a stronger preponderance of the evidence. So it typically seems in epistemology because it's assumed that the reasons that would matter in epistemology is evidence. That we can't appeal the pure comparisons and reasons. We need some independent standard of how much evidence is enough. And you know, what is it to be enough? It's just to be enough that like if you were to believe for it, you could know or you could be justified. So in the third part of the book in chapter 6 to 9, I argue that adopting this response to the problem of sufficiency leads to its own dense tangle of problems about where this standard sufficiency does come from. And my response to the problem is to reject a premise. I agree that it's true that evidence for and against p is the paradigmatic sort of reason for and against believing that p. But I argue that there's other non-evidential reasons against belief that you not count as evidence against this content. And once we acknowledge the existence of this kind of non-evidential, but still genuinely epistemic reasons, we can balance reasons in the same way that we do in ethics. And I argue that this has some, offers some really powerful explanations about why it makes sense to draw conclusions in philosophy even though we have very little evidence. For about ancient history where we have very little evidence, but it's still not reasonable to draw conclusions about other topics that's easy to get a lot more evidence about even when we have just as much evidence as we have about philosophy. And about pragmatic encroachment and I argue moral encroachment on the rationality of belief. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Good. That's and let me just say for listeners, you know, and you're giving, you know, great responses to these to these past two questions now. But the a lot of the details are very intricate, which they would have to be. And so we're getting the flavor of the kind of responses, the kind of response you develop in a great deal of detail in the book to both of these problems. But I want to make sure, you know, because the book is so rich, I want to make sure that we, we, we, we, we represent the, the, as, as full as full of its breath as we can. So, um, can we? And we sort of turn next to the analysis of knowledge. So one of the, I think at one point in the book, you do say that this is one of the more sort of speculative and made perhaps controversial parts of the book is that once we have a good sense of how reasons first can address the problem of unjustified belief and the problem of sufficiency, then something new comes into view that we can give a reasons first account of knowledge or we can give a reasons first analysis of knowledge. Can you tell us a bit about that? It's a counting in view of knowledge. - Yeah, so, so Kant has this remark in the first critique where he says that knowledge is belief for reasons that are sufficient both objectively and subjectively. And that's basically what I say that knowledge is. The main, the main thesis I argue for in the closing chapters of the book is that knowing is kind of believing well and not just believing the right thing, but believing well. And I argue that that's the analog in the case of belief of what's sometimes called moral worth and the moral philosophy literature. So Kant himself distinguishes, he's got the shopkeeper and the shopkeeper does the right thing but he only does it because he wants to keep his yield ratings and not have a moral motive. And so, so you can do the right thing but fail to act with moral worth to act well, morally well. And we can make the same distinction in lots of other cases. It's standard epistemology distinguished between propositional and paradoxic justification where if you believe what you have propositional justification to believe, there's a sense in which you believe, I mean, not the right thing in the sense of the truth, but you believe in accordance with the norm, but you lack doxastic justification. You are not justified in believing it. And so doxastic justification is like believing well by the norms and not just believing the thing the norms tell you to believe. And we've got the same distinction all over the place. There can be, it can be rational for you to fear somebody perhaps because they're chasing you with a knife and you might fear them, but you might fear them because they're wearing a clown outfit. And so you fear what it's rational to fear but you don't fear rationally. And there could be cases in a game where there's a right move to make and you make the right move, but you don't play well because your relationship to making the right move isn't the right relationship. So I think that this distinction between what I call right norms and well norms or right properties and well properties applies all over the place. It comes up in ethics, it comes up in epistemology, it comes up in other norm domains. And the main idea is that knowledge is a kind of well property. And the reason that this is going to lend itself to be understood in terms of reasons I suggest is because reasons are things that you can act on. So what's important for the well properties is always the reasons for which you do something. In the case of a doxastic justification, it matters that the reasons for which you believe it match in the right sort of way, the very reasons that justify it in the case of fear. In the case I gave you the reason why you fear, the thing that's rational to fear, but you don't fear rationally is that as I described it, the reason for which you fear, namely that the person is wearing a clown uniform, doesn't match the reason for you to fear. And that's the case with Kant's shopkeeper as well. That Kant's shopkeeper, the reason for which he gives correct change is not the reason for him to give correct change. And that can happen in the case of the right move of the game as well. So this is the place with these well properties, both in moral philosophy and elsewhere, that I think reasons really come into their own, of not just being able to explain the right properties, but being able to explain why it is that when there's a right property standard that we meet, there's always going to be this corresponding standard of whether we meet it well. And so that's what I argue in the last couple of chapters of the book. And I lay out a version of a kind of right reasons, account of moral worth and a corresponding right reasons account of knowledge. I think and I try to art show in the chapters that contemporary right reasons accounts of moral worth that are prominent in the work of Julia Markovitz and others. I have a lot in common with the feasibility analyses of knowledge from the 60s and 70s and try to show why. And that's how I try to pull together. Excellent. So you've been very generous with your time. So I've left the more scopic question for the end. So this is a really detailed-- in areas of philosophy that I most work in, the norms for a long time were focused very tightly on some particular thing. Don't worry about neighboring things. As Rawls put, it's stay on the surface, philosophically speaking as best you can. This book doesn't follow any of those norms, but is really comprehensive in a way that I very much appreciate. So let me ask as a final question. Let's just grant that you're right. Reasons for epistemology has been introduced into the idiom and is largely taken up. What happens to epistemology if once we adopt the reasons for approach, it looks as if a lot of the traditional foci and problematics are either going to be displaced or transformed in ways that might make them a little bit hard to identify or identify with their antecedents. Gets us a little bit about maybe generally about what the impact would be on epistemology as a field where a reason's first approach taken up. Bob, that's a very swooping question. Well, first, let's be realistic. I don't have any illusions about epistemology suddenly being swept by the reason's first revolution. And if it were, I don't think it would look like people accepting the specifics of my views in the book. So much as much wider range of views competing on which reasons play more fundamental roles and what reasons are and how they do it. But even if you did go so far as to accept all of the main thesis in my book, it's important to appreciate that although the book is sweeping, it's also in a way superficial. It's very selective in the topics that it engages with. It goes to great effort to spread those topics out across epistemology. But even the topics that I engage with, there's so much deeper to go. So with respect to one really important problem that arises if you accept my solution to the problem of efficiency, is that we need to be the case that there are non-evidential reasons that weigh against evidential reasons that could add up with them because the reasons against belief will include both evidential and non-evidential reasons. And then once they add up with them, they have to compete against the evidence in favor of belief. That is like the whole-- issues about the mechanics of how reasons combine are complex and difficult. And it's not transparent how they're going to go. Even in the book, I give a kind of toy model for how it is that unjustified beliefs might, as I put it in the book, go into the hopper of the reasons that can take that count without actually making a difference in what it's rational for you to believe. And the toy model that I give does not generalize very well to include the main ideas in part three of the book about how they could be non-evidential reasons that count against belief. There, the whole book is as neutral as it can be about the ontology of reasons, about where reasons come from, what explains them. The part three of the book defends a principle about what makes that kind of non-evidential reasons against belief that I think matter in epistemology. Count is the right kind of reason to matter in epistemology is properly epistemic. And I think that that account is pretty schematic. And there's a lot more to do to sort of explore that space. The kind of knowledge that I give is a wave in steam. and she had the idea that knowledge is believing well. But even if you agree with me, that knowledge is believing well, and that well properties are being understood in terms of reasons, there's a lot of space left to adjudicate between different ways, what kind of relationship the reasons for which you believe something have to bear to the reasons to believe it. And so, and of course, in the book, at various places, I, some of the problems that I raise don't turn on the claim that rational belief requires that there are reasons for you to believe something. But ultimately, if you accept all the thesis of the book, you would have to accept that justified irrational belief requires having some reason to believe something. And now, thinking about how that applies outside the cases of basic perceptual belief, but to testimony and the alpriori and many of the other kinds of cases that epistemology has been so enriched by, thinking of separately from the sort of, in some way, core topics of perceptual epistemology that have driven many of the main categories of different kinds of use, the rationalism, the empiricism, the pure externalism and so on. I think all the richness of those areas, still there and is challenging for the perspective that I've advocated in the book. - Let me, great, that sounds great. Let me just, let me put a different, a slightly different spin on the question. Unsolicited autobiography, my grad seminar in epistemology was all red barns, fake barns and new evil demons and that kind of thing. I suspect that if we were to take up the reasons first view, it would be a lot less likely that that would be the content of an epistemology graduate seminar. Would I be right about that? - Well, I think that fake barns are still gonna be there. - You'll see, if you read the book, in the closing chapters, I start to worry more and more about the relationship between the views that I've advocated and some of the prominent approaches of prominent virtual epistemologists, including Bernie Sosa. And I use the example of fake barns earlier in the book in the perceptual epistemology case. And I think those cases are gonna be really important for thinking about the relationship between believing well and acting well. One of the insights that is prominent in virtual epistemology is that not only is there an analogy between believing well and acting well, but there's an analogy between those things and also successful performance of things like, you know, getting credit for hitting the bull's eye with an arrow. - Right, right. - And the challenge that I've put in the closing chapters of the book is to take really seriously the analogy between moral worth and knowledge. - Right. - But many of the virtual epistemologists are pushing us to go further and take seriously the analogy between those things and other kinds of successful performance. And I think that there's gonna be a lot of action there for a long time to come and trying to figure out what the right scope of generality is for the explanation. - Right. Good. That's, that's, good, that's helpful. Mark, thank you for joining me on new books and philosophy today. It's been great talking about your new book. - Thanks, Bob. It's great to be here. - Fabulous. And thank you listeners for joining us for this discussion of Mark Schroeder's new book with Oxford University Press. It is titled "Reasons First." I urge you all to go out and take a look. For now, thank you for listening to new books in philosophy. Take care. (soft music) (soft music)