Rational Commitment and Legal Reason

Normativity, Commitment, and Instrumental Reason

R. Jay Wallace There are two tendencies in our thinking about instrumental rationality that do not seem to cohere very well. On the one hand, the instrumental principle—enjoining us to take the means that are necessary relative to our ends—does not seem to apply indifferently to any end that we might be motivated to pursue. There is, for instance, no genuine requirement to take the means that a...

Intentions and Rational Commitment

Intentions, an integral part of the mental state of an agent, play an important role in determining the behaviour of rational agents as they seek to attain their goals. In this paper, a formalization of intention based on rational commitment is presented. The formalization is based on a branching-time possible-worlds semantics for beliefs, goals, and intentions, upon which conditions are impose...

Moral and Rational Commitment

We often use the term ‘commitment’ to make claims of apparent normative import. An ontologically scrupulous philosopher says that she cannot accept a certain principle because it would commit her to abstracta. A conscientious friend says that he’d like to make your party but feels bound by a prior commitment. A campaigning politician says that she’s the only candidate who’s really committed to ...

Inference and Rational Commitment

What is it that explains the rationality of transitions in thought? It is natural to think that any such explanation will need to advert to at least two interrelated issues. The first has to do with what is constitutive of the validity of a transition, and the second with our actual practice of making inferential transitions. Many accounts attempt to deal with both issues simultaneously by show...

Legal Reason: The Use of Analogy in Legal Argument