The Obscurity of Internal Reasons

© 2009 Stephen Finlay S ince its publication in 1979, Bernard Williams’ “Internal and External Reasons”1 has been one of the most influential and widely discussed papers in ethics. I suggest here that the paper’s argument has nevertheless been universally misunderstood.2 On the standard interpretations, his argument — which he subsequently elaborated and defended in further discussions — is perplexingly weak. In the first section I sketch the main variants of the Standard (or, more provocatively, “Supposed”) Argument, and catalog the numerous flaws that others have observed in them. The badness of the argument itself might not be a conclusive reason against ascribing it even to a great philosopher, but there are many other exegetical problems for this reading, including that Williams himself seemed blithely aware of and untroubled by many of these flaws. In the second section I propose a different interpretation of Williams as offering an Alternative (or more provocatively, the “Actual”) Argument, which is immune to the seemingly fatal objections to the Standard Argument and better supported by the text and charity.3 On this interpretation, Williams offers just one consistent argument, which unites his central concerns with (i) the “explanatory dimension” of reasons statements, (ii) their conceptual content, and (iii) the connection between reasons and deliberation. While his argument is normally thought to be based on the common claim that reasons must be capable of motivating, I argue that it rather begins from a substantive and interesting analysis of the concept of a normative reason: that to believe that R is for you a reason for action just is to believe that R