Abstract

My project is to give an account of the requirements which must be satisfied if certain types of reasons are to be causes of action in a rational manner. ;The project must be viewed against the background of two challenges to practical reasoning generally. The first challenge comes from attribution theorists, who indicate that in a very broad range of cases, reason-giving is causally irrelevant to the actions which are justified by those reasons; if they are correct, practical reasoning is very often idle. The second challenge is from philosophers who maintain that reasons qua reasons cannot occupy the role of cause. ;In response to the first challenge, I show how what I call quasi-Aristotelian practical reasoning avoids substantial attribution error. The bulk of my project then comes in response to the second challenge. If reasons qua reasons are to be causes of action, then there must be a theory of causality which is adequate in showing them to be causes in virtue of their being the reasons that they are. Three major requirements which must be satisfied then are: reasons must be causes in virtue of their content; reasons must be describable as events which in turn are eligible as causal relata; reasons must occur as the cause in a singular causal claim which presupposes a cause/condition distinction. ;I then turn to three representative theories of causality in order to see which may satisfy these three requirements: a necessary and sufficient conditions analysis, a regularity account, and an interventionist account. The necessary and sufficient condition account cannot make the distinction between cause and condition. The regularity account cannot distinguish between cases of reason's causing qua content and causing qua accident. The interventionist account satisfies all three requirements. ;Finally, I discuss some issues for theories of causality proper which have been raised in the course of the project. It is clear that some analyses of causality are incompatible with the claim that reasons are causes, but whether we should give up these analyses or the thesis that reasons are causes is a question that receives only sharper focus, and not a solution, in this project