Deliberation and Acting For Reason

Deliberation and Acting for Reasons
Nomy Arpaly
Brown University
Timothy Schroeder
Ohio State University
Theoretical and practical deliberation are voluntary activities, and like all
voluntary activities, they are performed for reasons and can be carried out
wisely or unwisely, reasonably or unreasonably, rationally or irrationally.
As a consequence, there must be processes that are nondeliberative and
nonvoluntary but that nonetheless allow us to think and act for reasons,
and these processes generate the voluntary activities making up ordinary
deliberation. These nondeliberative, nonvoluntary processes by means of
which we are able to deliberate for reasons must be fundamental, on pain
of regress. As a result, the usefulness of deliberation to rational belief and
action is intermittent, contingent, and modest.1
We would like to thank a number of people for helpful discussion of the ideas presented
here, including Nicolas Bommarito, John Broome, Sarah Buss, Ben Caplan, David Christiensen, Justin DArms, James Dreier, David Estlund, Nico Kolodny, Philip Pettit, Peter
Railton, Richard Samuels, Valerie Tiberius, and our anonymous referees. This article also
benefited from versions of it being presented to the philosophers of Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Moral Psychology Research Group; Ohio State University; the
Ohio Philosophical Association; the Society for the Theory of Ethics and Politics; State
University of New York, Albany; University of California, Davis; and the Workshop on
Moral Expertise.
1. The general topic of interest to us has been treated by a number of philosophers
(including one of the authors of the present work). See, for example, Arpaly 2000, in
which rationality without deliberation is discussed; Arpaly 2003, chapter 2, in which deliberation itself is given as an instance of acting for reason without deliberation and a basic
regress argument is made briefly; Dreier 2001, which deals in depth with a related
Philosophical Review, Vol. 121, No. 2, 2012

DOI 10.1215/00318108-1539089
q 2012 by Cornell University
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NOMY A RPAL Y AND TI MOT HY SCHROEDER
1. The Nature of Deliberation

Allan sees that the tea shop has no pastries today, and he wonders
deliberatesabout where to go instead. He considers various options
and settles on the cafe up the street. Mira is asked whether she really
believes in animal rights or only the moral importance of animal welfare,
and she starts ponderingdeliberating aboutthe differences between
the two, ending up with the conclusion that she does believe in animal
rights. The frequency of deliberation in our lives could be exaggerated,
but it is entirely common and entirely familiar. In this first section, we
sketch out what deliberation is with sufficient precision to go on.
Deliberation is commonly divided into theoretical and practical
deliberation. Theoretical deliberation is primarily concerned with what
to believe, while practical deliberation is primarily concerned with what
to do. The product of theoretical deliberation is perhaps a new belief (or
entrenchment of an existing belief ), or a new credence in a possible state
of affairs, or a sincere thought about the truth of a proposition, or something similar. The product of practical deliberation is perhaps a new
intention (or entrenchment of an existing intention), or an action, or
something similaror the product of practical reasoning is a new belief
that now taking a certain course of action would be best overall, or a belief
that it would be fitting, or something similar.2 For our purposes, it is not
important what, exactly, the product of either sort of deliberation is, so
long as the above proposals are not all radically misguided.
Both sorts of deliberation are kinds of actions. (See also Hookway
1999 on epistemic deliberation and Railton 2009 on practical deliberation.)3 They are mental actions, or perhaps mental actions conducted
issue; and Railton 2004, 2009, in which the first steps of the present argument are taken
(in the jargon we deploy later in this article, Railton makes the regress argument against a
combined version of Present Deliberation and Present Recognition). We see the present
article as a particularly noteworthy addition to this growing literature in (1) having a welldeveloped theory of deliberation; (2) considering the full range of published arguments
for the thesis that deliberation has a privileged role in our thinking and acting for reasons;
(3) deploying a wide variety of counterarguments to the aforementioned arguments; and
(4) providing a distinctive account of what role deliberation actually plays in making us
responsive to our reasons.
2. This latter possibility would, of course, render practical reasoning a subtype of
theoretical reasoning.
3. We are committed to no specific theory of action and hope to be as uncommitted
as possible in the course of this work. But if deliberation is an action, then it does seem to
us that there will be instances of deliberation that are actions of a less-than-paradigmatic
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with supplementary nonmental aids (notepaper, calculators, interlocutors, the sound of ones own voice speaking ones thoughts aloud, and so
forth). We will, however, focus on the mental aspect of deliberation, as
mixed cases do not alter the plausibility of the conclusions for which we
will press.4 Purely mental deliberation, then, is a purely mental activity,
carried out by means of performing various mental actions aimed at some
suitable end. Both the actions and the end are important to deliberation.
For a mental activity to be deliberation, it must be aimed at determining what to think or do.5 As we said a moment ago, we maintain an
ecumenical stance on just what this amounts to, but there are limits to
ecumenism. A mental activity aimed only at amusing the subject is not
deliberation. A mental activity aimed only at facilitating sleep is not deliberation. Determining what to think or what to do is thus a constitutive
end of deliberation, in the same way that persuasion is a constitutive end
of arguing, or getting coffee is a constitutive end of going for coffee.
Deliberation can fail to achieve its end, but it is an activity that aims to
achieve that end (perhaps among others).
For a mental activity to be deliberation, it must also be carried out
by means of particular mental acts: bringing to mindto consciousnessvarious ideas (general or particular, abstract or concrete) or images (visual, auditory, gustatory, and so forth). There are other ways to
determine what to do or what to believe, but these are not deliberation. As
a person with the aim of determining what to do, Maria might be aware
that she will come to be resolved on what to do if she can just enter a state
of meditative tranquility in which she does not do any conscious thinking
sort: instances of deliberation from which one is alienated (I could hardly believe I was
contemplating covering up my misbehavior), deliberation conducted for an end that is
not transparent to one (I found myself thinking again about the facts of the case, uncertain as to why my mind was drawn to them), and deliberation conducted absentmindedly
(I suddenly realized that, in my mental wanderings, I had started going over all the
reasons I had given myself for ending my past romances, weighing up each one), to
choose just three examples. If the reader wonders about such cases, we hold that these
examples of apparent deliberation are actions just in case the counterpart cases involving
overt bodily movement are actionsand if they are not true actions, then they are not
true instances of deliberation either, for deliberating is something we do .
4. Note the existence of arguments that there is no principled difference between
purely mental actions and mixed cases. See, for example, Clark and Chalmers 1998.
5. Perhaps there is also deliberation about what to feel, or what to intend, that is
distinct from deliberation about what to think or to do. But we are skepticaland in any
case, the existence of such deliberation would not substantially change the arguments
that follow.
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but simply empties her mind. And it might well be true that entering this
state is a mental act that Maria can perform, aiming through it to determine what to do. But Maria would not be deliberating if she were to
proceed in this way.
Mental acts are not guaranteed to be acts of deliberation even if
they bring ideas or images to mind with the goal of determining what to
do through filling ones consciousness with them. Perhaps Randa finds
that what to believe about a difficult matter comes quickly to her if she
visualizes her fourth-grade teacher sternly asking, What is the answer,
Randa? This would not make her use of such an image into an act of
deliberation. Deliberation requires that one bring to mind ideas or images that are meant to have some rational relation to the propositions that
would be the conclusion of ones deliberation, with the aim of reaching a
conclusion.6 Even this is probably not a sufficient condition, but the full
complexities can be set aside for our purposes. Deliberation, at the least,
requires bringing to mind ideas or images meant to have some rational
relation to the topic being considered, in the service of reaching a conclusion about what to think or do.
Talk of mental acts that bring ideas and images to mind might be
unhelpfully unspecific. Experiences of deliberation suggest a variety of
perhaps helpful concrete examples. Consider Harold, who is deliberating about whether to promise to meet his son in Calgary on Tuesday.
Harold engages in a mental action known colloquially as searching his
memory for potentially conflicting promises, a process that itself might
involve the mental act of holding in mind the idea of Tuesday, but might
not even involve that so much as an effortful attentiveness in Harolds
present context. This mental act will produce as a product a notable
nothing in consciousness or some idea or image tied to a competing
promise. Or consider Albert: when he deliberates about the implications
of curved space-time for time travel, he visualizes a warped rubber sheet
with a ball rolling along it, and this image is relevantin the context of
his thinkingto the truth of the claim that a straight line in a curved
space-time is one that could loop back on itself. Of course, in saying this
we assume that there is a way of making intelligible the idea that there is a
rational relationship between a visual mental image and a proposition.
6. Or perhaps propositions can express or represent the conclusions of ones deliberation, rather than being identical to them. And perhaps propositions cannot express
plans, though plans can be the conclusion of practical deliberations (thanks to an anonymous referee for this point), and so we need to make room for them as well.
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One line of evidence in favor of this thought is found in the rich literature
on the content of sensory perception and imagery: see, for example,
Peacocke 1983 and Tye 1995. If imagery has content, then perhaps that
content can stand in rational relations to the content of beliefs. (But we
do not wish to commit to any particular claim about how imagery could be
rationally related to beliefs.)
In thinking about deliberation, it is important to focus on the most
basic voluntary acts that make up an episode of deliberation. While it can
be perfectly correct to say that in deliberating one considered X, Y, and Z
and concluded that P, it would be a mistake to think of this whole process
as an indivisible unit. If one is interested in deliberation as an active,
agential process, it is important to see that it is made up of agential
units, and these units are, in each case, an act in which something with
apparent (theoretical or practical) relevance is brought into consciousness as part of a larger plan to reach a theoretical or practical conclusion.
Seen on this fine-grained scale, we are reminded that deliberation is often
a far cruder process than the step-by-step valid deductions that philosophers enjoy describing. It is common for the process of deliberation to
throw up a fragmentfor example, Harold might suddenly say to himself, Oh, the planning council!rather than a complete set of ideas
entailing the conclusionI cant go to Calgary on Tuesdaythat is,
nonetheless, reached on the basis of the fragment.
Thinking of these basic agential units highlights the fact that extended deliberative actions are made up not just of these basic exercises
of agency over thought but also of the occurrence in consciousness of
thoughts and feelings that serve as input to deliberation but that are not
brought to consciousness through exercises of agency. When Harold
searches his memory for possible conflicting commitmentsa voluntary
mental actit might result in his consciously remembering that he has
committed to going to a meeting of the planning council. This conscious
remembering itself is something that might well happen in Harold as a
result of something he does directly without it being something he does
directly ( just as sinking a free throw is something that happens as a result
of something done directlyshooting the ballwithout itself being
done directly). The remembering happens in Harold, and having happened, prompts (as it might be) another action, such as Harolds saying
to himself, Yes, I mustnt forget the planning council meeting. Now,
when does that get out? This act, in turn, might lead to other nonvoluntary spontaneous thoughts or feelings, or it might lead to another voluntary mental actand so it will go, until Harold settles what to do or gives
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up (for the moment, at least) on settling what to do.7 In this way (as in so
many others), extended deliberative acts are like extended overt bodily
acts: they are made up of more elementary acts selected, in part, because
of the ongoing consequences of working through the extended action.
Deliberation is performed by performing a sequence of mental
actions. Thus, like any action, we would expect deliberation to be more or
less reasonable or unreasonable on any given occasion.8 Sometimes, deliberating is smart, reasonable, or rational, and sometimes it is stupid,
unreasonable, or irrational.9 Furthermore, even when it is rational to
deliberate in general, a person can deliberate in a specific way that is
rational or in a way that is downright foolish. That is, the specific mental
acts making up the process of deliberation will be reasonable or foolish,
rational or irrational, in addition to their product being such. The word
rational in the expression rational deliberation is thus not a redundant
one: irrational deliberation is possible.
To see the possibility of both sorts of irrational deliberation, consider some cases. First consider cases in which it is irrational to deliberate,
and yet one deliberates. Rebecca deliberates on whether she should really
be getting off the Interstate at exit 33, ignoring the fact that she and her
car are already on the off ramp for exit 33 and situated in swift-moving
traffic though she has no wish to get into an accident and knows that
distraction in swift-moving traffic promotes accidents. The rational thing
for Rebecca to do is surely to drive first and deliberate later, perhaps once
she has reached a calm surface street. Deliberating about the wisdom of
taking exit 33 at just that moment is irrational.
The second sort of case to be illustrated is the case in which the
agent is rational to deliberate in general, but in which the particular
deliberative acts taken by the agent are irrational. Suppose that Katie
7. Thanks to Peter Railton for pointing out to us the importance of the back-andforth in deliberation between basic mental acts and the spontaneous thoughts and feelings such acts often engender.
8. Compare our arguments on this over the next few paragraphs to Joseph Raz, who
expresses the view that reason is inherently normative (Raz 1999, 68).
9. We take a rational person to be a person who acts as he or she does for very good
reasons and thinks as he or she does for very good reasons; we also take it that facts about
being smart or stupid, reasonable or unreasonable, are relevant to claims about rationality
and irrationality. We do not rely here on the idea that rationality is tied to what is ideal
from the perspective of an omniscient outside observer, or anything similar. Newton was
rational in holding his theory of universal gravitation, in spite of that theorys falsity, in
our way of thinking about these things.
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begins to consider the grammaticality of the phrase Im loving. If she

searches her memory for different uses of the phrase, she is probably
proceeding reasonably. Calling to mind a pop song, an advertising campaign, and sentences uttered by different people will bring to consciousness evidence that the phrase has widespread use, and this is worthwhile
evidence to consider when determining what to think about a phrases
grammaticality: in conservative circles the verb to love is not used in the
progressive, but there might be a linguistic change in progress. But suppose that Katie begins to consider ways to express ongoing enjoyment of
something without using the phrase Im loving. She calls to mind the
phrases Ive been enjoying, I relish, and others. She says to herself, no
one needs to say hes loving something. Perhaps she finds the phrase
Im loving distasteful, and her emotions about it are influencing her
effort to determine what to believe about grammar. If she proceeds in this
way, it seems that Katies deliberation is now proceeding unreasonably
there is a sort of wishful thinking at work in her. After all, the existence of
another way to say much the same thing as Im loving is no evidence one
way or the other regarding the grammaticality of Im loving itself. As
Katie knows, a phrase can be grammatical even though it is also optional
as a means of expressing some idea. Given that her goal is to determine
what to think about the grammaticality of the phrase Im loving, she has
taken a wrong turn. Each time she calls to mind another alternative expression, or declares to herself the inessentiality of the expression Im
loving, she is acting unreasonably in her deliberation. And Katies unreasonable deliberation exemplifies just one way in which deliberation
can be improperly influenced: in addition to deliberation that is excessively oriented toward what we wish for (that is, wishful thinking), there is
also fearful thinking, antagonistic thinking, and the like (see Lazar 1999).
There is a lot in the philosophical literature about rational deliberation, while irrational deliberation is rarely mentioned. There is talk
of people who deliberate correctly or who deliberate incorrectly, or of
people who deliberate under good conditions (a cool hour) or under
bad conditions (in emotionally fraught times), but there is little mention
of deliberating irrationally or unreasonably. Is there, then, some independent standard for deliberation, failures of which are best called incorrectness in deliberation rather than irrationality in deliberation?
Consider what it means to deliberate correctly. It does not mean to deliberate in a cool hour, because incorrect deliberation can be the product of
a cool hour (this sometimes seems to happen, for example, when major
economic policies are designed) and at least some correct deliberation is
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the product of hot hours (for example, when righteous indignation

sharpens thoughts on the subject of human rights). Deliberating well or
correctlythe thing that cool hours make more likelyis deliberating
without fallacies and logical errors, as well as without such things as selfdeception or wishful thinkingin a way suited to determining what to
think or do. In other words, correct deliberation is in conformity to the
requirements of rationality. It thus appears that incorrect deliberation is
simply deliberation in violation of those requirements.
Acts of deliberation can be not only closer to or further from
what the reasonable or rational person would have done but also actions
performed for good or bad reasons. When one acts for a reason one does
not simply act or believe in accordance with the reason: ones accordance
with the reason is a result of the fact that one is acting for the reason. Thus,
consider Kiyoshi. It might be rational for Kiyoshi to turn on his television
because there is a program he enjoys that has just started, and this is a
good moment for a pleasant diversion. But Kiyoshi could have done what
is reasonable entirely by accident: he has a bad habit of turning on his
television when he walks in the door, and it was the habit he was acting on
rather than his good reasons. He could also have turned on the television
because of the good reasons to turn it on. There is acting in accordance
with ones reasons, and then there is the further step of acting for ones
reasons. A crucial claim for our article is that what is true of turning on the
television is also true of deliberation. It could be reasonable for Katie to
call to mind the advertising campaign based on the phrase Im loving it
when deliberating about whether the phrase is grammatical. But she
could call it to mind not because of whatever it is that makes it reasonable
to do so (that is, not for the right reasons) but because she has been
thinking about the advertising campaign off and on for a week, for a
course on marketing, and so would have called to mind the campaign
regardless of its relevancejust out of stupid habit, as she might have
said. If this had been the truth of the matter, then Katie would have done a
reasonable or rational thing but not have done it for the reasons there are
to do so. Likewise, Katie could also call the advertising campaign to mind
because her friend insistently urges her to consider the advertising campaign. Perhaps the friend is inarticulate about why the advertising campaign is relevant evidence (or even says something false about why it is
worth considering), and yet the friend will not relent until Katie accedes
and deliberates about what relevance the advertising campaign might
have as evidence regarding the grammaticality of using love in the progressive. Under this condition, again, Katie calls to mind a relevant idea in
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deliberating about what to believe, but again she does not do so for the
reasons she has to do so. Cases like these, displaying a contrast between
deliberating about something for the right reason and deliberating about
something for no good reason or for no reason that bears on what to
think or do, are strong evidence that there is such a thing as acting for the
right reasons (and for better or worse reasons) even when the action is
deliberation itself.
Nothing so far should be very controversial. Though most philosophers interested in deliberation have not provided us with theories of
deliberation or particularly naturalistic examples (Seidman 2008 provides one noteworthy exception), most of them have said nothing incompatible with the foregoingwhich in any case we take to be largely
familiar and conservative. And yet it seems to us that following the consequences of this account of deliberation leads to some very controversial
theses indeed.
2. Deliberation and Responding to Reasons
The idea that deliberation (sometimes also known as reflection, reasoning, practical reasoning, theoretical reasoning, and so forth) is crucial to
thinking and acting for reasons is widespread in philosophy. Consider the
following claims:
When acting rationally, an agent undertakes to act in light of her belief
about what she has reason to do. She chooses her action because it is
supported by reasons. In this sense, rational action seems to embody a
distinctly rational form of motivation in which the agent guides herself by
the thought that an action is recommended by reason. This guiding
thought need not always be explicitly articulated. For rational action to
be possible, however, the agent must, at some level of awareness, conceptualize the features to which she is responding as reason-giving. (Barry
2007, 232)
To make a reason for doing something the agents reason for doing it,
the reason must enter into a process of practical reasoning. . . . I do not
insist that every stage of the agents reasoning be consciously carried out.
The agent may have developed short-cuts in reasoning, and some of these
steps can become programmed into his brain and be carried out automatically. (Chan 1995, 140 and n. 10)
There are reasons why animals act as they do, but . . . only in the most
tenuous sense can we say that they have reasons for acting as they do. Only
a language-using creature can reason and deliberate, weigh the conflict-
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ing claims of the facts it knows in the light of its desires, goals and values,
and come to a decision to make a choice in the light of reasons. (Hacker
2007, 239)
For the person [who wants not to have a toothache, and who believes
that going to the dentist will cure the toothache] to act rationally, she must
be motivated by her own recognition of the appropriate conceptual
connection between the belief and the desire. (Korsgaard 1997, 222)
Once we are aware that we are inclined to believe or to act in a certain
way on the ground of a certain representation, we find ourselves faced
with a decision, namely, whether we should do thatwhether we should
believe or act in the way that the representation calls for or not. Once the
space of reflective awarenessreflective distance, as I like to call it
opens up between the potential ground of a belief or action and the belief
or action itself, we must step across that distance, and so must be able to
endorse the operation of that ground, before we can act or believe. What
would have been the cause of our belief or action, had we still been operating under the control of instinctive or learned responses, now becomes
something experienced as a consideration in favor of a certain belief or
action instead, one we can endorse or reject. And when we can endorse
the operation of a ground of belief or action on us as a ground, then we
take that consideration for a reason. . . . [W]e now both can have, and
absolutely require, reasons to believe and act as we do. (Korsgaard 2009,
31 32)
An agent [must] take herself to have good reasons for the option she
chooses. . . . [And her taking herself to have these good reasons] must not
change under appropriate reflection. (Tiberius 2002, 343)
This selection of quotations strikes us as representative of a

substantial portion of the literature on thinking and acting for reasons
(if the reader finds some of them unclear as expressions of ideas about
deliberation, the significance of particular paragraphs will be made
clearer in the next section). There is, thus, some reason to explore the
weaknesses inherent in the idea that deliberationsomehowmakes
thinking and acting for reasons possible. To this we now turn, focusing on
the special case of the act of deliberation itself.
3. Regress Objections
It might be suggested that an act of deliberation can be an action
taken for reasons because it is an action with an appropriate relationship
to a previous occasion of deliberation. Call this approach Previous
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Deliberation. In the past, perhaps, Harold engaged in some deliberation, at the end of which he embraced the principle that he should not
make a promise without considering (that is, deliberating upon) possible
conflicting prior promises. And that is why, when he searches his memory
for such promises, he not only does what he has reason to do but does it
for a reason. His present deliberating for reasons is constituted by his
acting in accordance with the conclusion of previous deliberation about
how to deliberate in such cases. Or, in a slightly more sophisticated vein,
his present acting (that is, his present searching of his memory) for
reasons is constituted by his acting out of a habit, policy, or virtue that
was engendered by his previous deliberative conclusion about how to
deliberate.10
We assume, along with Anscombe (2000) and philosophers as
different as Davidson (1980) and Korsgaard (1996), that every action is,
by necessity, done for a reason (or reasons; we will stick to saying a
reason). It need not be done from overwhelming reasons or even
good reasons. The action need not be completely justified, but it needs
to be at least somewhat rationalized: done for a very bad, foolish reason,
perhaps, but still for that reason, and not for no reason at all.11 Since
deliberation is an action, deliberation cannot be deliberation without
10. The role of habit in making deliberation responsive to reasons appears to be

invoked by Chan 1995, as quoted above. It is emphasized by, for example, Hookway (1999)
and Herman (1993). Hookway does not clearly endorse Previous Deliberation, howeverperhaps as a result of having a slightly different framing of the issues from the
one that concerns us. Railton (2009) also emphasizes the role of habit, but Railton is very
clear that he rejects anything like Previous Deliberation.
11. What about actions, like choosing one of two equally appealing bales of hay, that
appear to be taken for no reason? An anonymous referee helpfully suggests that, instead
of holding that every action is taken for a reason, we might hold the weaker thesis that
every action coincides in the actual world with an action performed for a reason. On this
suggestion, choosing the left-hand bale of hay is not something one does for a reason
(because one has no reason to prefer it over the right-hand bale), but it is an action that
coincides with choosing either of the bales, and one does have a reason for this coinciding
action (perhaps, to feed a hungry donkey). If this is the best way to sort out these actiontheoretic issues, we can accept this suggestion: it does not change our arguments. But
notice that when a person acts irrationally, there is no rationalizing explanation of why he
or she does what is irrational rather than what is rational. Yet irrational actions still seem to
be actions, performed for (inadequate) reasons. So perhaps there is a theory of action
within which it is possible to say that irrational actions are performed for reasons that do
not justify taking the action rather than some alternatives, and perhaps the same theory
will allow that one bale of hay can be chosen for a reason that nonetheless does not justify
choosing that bale rather than the alternative bale.
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something else rationalizing it, without being done for some reason or
other. Suppose that one act of deliberation is made to be an action done
for a reason by a previous deliberative conclusion, as Previous Deliberation requires. That previous deliberative conclusion was reached through
one or more acts of deliberation. Consider the act of deliberation (assume for simplicity that there is only one) that results in the conclusion.
To be an act of deliberation it has to be done for a reason. If it were not
done for any reason if it were not rationalized by somethingit would
not be an action, and so not an act of deliberation, and would not have the
power to rationalize the present act of deliberation. What, then, makes it
true of the prior deliberative act that it is an action done for a reason?
What rationalizes it? According to Previous Deliberation, it would have
to be some prior act of deliberation. And so we are set off on a regress.
Further, the regress is a vicious one, for no matter how far back in a
deliberating agents life we go, we must always find a prior act of deliberation in order to satisfy the theory. Previous Deliberation thus fails.
It might be suggested that an act of deliberation is an action taken
for a reason because it is an action with an appropriate relationship to
another, simultaneous act of deliberation. Call this approach Present
Deliberation. A defender of Present Deliberation might hold that, as we
reach deliberative conclusions, we also embrace the process by which we
reach these conclusions. That is, each deliberative act contains, as it were,
a second act of deliberation in which the first act is deliberated upon and
found reasonableand on this basis, the fact that the first act is performed for a reason is established.12
Present Deliberation, like Previous Deliberation, also begins a
vicious regress. To be a deliberative act, the second deliberative act
required by Present Deliberation requires that something make it the
case that it is an act done for a reason, and so it requires a third deliberative act, and so on. The viciousness of this regress lies in its requirement that, to deliberate at all, an agent engage in infinitely many distinct
acts of deliberation simultaneously, with each act having a distinct goal.
Infinitely many implicit beliefs can, perhaps, be stored in a finite agent.
But infinitely many distinct mental actions cannot be performed at the
same time by finite agents.13
12. Hacker (2007) and Korsgaard (2009), quoted above, both appear to endorse
Present Deliberation.
13. A variant of Present Deliberation, suggested in conversation by Gil Harman,
avoids the regress by means of self-reference. The suggestion is that acts of deliberation
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It might be suggested, in the light of the foregoing, that an act of

deliberation is performed for reasons because it is an action with an
appropriate relationship to a merely possible act of deliberation. Call
this approach Possible Deliberation. Perhaps it is true that, were Harold
to deliberate about it, Harold would conclude that he is being reasonable
(or unreasonable) in trying to call to mind promises that might conflict
with meeting his son in Calgary. And perhaps it is this fact about what
conclusion he would have reached that makes it true that Harolds act of
trying to call these promises to mind is indeed a reasonable (or unreasonable) act.14
Possible Deliberation, like its counterparts, faces a serious regress
problem. Suppose it is true that had Harold deliberated about the
reasonableness of calling to mind promises that might conflict with meeting his son in Calgary, he would have reached the (theoretical) conclusion that it would be reasonable of him to do so. Now, if Harold had
deliberated, he would have done so for a reason; and so (by Possible
Deliberation), it would have to be true that had he deliberated about
whether he had reason to reach the theoretical conclusion that it would
have been reasonable to call to mind possible conflicts, he would have
reached the theoretical conclusion that, yes, it would have been reasonable to reach the theoretical conclusion that it would be reasonable to call
to mind possible conflicts. And from here it just gets worse, as Harold
must support infinitely many ever-more baroque counterfactuals about
what he would have reasoned about his reasoning about his reasoning
about his reasoning . . . about his reasoning about his calling to mind
possible promises that would conflict with meeting his son in Calgary.
At a certain point, Harolds ability to support these counterfactuals about
reasoning about reasoning . . . will give out, because his intellectual abilities in this regard are (like all of ours) modestly finite, but the need for
counterfactuals about how he would reason about reasoning about
reasoning about . . . is infinite. That is, there is no problem with there
are undertaken for reasons just in case the act of deliberation judges itself to be reasonable, in addition to judging whatever else it judges. The content of Katies deliberation
(for example) might then be as follows: there is an advertising campaign using the phrase
Im loving and this is a reasonable thing to be considering. But Harmans proposal does
not solve other problems for Present Deliberation, found in the next section.
14. Possible Deliberation appears to be defended by Tiberius (2002), quoted above.
It would also seem to be defended in McGeer and Pettit 2002, 294, on the assumption that
believing for a (better or worse) reason is what makes one responsible for ones beliefs.
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being infinitely many possible Harolds, but there is a serious problem

with it being the case that Harold could have had an opinion about what
it would be reasonable for him to believe about his reasoning about his
reasoning about . . . (and so on for another fifty iterations) . . . about his
reasoning about calling to mind possible promises, because this is just too
complex a thing for Harold to have a genuine opinion about. This is the
viciousness of the regress. It will not help to appeal to how Harold would
ideally reason, notice, because how he would ideally reason is via deliberative acts that would themselves be acts performed for reasonsacts
that would themselves be reasonableand so no appeal to ideal reasoning can be made in explicating what it is to deliberate for a reason on pain
of ontological circularity.
A view that combines elements of Present Deliberation and Possible Deliberation is the view that Harold deliberates as he does for reasons if his deliberation stems from an actual mechanism that ensures that
he does whatever he would have done had he deliberated. But it is hard to
see how this view makes progress over Possible Deliberation. Presumably
the combined view holds that Harold deliberates as he does for reasons if
his deliberation stems from an actual mechanism that ensures he deliberates as he would have done had he deliberated on how to deliberate,
which again would have had to be for a reason. This sets off the regress
problem again.15 We have no objection to the idea that thinking and
acting for reasons relies on some mechanismone that could be validated by an ideal observer who deliberated about the operations of the
mechanism. But there is a related idea that is unsupportable and that we
reject: the idea that what makes the mechanism one suited to ensure that
we think and act for reasons is reducible to facts about counterfactual
reasoning about the mechanism.
Possible Deliberation is no more tenable than Previous or Present
Deliberation. And with it we exhaust our imaginations. There are surely
other ways to defend the claim that a deliberative act is performed for a
reason just in case it bears the right relation to some other deliberative
act. But we have covered the main options that seem worth covering and
15. The combined view is also subject to the problems raised in the next section: if
Katie has foolish views about how she ought to deliberate, views that do not ordinarily
come up when she deliberates about this or that but do come up when she deliberates
about how to deliberate about this or that, then this combined view must hold that to
deliberate for good reasons in the present, she must now deliberate in the manner that
she would, foolishly, validate upon considering her deliberative process. More on this
below.
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have found no defense that succeeds. It seems that acts of deliberation are
performed for reasons (good or bad) in virtue of something other than
their relation to deliberation.
4. Other Objections
Apart from regresses, there are various other problems for Previous, Present, and Possible Deliberation. Quite salient is the fact that the experience of deliberating as to how to deliberate is rare and the experience of
deliberating about how to deliberate about how to deliberate almost
nonexistent. Many people seem to get by in life with a bare minimum
of reflection upon their own thought processes. Must we believe that they
have, nonetheless, managed at some time or other to have deliberated
about how to deliberate in sufficiently broad terms that now their acts of
deliberation are all capable of being taken for good (or bad) reasons?
This seems required by Previous Deliberation but unlikely to be true. And
then, Present Deliberation requires an act of deliberation that is not
phenomenologically familiar yet that should be as easy to experience as
ordinary deliberation itself. At the very moment at which Harold consciously tries to call to mind competing promises that would prevent him
from promising to meet his son in Calgary, he is not (if he is anything like
us) consciously evaluating the reasonableness of this conscious search of
his memory. Yet Present Deliberation requires that there be such an act.
So the second deliberative act required by Previous Deliberation would
seem not to be a conscious act at allwhich makes it an act not of
deliberation but of some other kind.
More problems appear when we turn the discussion from acting
for reasons per se to acting for good reasons, or acting rationally or reasonably. Consider the view that acting for good reasons depends on a previous, present, or possible act of deliberation. Problems for these views
arise from the possibility of people deliberating about how to deliberate
but reaching foolish conclusions.
For Past Deliberation, consider people who, perhaps as a result of
adolescent philosophical discussions, have embraced foolish principles
constraining deliberation: to believe nothing in the future without seeing
a proof; to do nothing without first asking how it will benefit me. People
who manage to constrain their deliberations in these ways seem less
reasonable, not more, in virtue of their conformity to their chosen principles. If they neglect their principles (as they often do, common sense
reasserting itself unnoticed), they deliberate in ways that are more
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reasonable, it would seem, while in violation of their most recent settled

policies for deliberation. (One of us has discussed such cases at length in
Arpaly 2000 and Arpaly 2003, chap. 2.)
Present Deliberation entails, similarly, that an utterly unreasonable deliberation about how to deliberate has the power to make the
deliberated-upon deliberation itself reasonable. Thus the view makes it
quite unclear how an act of deliberation could be unreasonable so long as
an agent is, at the moment of deliberation, subjectively content with the
act. Yet, as we have seen, such unreasonable acts of deliberation seem
common enough: if Katie is deliberating about the grammaticality of Im
loving and her deliberation has gone down an unreasonable path in
which she is asking herself about all the alternatives that exist to that
phrase, her subjective contentment with the course of her deliberation
does not make it reasonable. She is failing to act on the reasons she has to
think about other things if her goal is to determine the grammaticality of
the phrase Im loving, and no contemporaneous endorsement of her
thinking can change this fact.
A variant on Present Deliberation holds that an act of deliberation
is one performed for good reasons just in case it is an act that is believed
reasonable, consciously believed reasonable, thought to be justified by
the reasons before the agent, or otherwise taken (cognitively) to be appropriately licensed. Call this variant Present Recognition.16 Strictly
speaking, Present Recognition might fall outside our purview, because
the recognition it requires is not an action (unless it is a judgment, and a
judgment is an action). But Present Recognition is worth addressing; it
also falls prey to the sort of objections being raised in this section to Past,
Present, and Possible Deliberation.
The obvious objection to Present Recognition is the same that
was just made to Present Deliberation: that foolish approving attitudes
would seem unable to make otherwise foolish deliberative acts into ones
performed for good reasons.17 As before, it would seem that if Katie is
getting caught up with thinking of alternatives to the phrase Im loving
16. Present Recognition appears to be endorsed by Barry (2007) and Korsgaard
(1997), quoted above. Niko Kolodny (2005, 520) seems to endorse something like Present
Recognition in writing that for a mental transition to happen for a reason, it must result
from awareness of the justification for the transition. But in a footnote, Kolodny wants to
allow that unconscious, automatic awareness is possible. Since there is no such thing (in
our understanding) as unconscious awareness, we find this a bit puzzling but suspect that
the problems do not go away by burying the putative awareness in the unconscious.
17. Wedgwood (2006, 675) raises similar objections to a similar move.
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while deliberating about its grammaticality, then Katie is deliberating

irrationallyeven if she consciously believes that she is proceeding
very reasonably, or otherwise has a positive cognitive attitude toward
her responsiveness to reasons. Her conscious belief is simply mistaken.
A related objection asks: is an agents conscious belief that he or
she is proceeding reasonably (or whatever other variant of Present Recognition is preferred) itself believed for good reasons? If it is not, then it
seems not to be the sort of thing that could render an act one that is
performed for good reasons. Why would mere faith in ones reasonableness, held for no good reason, be something that could actually render
ones acts reasonable? (If the action happens to be in conformity to the
requirements of rationality, then one is merely lucky that ones act is as
rationally acceptable as one guessed it to be. How does this lucky coincidence justify the claim that the act was not merely in accordance with
rationality but in fact performed for good reasons?) But if the belief in
ones own reasonableness is believed for good reasons, then we can look
back to when the belief was formed and ask how it was that the belief was
formed for good reasons. It cannot be because the belief was the product
of appropriate deliberation about what to believe, on pain of circularity
or regress. So it must be something else. And thus we find that if we start by
holding Present Recognition, we end by recognizing a process outside of
deliberation and voluntary action such that beliefs can be formed for
good reasons via that process. So long as this process is equally capable
of generating actions for good reasons (and at this point there is no
reason to deny it), the conclusion is exactly that toward which we are
pressing. As a result, Present Recognition fares no better than Present
Deliberation.
Finally, Possible Deliberation faces these same problems stemming from the possibility of foolish views about deliberation. Katie is,
suppose, acting for good reasons when she says to herself, Lots of people
seem to say Im loving without scare-quoting it or anything. She is trying
to determine the grammaticality of the phrase, and saying this to herself is
rehearsing relevant information, and she has said it to herself for the
reason that it is relevant information. But suppose Katie has some unreasonable beliefs about good reasoning. In particular, suppose Katie
believes that no piece of evidence is worth considering if it is not conclusive. This belief of hers is unreasonable, of course, and normally she does
not revise her beliefs in accordance with it (though occasionally she does,
when this belief spontaneously occurs to her while she is reasoning). But
in contexts in which she theorizes about how her reasoning should be
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conducted, this belief comes to the fore all the time. It seems to us that
this scenario is possible. And yet, Possible Deliberation must say it is
impossible, because the fact that Katie would reject her own deliberative
act as unreasonable makes it true, according to Possible Deliberation,
that her own deliberative act actually was unreasonable. The mere possession of a foolish belief about what counts as evidence worthy of consideration in deliberation deprives Katie of the capacity to deliberate for
good reasons. We think this is false. It goes against what seems the most
natural interpretation of the case, which is that Katie can be reasonable
in actuality while being counterfactually disposed to reject her own
reasonableness, and also it seems that believing the contrary requires
attributing too much power to single metatheoretical beliefs. We do
not think that believing (in the grips of bad psychology) that every act
is selfish can make every act by that agent selfish. Why should beliefs
about the nature of deliberation be so much more powerful? So we
take it that Katie can deliberate for reasons even though her deliberation
does not conform to her belief about how such deliberation should
proceed.
Tiberius (2002) defends her form of Possible Deliberation against
this objection. Her defense focuses on making it plausible that agents
who force themselves to conform to foolish practical principles act rationally in so doing. Agents who believe that they should consult an astrologer as part of ideal deliberation and who, as a result, do not get proper
medical treatment for something act rationally in not getting the medical
treatment (if doing so follows from the astrological advice), according to
Tiberius. But Tiberius does not consider the question of whether these
agents would be acting irrationally if they had never deliberated (and so
never concluded that they ought to start by consulting an astrologer) but
had simply acted on their belief that doctors know what to do for people
with mysterious pains, plus their belief that they have a mysterious pain,
plus (if needed) their desire not to be in pain. It seems to us that these
agents would be acting for a good reason if they were to just spontaneously visit a walk-in clinic as they were walking past one. And if so,
there is something wrong with Possible Deliberation. The factif it is
onethat agents could undermine their justification for taking this action via reasoning on the basis of a foolish deliberative principle does not
change what the agents can do for good reasons in the absence of such
misguided deliberation.
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5. Is There an Ambiguity?
We have shown that there must be a way of thinking and acting for reasons
independent of deliberation and that this way of thinking and acting
for reasons must be what makes acts of deliberation more or less reasonable as actions. But it is worth asking: is there another waya different
wayof thinking and acting for reasons, one that does rely upon deliberation? That is, are there perhaps two senses of thinking for reasons and
acting for reasons, a weaker sense in which deliberation is not necessary
and a stronger sense in which deliberation is necessary after all?18
There is rarely anything wrong with making distinctions in philosophy, and we see nothing to object to in the present proposal. Let there be
one sense of what it is to think or act for a reason, the sense under discussion in this work so far, and let there be another, called thinking and
acting for reasons par excellence, that is instantiated only when the
thought or act in question has been considered, and validated, by the
thinker or actors own deliberative processes.
With this distinction made, however, it is worth asking what the
status is of beliefs formed and actions performed for reasons par excellence. Are these actions the only ones that are properly said to be actions
as opposed to mere activities? (Are these beliefs the only ones that are
properly said to be beliefs as opposed to mere cognitions?) Are these
thoughts and actions the only ones that are properly said to be rational,
reasonable, sensible, intelligent (or irrational, not very reasonable, foolish, unintelligent)? Are these thoughts and actions ones that are certain
to be more rational than they would have been otherwise? Our answer to
all of these questions is no, for reasons found in what has come before.
And if the answer to all of these questions is no, then while we are happy
to grant the existence of thinking and acting for reasons par excellence,
we see no special role for this sense of acting for reasons in the philosophical literatures with which we are most familiar. It is the sense of
thinking and acting for reasons that is not par excellenceplain thinking and acting for reasonsthat has all of the properties we are most
interested in when we are interested in thinking and acting for reasons.
Begin with the question of whether thinking and acting for
reasons in a sense wholly independent of deliberation (not par excellence) really counts as thinking or acting. There are philosophers who
distinguish the mere activity of some animals from the full-blooded
18. We thank an anonymous referee for urging us to consider this possibility.
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actions that only people can perform.19 Perhaps the philosopher interested in thinking and acting for reasons par excellence would want to
hold, in a similar vein, that being moved by reasons par excellence is a
necessary condition for being a belief or action. So consider the case of
the apparent act of deliberating. Deliberation itself is very rarely something on which one has deliberated, but deliberation is a paradigmatic
mental action, an action one can performlike any actionvoluntarily.
(The reader can experience the voluntary aspect of deliberation by now
electing to take a minute to deliberate on, say, the reasons for the dwindling memberships of unions in the United States, should the reader wish
to do so.) Deliberation is also subject to the common disorders of voluntary action, which is further evidence that it is an ordinary voluntary
action in general (regardless of whether one has just deliberated about
how to deliberate). For instance, one can decide that it is best to cease to
deliberate about how best to flirt with someone unsuitable only to then be
akratic and unable to stop thinking about it.
Moving beyond deliberation, there are all of the apparent actions
people perform and the apparent beliefs they form wholly independently
of deliberation. If we have any grasp of action, then passing the salt when
asked to please pass the salt is an action, and is so whether or not one
deliberates (as rarely happens, in the case of salt passing) about whether
to pass the salt. Likewise, if we have any grasp of belief, then what
typically happens when one opens the fridge and sees everything that
one expects but butter is that one comes to believe that there is no more
butter, and this counts as a belief even in the absence of deliberation on
butters availability. To deny these theses in the cases of ordinary adult
language-using human beings (at least) is, it seems to us, to lose any grasp
one might have had on what actions and beliefs are.20
19. See, for example, many of the essays in Velleman 2000. We note that although
Vellemans views have a strongly Kantian cast, he need not fall prey to any of the arguments
in this article. The desire to make sense to oneself, from which all genuine action must
stem on Vellemans account, is one that might move one for good reasons in the absence
of deliberation upon those reasons.
20. Someone wishing to nonetheless diminish the status of these putative actions and
beliefs by denying them these names could always reserve the words action and belief
for things upon which there has been deliberationbut then the philosophical interest
of true beliefs, as opposed to schmeliefs (things just like beliefs except for not having been
deliberated upon), and true actions, as opposed to shmactions, becomes open to
question.
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So thinking and acting for reasons par excellence is not required

for performing actions or forming beliefs. It is likewise not required for
these actions or beliefs to be more or less rational, performed for better or
worse reasons. As we held earlier in the article, nothing can be an action
without being performed for some reason or other, whether a better or a
worse one. So if we have shown that there can exist actions that are not
performed for reasons par excellence, then we have shown that there are
actions that are performed for better or worse reasons without being
performed for reasons par excellence. And the same reasoning, it
seems, should hold for belief as well as action.
Now, even if this much is agreed to, it might still be held that
thinking and acting that does not happen for reasons par excellence
must always be somewhat deficient in its rationality, intelligence, or
reasonableness. But this too seems wrong. Imagine, for example, Oscar
Wilde, who according to one story bragged that he could make a pun
on any subject. Presented with the challenge the queen, he quickly
answered, the queen is no subject. A conversation like this can happen
much too fast for any deliberation to take place and surprise even the
pun-maker; this is a big part of what makes a great conversationalist. Yet
Wildes answering is a paradigmatic action, and a paradigmatically witty,
smart, well-chosen, intelligent action as well. It would have been less witty
and a lesser display of intelligence had Wilde deliberated before his quip;
this strongly suggests that Wildes quip strikes us as performed for excellent practical and aesthetic reasons, in a way that warrants this kind of
praise, without any presumption that deliberation was involved, and
so without any presumption that it was performed for reasons par
excellence.21 Similar thoughts apply in the epistemic domain. It is a
true dullard who concludes that he or she is out of butter only after
deliberating upon the fact that no butter is in evidence in the refrigerator
and after concluding that the absence of visual evidence is a reason to
believe in the absence of butter. A more intelligent person would be
shown to be more intelligentwould have his or her rational faculties
on full displayin drawing the same conclusion without engaging in any
deliberation at all. There are cases in which human beings cannot draw
the correct epistemic conclusions for good reasons without relying on
deliberation (for example, about complex philosophical matters; see
below)but that such cases exist does not show that every case is one
21. Arpaly (2003, chap. 2) gives witty conversation as an example of possibly rational
action without deliberation.
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in which the only way to believe something for a good reason is to have
first thought it over.
Finally, there is the evidence (drawn on in the previous section)
that theoretical and practical conclusions reached on the basis of deliberation can be less reasonable, less rational, than the theoretical and
practical conclusions that would have been reached in the absence of
deliberation. People with a foolish theory of how to deliberate can make
themselves less reasonable than they would otherwise be by deliberating.
People whose deliberations about whether or not there is any butter do
not rest until a proof is at hand are people whose deliberations are likely
to harm their epistemic status, not help it; had they only not deliberated (and so not drawn upon their thesis that all beliefs need proofs
for their justification), they would likely have believed what was reasonable on the grounds that made it reasonable. Similarly for their practical
counterparts.
In short, while there is room for the idea that there is such a thing
as responding to reasons par excellence, there is no particularly interesting property that attaches to all and only instances of responding to
reasons in this way, in the light of deliberation about ones reasons.
There is an important role for deliberation to play in our thinking and
acting for reasons, as we will now turn to demonstrating. But this role is
one that is intermittent, contingent, and modest.
6. The Role of Deliberation
We concluded that acts of deliberation are in no way required for other
acts of deliberation to be performed for reasons. We take it that, if acts of
deliberation are not required, no other acts are required: acts of deliberation were the only promising candidates from the realm of actions. So
we conclude that it is possible to act for reasons in virtue of things
processesthat are themselves nondeliberative and nonvoluntary. And
while we have only argued that this is true in the realm of deliberation, we
think it natural to generalize: it is possible to believe for reasons and to act
for reasons in all sorts of domains via nondeliberative, nonvoluntary
processes.
We now face an unusual question. What is the value of deliberation? Within the theory of rationality, the value of deliberation is not
normally questioned, but if people are endowed with the capacity to
think and act for reasons without deliberation, then the question of deliberations value naturally arises.
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Thinking and acting for reasons via nondeliberative, nonvoluntary (ND) processes has an impressive role in our lives. But it is also
evident that there are obstacles to thinking and acting for the very best
reasons using only our ND capacities. Other causal processes are at work
within our minds in addition to those that mediate our ND abilities to
think and act for reasons. Quick wit and even ordinary grammaticality can
suffer from low blood sugar, from background emotional distress, from
sitting in view of a distracting television display, and more. There is, as a
result, room for various interventions to enhance our ND abilities to
think and act for reasons.
Caffeine and a good nights sleep and a bite to eat all enhance our
ND abilities to think and act for reasons, but these are purely nonrational
interventions. What room is there for deliberation to contribute to thinking and acting for reasons?
Consider first some more carefully selected ways in which we can
enhance our ND abilities to think and act for good reasons. These abilities can be diminished by distraction: a television in the background,
noisy children running around, the presence of a very attractive personall can make it hard to maintain witty banter, generate philosophical insight, or do other things displaying ND reason-responding at its
best. (They can even make it difficult to act on the reasons one has to use a
verb conjugated for the third person singular or to move the fork in ones
hand to ones mouth.) One thing people do to enhance their ND abilities
to think and act for reasons is to dismiss the distractions: turn off the
television, send the children to play outside, and gaze at the ceiling in
preference to the attractive person.
Another familiar obstacle to our ND abilities to think and act for
good reasons is lack of inspiration. Wit without a set of topics to organize
it is challenging, and new philosophical insights are often promoted by
being asked new questions. To enhance their ND reason-responding,
people will take advantage of available sources of inspiration: glance
about for topics to comment on or listen to the very particular cadences
of a conversational partners speech, if one hopes to find something witty
to say, or encourage a conversational partner to never mind how other
people think about the problem, just tell me whatever you think, when
seeking to jump-start philosophical insight.
Another barrier to the optimal use of our ND abilities to think and
act for reasons is generated when beliefs (and perhaps also plans, desires,
and so forth) are not at the foreground of our awareness. If Harolds son
asks him to meet in Calgary on Tuesday, Harolds thinking will tend to be
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most responsive to the contents of his mind that were just under discussion and to those that are most linked (by association?) to the ideas of
meeting, Calgary, and Tuesday. Harolds thinking will also tend to reflect
ideas that he has dwelt on recently, especially ones he has dwelt on repeatedly. But Harold is in some danger of not taking into account facts he
knows but that he has not much thought about recently in any guise. If,
for instance, Harold had agreed five weeks ago to lunch with someone on
the twentieth, and Tuesday falls on the twentieth, and going to Calgary
requires departing well before lunch, this is much less likely to come to his
mind than a regular Tuesday meeting of the city planning council. Things
one believes (plans, desires, and so forth) but that are not being thought
about at the moment seem less efficacious in influencing ones thoughts,
even when relevant, than things equally believed (planned, desired, and
so forth) but currently or recently thought about, all else being equal.
Automatic retrieval is clearly possible (we spontaneously recall relevant
facts all the time), but it is also clearly not implemented in human beings
with optimal efficiency. Fortunately, there are a number of overt acts one
can take to combat the problem: Harold can keep a day planner and
consult it, for instance.
These sorts of voluntary overt actions have corresponding partners in deliberation. Consider first dealing with distraction. In deliberation, one can take mental actions to deal with distraction: one can refocus
ones attention onto ones question or the evidence already called to
mind, one can use verbal imagery to say to oneself I need to say something about causation, something about causation and otherwise use
mental behavior to block the effects of potentially distracting stimuli.
When these actions involve contents that are relevant to theoretical or
practical conclusions one is pursuing, these actions are acts of deliberation. In this way, deliberation can be a covert action that improves ND
reason-responding, taking the place of an overt action that would improve ND reason-responding. Of course, sometimes acts of deliberation
are a poor substitute for more vigorous action: if the kids are making a
ruckus, saying Is causation always lawful? repeatedly to oneself is probably a less effective way of dealing with distraction than sending them
out to the yard. But sometimes acts of deliberation are more effective
than most overt acts available: if emotional distress is getting in the way of
philosophical contemplation, it might be that mentally refocusing ones
attention is going to be more effective in reaching a theoretical conclusion than giving oneself a slap to the face and muttering Get a grip!
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Note that the deliberative acts just described would themselves be

actions performed for reasons as the result of ND mechanisms. When
deliberation is brought to bear to enhance the efficacy of ND mechanisms for thinking and acting for reasons, it does not do so as an alien
intrusion into an ND process. Rather, deliberation is brought to bear as its
own sort of action, performed through ND mechanisms that make the
deliberative acts themselves more or less reasonable acts: reasonable at
promoting the end of enhancing our ability to think about other things
and act in other ways, for good reasons.
Consider now dealing with lack of inspiration. There are acts of
deliberation that can cope with a dearth of inspiration in the external
world and, in this way, enhance ND reason-responding, just as overt action might. If Heather is planning to make a funny speech at a wedding
and finds herself lacking inspiration, she could take overt actions that
might help, such as browsing through a photo album with pictures of the
bride- and groom-to-be. But she might also engage in deliberative acts,
such as calling to mind things that comedians often talk about, in the
hope of stumbling across a topic of humor that particularly suits the
people involved or the ceremonial occasion. And it might be that on a
given occasion Heather would be better off turning to the world outside
her head for inspiration, while on another occasion her best bet would be
to turn inward and rely on deliberative acts to gain insights into how to
improve her speech.
Next, consider dealing with the problems generated by information that has not recently come to conscious attention. Acts of deliberation by their nature bring ideas and images into consciousness and so
are excellent vehicles for the promotion of neglected factsso long as
something (some ND process that guides deliberative acts) causes the act
of deliberation to focus on the buried information in the first place. To
make it more likely that we will recall such buried information, we use a
number of techniques in deliberation: going over a conclusion or an
argument again, looking (as we say) for potential problems. (If we
are skilled deliberators, we tend to use techniques such as putting the
same ideas into different words, or approaching them from a different
organizational principle or perspective, in order to enhance the probability that we will call to mind buried information.) Sometimes we need
to check an encyclopedia and so forth for such purposes, but often deliberation takes us far enough.
One other circumstance in which deliberation helps (the last we
will mention, though we make no claim to being exhaustive) is when we
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are faced with puzzles that are, for some reason or another, too big for
us. Deliberation can be used to sequence together a set of steps, each one
of which can be performed without deliberation, in such a way that
the sequence results in solving the big problem with which we began.
Consider complex sums: faced with the task of adding 3,545 to 869 we
find ourselves unable to see the result directly. But if we focus our attention first on the sum of five and nine, and keep in mind that the result
ends in four (a conclusion that, itself, can be reached without the aid of
deliberation), and then sum one, four, and six . . . and so on, then we
can perform a sequence of mental actions with the final result being
that we can draw the correct conclusion about the sum of 3,545 and
869. Whether or not a particular task calls for this treatment depends
on the individuals capacity for ND reason-responding: young children
require deliberation even for simple arithmetic, most adults require it
only for more complex calculations, and a few arithmetical wizards immediately seefor the right reasonsums and products that the rest of
us must work through with painstaking effort. It also depends on the
circumstances: deliberation can suddenly be required for a task not normally requiring it if one is overwhelmed by fear or another strong
emotion, for instance. And presumably it depends on the nature of the
task itself: arithmetic lends itself to algorithms requiring only small steps
(relative to our ND reason-responding capacities), and so does shopping
for groceries, but some complex tasks seem not to helpfully decompose
(perhaps generating major new philosophical insights falls into this category). Yet, even with these tasks, deliberation often seems helpful: it is
hard to imagine how a human being could develop a good philosophical
theory, devise a reasonable scientific experiment, or write a structurally
complex short story without it.
The moral that is lurking in these examples is that what deliberation does, when it enhances responding to reasons, is to act to remove
barriers to the ND processes through which we normally think and act for
reasons. Perhaps it is true that, as children, we first learn the value of
talking to our parents, then learn the value of talking to ourselves aloud,
and finally learn the value of voluntarily generating auditory images of
our voices, as a means of thinking more reasonable thoughts about what
to believe and do. But even if this is not true of ontogeny, it is a suitable
myth for the sort of view we are defending. Deliberation is not the foundation of our ability to think and act for reasons but a tactic we have for
enhancing our preexisting, and foundational, abilities to think and act
for reasons: our ND reason-responding.
234
Because this is the role of deliberation, the value of deliberation is

intermittent, contingent, andin some waysmodest.
It is intermittent because sometimes we think and act for reasons
without recourse to deliberation, and at other times we are better able to
enhance our abilities to think and act for good reasons through turning
off the noise in the background than through deliberation.
The value of deliberation is contingent because, so far as we can
see, there is no reason in principle that we have to be designed such that
blood sugar, ambient noise, lack of recent conscious attention, or even
computational tractability are factors that are able to disrupt our ability to
think and act for good reasons. There could exist creatures whose ND
abilities to think and act for good reasons are flawless, or close to it. For
such superhuman creatures, all deliberation would be a waste of time, in
the way it would be a waste of time on our parts to deliberate on trivial,
obvious topics (what is five plus nine? should I brush my teeth at exactly
thirteen minutes to the hour, every hour?). There are animals incapable
of seeing at a glance that a reaching device must be used in order to
secure a certain banana, but we are capable of this feat. There are
human beings among us who are capable of seeing at a glance that 39
goes into 351 nine times, while others of us are not capable of this feat.
(There are also reports of savants capable of seeing at a glance that certain
seven-digit numbers are prime. Though the power is mysterious, we see
no reason to deny that these savants grasp what they do for excellent
reasons, unaided by deliberation.) Why then should there not be possible
creatures who can see at a glance what to do to bring the world to a just
global peace, or what to think about the correspondence theory of truth?
It seems to us that these creatures are possible, though they would be very
unlike us indeed.
There could also be creatures who have all of our difficulties with
ND reason-responding but who also have trouble controlling their behavior if they start thinking about a question. These creatures would be ones
who, once started on the question of whether or not to have a precise time
for brushing their teeth, would have trouble doing anything other than
brushing their teeth for the rest of the afternoon. They would be like
obsessive-compulsives who would be prone to developing topics of obsession and compulsion from dwelling on them in thought. These creatures
are possible, if less well adapted to a world like ours than we ourselves are.
It is only a contingent fact that the Earth is populated by neither
sort of creature: neither creatures who are rationally perfect without deliberation nor creatures who are grossly impaired by it. We have great
235
need of our powers of deliberation and no doubt owe to them much of

the technological and social complexity that we have and that huntergatherers lack (and they, in turn, no doubt benefit greatly from deliberation as well). But things need not have been this way; what deliberation
does for us is not expressive of its nature so much as it is expressive of
our nature: for others deliberation would be otiose or systematically
harmful, but given the kinds of creatures we are, deliberation is by and
large a boon.
Finally, the role of deliberation is modest in that deliberation can
fail to respond correctly to reasons just as much as other actions can.
Deliberation can fail to call to mind the neglected but vital fact, can
look in worthless places for inspiration, can fail to shut out the distractions that are making it so hard to draw any conclusions at all, can take us
to the wrong step in an attempt to solve a problem sequentially. It can
focus our attention on certain facts that support one conclusion while
diverting our attention from other facts that support another (better
supported) conclusion. Deliberation is a valuable but imperfect tool
for improving our more valuable but even more imperfect abilities to
think and act for reasons without it.
7. Thinking and Acting for Reasons without Deliberation
All of this could lead one to the conclusion that a new theory of thinking
and acting for reasons is needed to explain nondeliberative, nonvoluntary processes of reason-responding. We do not propose to offer a theory
here because such a theory has been proposed, elaborated, and defended
at length by one of us in Arpaly 2006, and is defended in Wedgwood
2006. But to make things clearer, we will say a few words about what we
take a suitable theory of ND reason-responding to look like.
A suitable theory of ND reason-responding considers transitions
between mental states: from some beliefs to others (when believing for
reasons), from beliefs (and perhaps desires and plans) to an intention or
willed action (when acting for reasons), and perhaps other transitions as
well. Now, some such transitions happen as a matter of blind material
causation: Katies belief that grammar depends on social practices might
physically rest on a blood vessel that, because of the activity of the neurons
making up the belief, ruptures, causing an end to the neurons making up
her belief that Object is an amusing name for a cat. This sort of transition is obviously not one that happens for reasons. Other transitions
happen because of causal relations that are sensitive to the contents of the
236
mental states involved but not because these contents have any rational
relation to one another. Harold might think of the planning council, and
this mightbecause he associates the idea of planning with Michael
Bratman cause him to think that Michael Bratman, author of Intentions,
Plans, and Practical Reasoning , is very tall. Though physical connections
certainly mediate this causal relation, the causal relation is in some way
sensitive to content as well: it is no accident that planning reminds Harold
of Bratman and not, say, of mice. Just how to understand this sort of
causation-in-virtue-of-content (or, perhaps better, this explanatory relevance of content) is debated by philosophers of mind, but it seems
reasonable enough to us that some true story exists to be told. Still,
even once told, this is not yet a story of mental transitions in virtue of
reasons. Free associative links are not reasons (or do not represent
reasons) to shift from one thought to another. Finally, some transitions
seem to happen because the contents in question have certain logical
relations to one another. The transition from the beliefs that all owls are
strigine and the belief that Bubo is an owl to the belief that Bubo is
strigine is one that could be caused not just by free association but by a
process that is sensitive to the fact that the first content entails the
second.22 Just how a brain might be organized to make this true we
leave to scientists. And just what theory of causation, or causal relevance,
might permit this sort of claimed causal relation to be validated? It seems
to us that it is a special case of the general problem of how to understand
causal relations in virtue of properties (or how to understand causal relevance in terms of properties), and so the problem is one to be left to
philosophers working on causation and causal relevance. It is not a problem specific to action theory or the theory of reasons. The claim that a
belief that Bubo is an owl gave birth to the belief that Bubo is a strigine by
virtue of the logical connection between it and the belief that all owls are
strigines is no more mysterious than the claim that the rock broke the
window by virtue of its mass and rigidity and the fragility of the glass. We
assume that the metaphysical problem has a solution.
22. It is perhaps worth reminding the reader that we do not require thoughts brought
to mind to actually have a logical relation of some sort to anything of note in order to be
part of ones deliberation, much less a logical relation as strong as entailment. All that is
required is that the thought brought to mind be one that is meant by the agent to bear
some logical relation to what to think or what to dowhich might amount to simply being
a consideration that is hoped to be one that inductively undermines one of several considerations counting in favor of taking a certain action or thinking a given thought, for
example.
237
We take reason-responding to require nothing more than mental

transitions that occur because of the logical relations (theoretical entailment, practical entailment, statistical relevance, or the like) between the
different attitudes involved. And we take this to be nothing fancier than
causal relations in virtue of certain properties, something that neither
deliberation nor voluntary action more generally is required to mediate
in general.23
We have argued that deliberation is not essential to rationality.
This is not to deny that deliberation is wonderful. We can think of no
realistic way in which human beings could have achieved the insights in
philosophy, the arts, and the sciences that we have achieved without deliberation. So we celebrate deliberation. But we celebrate it as a powerful
tool well suited to ameliorating our human weaknesses as imperfect ND
reason-responding agents. We are unfortunate in needing deliberation
but fortunate in having the tool that we need. Deliberation is a beautiful
tool for its purpose. Philosophers go wrong only when they misconstrue
deliberation as, not a tool in, but the foundation of, our power to think
and act for reasons.
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Deliberation and Acting for Reasons

Philosophical Review, Vol. 121, No. 2, 2012

NOMY A RPAL Y AND TI MOT HY SCHROEDER

1. The Nature of Deliberation