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Davidson's Debt to Anscombe Davidson’s Debt to Anscombe PAUL HURLEY Claremont McKenna College ABSTRACT: Robert Myers’ interpretation of Donald Davidson’s practical philoso- phy gets Davidson right in many fundamental respects. Myers rightly argues that Davidson avoids inconsistencies among internalism, ethical objectivity, and the belief-desire theory by modifying central elements of the Humean belief-desire the- ory, and that Davidson’s alternative legitimizes the extension of his interpretation and triangulation arguments into the practical sphere. But at a crucial fork in the interpretive road Myers loses his way. Davidson follows G.E.M. Anscombe down a different path, one that takes individual desires to be constituted in part by evaluative judgements. RÉSUMÉ : L’interprétation de la philosophie pratique de Donald Davidson proposée par Robert Myers représente correctement maints aspects fondamentaux de sa pensée. Myers soutient à juste titre que Davidson évite les incohérences entre la position internaliste, l’objectivité éthique et le modèle croyance-désir en modifiant des éléments centraux de ce modèle, et que l’alternative proposée par Davidson rend légitime l’extension des arguments de l’interprétation et de la trian- gulation dans la sphère pratique. Cependant, Myers s’égare à une bifurcation cru- ciale de la route interprétative. Davidson suit G.E.M. Anscombe sur une voie différente, une voie qui considère les désirs individuels comme constitués en partie par des jugements évaluatifs. Keywords: Davidson, Anscombe, belief-desire theory, internalism, desires, inconsistent triad Dialogue 59 (2020), 219–233 © Canadian Philosophical Association/Association canadienne de philosophie 2020 doi:10.1017/S0012217320000050 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 28 Sep 2021 at 02:42:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use. 220 Dialogue 1. Introduction I engage here almost exclusively with Part II of this impressive book.1 I will first make it clear where I am entering into the argument and why. This will involve laying out various important respects in which I think Robert Myers gets Donald Davidson right, before identifying a significant interpretive fork in the road. Myers interprets Davidson as taking a path that anticipates T.M. Scanlon on desires and Michael Smith’s approach to ethical internalism, a path that requires the rejection of Davidson’s own commitment to the holism of pro-attitudes as misguided. But Myers recognizes the existence of a very different interpretive path, upon which individual pro-attitudes are constituted in part by evaluative commitments. I take Davidson to follow G.E.M. Anscombe down this very dif- ferent path, a path that yields an ingenious account both of desires and of the basis for Davidson’s internalism, and that vindicates his commitment to the holism of pro-attitudes. What Myers highlights in Davidson’s account up to this interpretive fork is important, and marks an important advance in Davidson scholarship, but what he elides from view in Davidson’s account by taking the wrong fork in this interpretive road is also crucial to an apprecia- tion of Davidson’s distinctive contributions to practical philosophy. These mis- interpretations, I suggest, follow in part from Myers’ failure to acknowledge the depth of Davidson’s often expressed debt to Anscombe’s Aristotelean views regarding practical reason, desire, and intention. I will close by pointing to var- ious dimensions along which the choice of the wrong interpretive fork matters both to understanding Davidson and to appreciating the implications of his view for substantive questions in contemporary metaethics. As Myers points out, Davidson holds that his interpretation argument, with its commitment to publicity and holism, applies to pro-attitudes such as desires as well as to beliefs. Moreover, Davidson famously and persistently endorses the belief-desire theory. On the most common version of the belief-desire theory of action explanation, the Humean view, desires are merely dispositions to bring about their objects, and normative beliefs are merely expressions of such pro-attitudes, not claims that can be in the strictest sense true or false. Myers also rightly points out that the belief-desire theory, thus understood, is ill-suited to Davidson’s proposed extension of both his triangulation argument and his interpretation argument to the domain of pro-attitudes. In addition, Davidson is clearly committed to the objectivity of value, and the Humean ver- sion of the belief-desire theory raises serious challenges for any attempt to rec- oncile objective value with internalism,2 another position to which Davidson 1 Myers and Verheggen, Donald Davidson’s Triangulation Argument: A Philosophical Inquiry, henceforth DDTA. 2 See Davidson, “How Is Weakness of the Will Possible?,” p. 26, in which he endorses internalism, understood as the position that a judgement of value must be reflected in desires. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 28 Sep 2021 at 02:42:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use. Book Symposium: Donald Davidson’s Triangulation Argument 221 remains committed throughout his work. These three positions, objectivity, internalism, and the Humean form of the belief-desire theory, appear to form an inconsistent triad.3 Within the context of the traditional belief-desire theory, any plausible account of the internal motivating force of value judgements must, it seems, take them to express an agent’s desires, but as conceived by the Humean such affective states are not themselves sensitive to objective rational assessment.4 The objectivity of such judgements, by contrast, requires that they express beliefs, precluding a plausible account of their internal motivating force. Despite these serious and well-documented tensions among them, Myers seems clearly to be right that Davidson is unabashedly committed to all three — ethical objectivity, internalism, and the belief-desire theory. Is Davidson properly read as somehow squaring this metaethical circle? I think Myers is right that the answer is yes, and that the key is Davidson’s distinctive, non-Humean take on the belief-desire theory. To support this inter- pretation, Myers offers a helpful distinction between two commitments that are typically folded together in the Humean account, the first to a Humean theory of motivation, which “revolves around the largely negative claim that beliefs alone are not sufficient to motivate actions,” (“Non-cognitive states are necessary as well” (DDTA, p. 139)), the second to a Humean theory of pro-attitudes, upon which a pro-attitude to Ψ is fundamentally a disposition to do “whatever one believes will increase one’s chances of Ψ-ing” (DDTA, p. 142). Myers seems to me just right that 1) Davidson is best interpreted as accepting the Humean the- ory of motivation while rejecting the Humean theory of pro-attitudes, and 2) Davidson’s proposed modification to the Humean theory of pro-attitudes is the key to understanding why he takes the interpretation and triangulation argu- ments to range over pro-attitudes as well as beliefs. It is also, I believe, the key to why, on Davidson’s approach, there is no inconsistency among internalism, objectivity, and the belief-desire theory, thereby squaring the metaethical circle.5 I hope this brief initial stage setting is sufficient to show how much is right about Myers’ interpretation of Davidson, and why Davidson’s distinctive ver- sion of the belief-desire theory, thus properly understood, is so important. If Davidson can maintain the Humean theory of motivation while providing an alternative to the Humean theory of pro-attitudes upon which they are properly understood as more than such mere dispositions to bring about some Ψ, and this something more both 1) clears the way for extending the triangulation and inter- pretation arguments from beliefs to pro-attitudes (as Davidson clearly intends), 3 Smith, The Moral Problem, pp. 1–14. 4 Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism,p.4. 5 I have explored this aspect of Davidson’s account in greater depth in my “A Davidsonian Reconciliation of Internalism, Objectivity, and the Belief-Desire Theory,” and “Desire, Judgment, and Reason: Exploring the Path Not Taken.” Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 28 Sep 2021 at 02:42:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use. 222 Dialogue and 2) paves the way for a demonstration that the inconsistency of the triad is merely apparent, then the right account of Davidson’s view of pro-attitudes, rea- sons, and actions, and the potential resolution of one of the greatest challenges in metaethics, hinge on what this alternative account of pro-attitudes is, and whether it is plausible. 2. Scanlon and Smith So what, on Myers’ interpretation of Davidson, is this alternative account of pro-attitudes that allows Davidson’s philosophical approach to accomplish all of these important things? His suggestion is that it is “like the one Thomas Scanlon proposes, according to which pro-attitudes are … states in important respects sensitive to one’s judgments about one’s reasons for action” (DDTA, p. 145). Here, Myers begins his journey down an interpretive path that finds little support in the text, and that eschews the more Anscombean path that finds robust support in Davidson’s writings. The contours of these diverging paths will soon become clear, but the first piece of evidence that this cannot be the right one has already been provided. What Myers appeals to in Scanlon’s account, that such pro-attitudes, properly understood, are not mere dispositions to promote some state, but in some sense involve evaluations of their contents as desirable, valu- able, or good, clearly does capture an essential feature of Davidson’s alternative account of pro-attitudes. But it is equally clear that Scanlon’s account can’tbe Davidson’s, because Scanlon’s approach violates what Myers has established are the fundamental parameters for any plausible interpretation of Davidson’s account of pro-attitudes.
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