acting on p when you know you don’t know p

It looks like I’m going to give blogging another go. I got a lot of useful feedback last summer when I returned to blogging.

A certain kind of case has been bugging me for a month or so. Here is a case with the relevant structure. Suppose Jack is getting ready to leave the house for work. He has a big date tonight. In fact, he is meeting is girlfriend’s parents for the first time. Jack is a philosopher, and so the professional standards for personal grooming that Jack is subject to are very permissive. However, things are not so permissive with his girlfriend’s parents. They would immediately think Jack is very lazy if he didn’t show up clean shaven. Jack knows, let’s say, that there is a reasonable chance that he won’t have time to come back home to shave before the date and a reasonable chance that he will. But he doesn’t know how long it will take him to get through the work he has to do after he teaches, and so he isn’t sure if he’ll be able to get home in time.

I think it’s clear that Jack should shave in the morning. Moreover, I think it is plausible that it is permissible for Jack to act on Conservative:

conservative: I won’t make it back home in time.

Thus, I think that it’s permissible for Jack’s motivating reason for shaving to be Conservative.

If this is right, what follows? At first I thought that the Knowledge Action Principle and its ilk was in trouble:

kap: When your choice is p-dependent, treat p as a practical reason iff you know p.

At least in one sense, this isn’t right. For I don’t think that it’s permissible for Jack to treat p as a practical reason full-stop. For example, it’s clearly not permissible for Jack to assert that Conservative is a practical reason. Moreover, it’s impermissible for Jack to believe that p is a practical reason. What I think is permissible for Jack is to accept p for the purposes of his grooming decision. If it’s permissible merely to accept p, then it’s not permissible to believe p is a practical reason and assert p is a practical reason.

Notice that appealing to the belief/accept distinction doesn’t seem to give the defender of KAP and its ilk any room to maneuver. For those principles are just about what status your attitudes must have towards a proposition in order to permissibly treat it as a practical reason. It seems like if acceptance isn’t knowing, or believing with justification, or believing a truth and you can permissibly act on p when you permissibly accept p, then KAI and its ilk have a problem.

In other words, if I’m right about cases of mere acceptance, then those who think that permissible action must be driven by states that have some type of positive justificatory status do have some kind of problem. For it seems like acting on p is a really central aspect of treating p as a practical reason. And if you can permissibly act on p when you permissibly accept p, then not all permissible action has a tight connection with states that have a positive justificatory status.

I take it the most natural response is to deny that it really is permissible to act on Conservative, and that instead it’s only permissible to act on a proposition about how likely you are to make it home, or about how bad it would be if you thought you would make it home but didn’t, or something like this. This doesn’t seem right to me. Most of my evidence for this is gained by reflecting on my own behavior in cases like this. I really think that I act on the ‘conservative’ proposition, so to speak. Moreover, at the time of acting I’m always quite confident that I am justified in doing so.

Alternative explanations welcome.

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Reliability and Luminosity in Williamson’s Anti-Luminosity Argument
• Someone point out my stupidity (x-posted at RE)
• Knowledge and its Limits Reading Group, chapter 5.
• A young man learns what’s most important in life from the guy next door

~ by Errol Lord on May 25, 2009.