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Instrumental Reasoning
Edited by Jonathan Way (University of Southampton)
About this topic
| Summary | To be instrumentally rational is, roughly, to take necessary and effective means to one’s end. For instance, if you decide to give up smoking, it would be instrumentally rational to stop buying cigarettes, and to limit the time you spend around other smokers. It would be irrational not to take any means to this end. Instrumental rationality raises several sets of questions, including: (i) what are the principles of instrumental rationality? (ii) what is the normative status of the principles of instrumental rationality? (iii) might instrumental rationality be all of practical rationality? |
| Key works | Much recent discussion of this topic takes off from Bratman 1987, Broome 1999, and Korsgaard 1997. Kolodny 2005, Raz 2005, and Schroeder 2009 are central contributions to the subsequent debate. A different stream in the literature focuses on decision theory as a theory of instrumental rationality.Gauthier 1986 includes a classic and fairly accessible statement of this idea. |
| Introductions | |
Show all references
Related
Siblings
- Decision (303)
- Deliberation (459)
- Desire and Motivation (395)
- Desire and Reason (487)
- Practical and Theoretical Reasoning (354)
- Rational Requirements (476)
- Pratical Reason, Misc (631)
Contents
468 found
Order:
| 1 — 50 / 468 |
- What ought probably means, and why you can’t detach it.Stephen Finlay - 2009 - Synthese 177 (1):67 - 89.Some intuitive normative principles raise vexing 'detaching problems' by their failure to license modus ponens. I examine three such principles (a self-reliance principle and two different instrumental principles) and recent stategies employed to resolve their detaching problems. I show that solving these problems necessitates postulating an indefinitely large number of senses for 'ought'. The semantics for 'ought' that is standard in linguistics offers a unifying strategy for solving these problems, but I argue that an alternative approach combining an end-relational theory (...)
- Sunk Costs.Robert Bass - manuscriptDecision theorists generally object to “honoring sunk costs” – that is, treating the fact that some cost has been incurred in the past as a reason for action, apart from the consideration of expected consequences. This paper critiques the doctrine that sunk costs should never be honored on three levels. As background, the rationale for the doctrine is explained. Then it is shown that if it is always irrational to honor sunk costs, then other common and uncontroversial practices are also (...)
- Maximizing, Satisficing and the Normative Distinction Between Means and Ends.Robert Bass - manuscriptDecision theory, understood as providing a normative account of rationality in action, is often thought to be an adequate formalization of instrumental reasoning. As a model, there is much to be said for it. However, if decision theory is to adequately account for correct instrumental reasoning, then the axiomatic conditions by which it links preference to action must be normative for choice. That is, a choice must be rationally defective unless it proceeds from a preference set that satisfies the axiomatic (...)
- Personal Identity, Self Connectedness, and Time-Biases.Conall Clarke, Andrew J. Latham, Kristie Miller & Wen Yu - manuscriptEmpirical evidence suggests that one explanation for a certain sort of time-bias—near-bias—is diminution in self-connectedness between current person-stages and temporally farther future stages. In this paper we extend this research in two directions. First, we explore the association between self-connectedness towards past person-stages and retrospective near-bias, with the aim of determining whether we can explain retrospective near-bias in terms of diminished feelings of connectedness between current person-stages and temporally farther past stages. Second, we explore the association between future-bias and asymmetries (...)
- (1 other version)Exploring People’s Normative Judgements About Future Bias and The Temporal Value Asymmetry.Andrew J. Latham, Rita Li, Kristie Miller & Wen Yu - manuscriptThis paper empirically probes people’s judgements about whether future-bias and the temporal value asymmetry (TVA for short) are rationally permissible, obligatory, or impermissible. While philosophers are divided about the normative status of these attitudes/preferences, they have typically agreed that non-philosophers will judge that future-bias is at least permissible, and probably obligatory, and will judge that TVA is not permissible. If this is right, it is important for two reasons. First, many researchers have argued that future-bias is a manifestation of TVA. (...)
- Expected Comparative Utility Theory: A New Theory of Instrumental Rationality.David Robert - manuscriptThis paper aims to address the question of how one ought to choose when one is uncertain about what outcomes will result from one’s choices, but when one can nevertheless assign probabilities to the different possible outcomes. These choices are commonly referred to as choices under risk. In this paper, I develop and motivate a new normative theory of rational choice under risk, namely expected comparative utility (ECU) theory. Roughly, for any agent, S, faced with any choice under risk, ECU (...)Remove from this listExport citation
Bookmark - The Extended Theory of Instrumental Rationality and Means-Ends Coherence.John Brunero - forthcoming - Philosophical Inquiries.In Rational Powers in Action, Sergio Tenenbaum sets out a new theory of instrumental rationality that departs from standard discussions of means-ends coherence in the literature on structural rationality in at least two interesting ways: it takes intentional action (as opposed to intention) to be what puts in place the relevant instrumental requirements, and it applies to both necessary and non-necessary means. I consider these two developments in more detail. On the first, I argue that Tenenbaum’s theory is too narrow (...)
- Ends and Persons: A Transcendental Argument.David DeMatteo - forthcoming - Episteme: An Undergraduate Journal of Philosophy.This paper makes a transcendental argument. It assumes the normative validity of the instrumental principle, and then investigates the conditions of its validity. Ultimately, it argues that there are three necessary conditions for its validity. Firstly, agents must be rationally capable of regarding themselves as having a single self that possesses the same reasons, ends, and means. Secondly, agents must be rationally capable of distinguishing themselves from other selves that possess ends. Thirdly, these two conditions must actually obtain, which means (...)Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Instrumental and Intrinsic Desire.Wooram Lee - forthcoming - In Alex Gregory, The Routledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Desire. Routledge.This chapter provides an overview of some central philosophical issues surrounding the distinction between instrumental and intrinsic desires and the relationships between them. I first clarify some crucial notions that feature in the initial characterizations of instrumental and intrinsic desires. I then tackle the question of whether an instrumental desire is a further attitude or mental state that exists independently of the intrinsic desire(s) and the means-end belief(s) that explain it. I outline two arguments in support of the negative answer (...)
- Bargaining with Myself: Humean Temptation and Rational Resistance.Marina Moreno - forthcoming - In Mathea Slåttholm Sagdahl & Attila Tanyi, Problems of Choice: Normativity, Rationality, Axiology, and Morality. London: Routledge.This paper examines robustly Humean solutions to temptation cases. Such cases are typically characterized by a pattern of preference reversal: at an initial time t1, an agent prefers not to give in to a temptation; at a later time t2, when the temptation becomes imminent, this preference reverses; and at a subsequent time t3 after the agent has either succumbed to or resisted the temptation, the preference often reverts again. Standard Humean accounts of rationality and motivation face a difficulty here. (...)
- A Timing Problem for Instrumental Convergence.Rhys Southan, Helena Ward & Jen Semler - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies:1-24.Those who worry about a superintelligent AI destroying humanity often appeal to the instrumental convergence thesis—the claim that even if we don’t know what a superintelligence’s ultimate goals will be, we can expect it to pursue various instrumental goals which are useful for achieving most ends. In this paper, we argue that one of these proposed goals is mistaken. We argue that instrumental goal preservation—the claim that a rational agent will tend to preserve its goals—is false on the basis of (...)
- Neo-Humean Rationality and the Profoundest Problem in Ethics.Caj Strandberg - forthcoming - In Mathea Slåttholm Sagdahl & Attila Tanyi, Problems of Choice: Normativity, Rationality, Axiology, and Morality. London: Routledge.This chapter puts forward a Neo-Humean view on reasons that combines the distinction between rationally requiring reasons and rationally justifying reasons with a Neo-Humean view on rationality which understands this notion in terms of coherence between final desires and pro-attitudes. According to this view, moral reasons consist in rationally justifying reasons whereas prudential reasons consist in rationally requiring reasons. In contrast to a reasons-based view on rationality, the view makes it possible to explain and compare an agent’s moral and prudential (...)
- Practical Death.Angela Sun - forthcoming - Journal of Moral Philosophy.This article argues that integrity requires living up to the requirements of our core commitments. I argue that an agent who violates the requirements of her core commitments and ceases to be integrated suffers a _practical death_: an experience characterized by psychological crisis, loss of direction, and a diminished capacity for instrumental reasoning. Because these conditions undermine self-governance, the account I offer illuminates an important but underexplored connection between integrity and self-governance.
- Purely Instrumental Agents Are Possible.Bennett Eckert-Kuang - 2026 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 112 (1):88–101.Purely instrumental agents can reason about how to realize their ends, but not about which ends to pursue. They can do one thing in order to do another but cannot choose their final ends for reasons. Some have argued that such agents are impossible, and that the success of moral constitutivism depends on their impossibility. Moral constitutivists hope to ground moral norms in the nature of rational agency as such. But if purely instrumental agents are possible, then rational agency is (...)
- Having Normative Practical Reasons.Botan Dolun - 2025 - Dissertation, University at BuffaloThis dissertation investigates the nature of reason-possession, a topic that has received significant attention in recent philosophical literature. Existing discussions often center on a key puzzle: How can false beliefs appear to provide agents with reasons to act, making them rationally responsible for forming intentions based on these beliefs? This puzzle highlights a potential tension between the objective sense of reasons, understood as facts tied to the rational advisability of actions, and the subjective sense of reasons, grounded in an agent's (...)
- Zetetic Flyovers.Julien Dutant, Clayton Littlejohn & Sven Rosenkranz - 2025 - Philosophical Issues 35 (1):51-62.It has recently been argued that purported evidential and zetetic norms issue contradictory verdicts and that such contradictions best be resolved in favor of zetetic norms. The paper argues that this line of argument proves unsuccessful. First, natural formulations of what one ought to do if inquiring into a given matter resemble anankastic conditionals that don't allow for detachment of normatively significant verdicts. Second, even if suitably reformulated, zetetic norms issue, at best, verdicts with a distinctly practical flavor that contrasts (...)
- Inquiry and conversation: Gricean zetetic norms and virtues.Leonardo Flamini - 2025 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 4 (1):1-30.Recently, philosophers have shown an increasing interest in the normativity of inquiry. For example, they discuss which doxastic or epistemic state makes an inquiry permissible or impermissible. Moreover, since our inquiries are typically considered goal-directed activities that aim at answering questions, philosophers have offered general principles to capture their instrumental normativity. However, it is notable that these principles – being general – lack specificity: They do not tell us how we should specifically behave to conduct an effective inquiry. The primary (...)
- From Epistemic States to Duties Not to Inquire?Leonardo Flamini - 2025 - Philosophia (2).Some philosophers consider knowledge the fundamental state whose presence or absence helps us decide when an inquiry is not permissible. Falbo has recently provided an alternative perspective in which epistemic improvement is what determines when an inquiry into a given question is not permitted: If it’s rational to be sure at t that, by inquiring, one won’t improve epistemically upon the question Q, then inquiry into Q is not permissible at t. In this paper, I will show that Falbo’s view (...)
- Contemporary Issues in Theory of Inquiry.Leonardo Flamini - 2025 - Dissertation, University of Pavia - University of ZurichHuman beings are naturally inclined to inquire – this is much uncontroversial. However, recent philosophical discussions reveal that the nature of inquiry and the principles that should guide it remain subjects of significant debate. Namely, we lack a straightforward answer to foundational questions about what inquiry entails and how it ought to proceed. Rather, contemporary philosophical literature presents a range of contrasting perspectives on the descriptive and normative dimensions of inquiry, making it a topic of ongoing disagreement and controversy. This (...)
- Intentions and Inquiry.Daniel C. Friedman - 2025 - Mind 134 (533):85-106.This paper defends the Intention Account of Inquiry. On this account, inquiry is best understood by appeal to a ‘question-directed intention’ (QDI), an intention to answer a question broadly construed. This account’s core commitments help meet recent challenges plaguing extant approaches to characterizing inquiry. First, QDIs are the type of mental state central to inquiry, not attitudes like curiosity or wonder. Second, holding a QDI towards a question and acting in service of it constitutes the start of inquiry. Third, controversial (...)
- Design and Rationalism: A Visualist Critique of Instrumental Rationalism.Michalle Gal - 2025 - Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics 48 (1):75-85.This article presents a visualist theory of design that contrasts with the instrumental rationalism that dominates the philosophy of design. My critique of rationalism is based on two omnipresent and paradigmatic phenomena in design: the variety of forms for one single function and the variety of uses of one form. Instrumental rationalism defines design as a coherent line that runs from a rational goal to the proper means and proper use of an object. Therefore, this philosophy values design according to (...)
- Suppositional Desires and Rational Choice Under Moral Uncertainty.Nicholas Makins - 2025 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 12.This paper presents a unifying diagnosis of a number of important problems facing existing models of rational choice under moral uncertainty and proposes a remedy. I argue that the problems of (i) severely limited scope, (ii) intertheoretic comparisons, and (iii) 'swamping’ all stem from the way in which values are assigned to options in decision rules such as Maximisation of Expected Choiceworthiness. By assigning values to options under a given moral theory by asking something like “how much do I desire (...)
- Reply to Moehler.Katharina Nieswandt - 2025 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 55 (3):270-279.Recently and in this journal, I published a paper titled “Instrumental Rationality in the Social Sciences,” which offered a new argument against the equation of practical rationality with sound means-end reasoning. My paper attracted a critical commentary by Michael Moehler to which I reply here, without presupposing familiarity with my paper or Moehler’s comments. The critique is shown to rest on misunderstandings. Neither does my argument require that means-end reasoning always be egoistic nor can opponents, such as rational choice theorists, (...)
- Promotionalism, orthogonality, and instrumental convergence.Nathaniel Sharadin - 2025 - Philosophical Studies 182 (7):1725-1755.Suppose there are no in-principle restrictions on the contents of arbitrarily intelligent agents’ goals. According to “instrumental convergence” arguments, potentially scary things follow. I do two things in this paper. First, focusing on the influential version of the instrumental convergence argument due to Nick Bostrom, I explain why such arguments require an account of “promotion”, i.e., an account of what it is to “promote” a goal. Then, I consider whether extant accounts of promotion in the literature—in particular, probabilistic and fit-based (...)
- Shifting Scope: A Model of Instrumental Rationality.Caj Strandberg - 2025 - Theoria 91 (4):1-13.The paper develops a new model of instrumental rationality: There is a general concept of instrumental rationality that has two types of instances that differ with regard to coherence and scope. The ‘primary aspect’ applies in effect only to cases where an agent has reason to do what she intends to do and corresponds to a narrow‐scope requirement. The ‘secondary aspect’ applies also to cases where an agent does not have reason to do what she intends to do and corresponds (...)
- Neo-Humean Rationality and the Unity of Practical Normativity.Caj Strandberg - 2025 - Synthese 206 (5):1-28.A unified view of practical rationality needs to meet two requirements: explain facts about practical rationality in terms of one single type of facts and account for the connections between practical rationality and other normatively significant notions. In this paper, I propose a Neo-Humean structure-based view on rationality and suggest that it, in contrast to a reason-based view, is able to meet these requirements. As regards the first requirement, I argue that facts about practical rationality can be ultimately explained by (...)
- Political Normativity… All-Things-Considered.Francesco Testini - 2025 - Topoi 44 (1):39-51.The idea of a distinctively political normativity came under sustained fire lately. Here I formulate, test, and reject a moderate and promising way of conceiving it. According to this conception, political normativity is akin to the kind of normativity at play in all-things-considered judgments, i.e., those judgments that weight together all the relevant reasons to determine what practical rationality as such requires to do. I argue that even when we try to conceive political normativity in this all-things-considered way, and even (...)
- Responsibility and the Demands of Morality: Collected Papers.Stephen J. White, Kyla Ebels-Duggan & Berislav Marušić (eds.) - 2025 - Oxford United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the): Oxford University Press.-/- Stephen J. White (1983-2021) was developing a comprehensive view of responsibility and its limits when his life was tragically cut short. This volume contains his collected papers. White's view of responsibility spans across ethics, action theory, and interpersonal epistemology. Its core idea is that to be responsible for doing or believing something is to be answerable for why one has done it or why one believes it, and to be responsible for a state of affairs is to be answerable (...)
- Naive Action Theory and Essentially Intentional Actions.Armand Babakhanian - 2024 - Southwest Philosophy Review 40 (1):229-237.In their recent paper, “Practical Knowledge without Luminosity,” Bob Beddor and Carlotta Pavese (2022) claim that the doctrine of essentially intentional actions, or “essentialism,” is false. Essentialism states that some actions are essentially intentional, such that, “whenever they are performed, they are performed intentionally” (2022, p. 926). Beddor and Pavese work to reject essentialism, which figures as a key premise in Juan Piñeros Glasscock’s anti-luminosity argument against the knowledge condition for intentional action (Piñeros Glasscock, p. 1240). Historically, essentialism has received (...)
- On Giving Yourself a Sign.Justin Dealy - 2024 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 28 (2).I argue we can have subjective practical reasons to perform actions we believe are neither morally required nor a means to satisfy our intrinsic desires. These reasons are grounded in extrinsic desires. Specifically, my claim is that subjective practical reasons can be grounded in desires for signs (i.e., signatory desires), a species of extrinsic desire, together with means-end beliefs. These reasons act like any other subjective practical reason, except when they are trumped, which I argue can happen when they are (...)
- Anchoring Social Purpose Beyond ESG.Julian Friedland - 2024 - California Management Review 2024 (Summer).Wellbeing is classically considered a bi-product or externality of economic activity, which can either be positively or negatively influenced. This conventional view is returning to the fore in the face of renewed criticisms of ESG reporting standards as leading business astray from its core financial purpose. However, such reactivism overlooks the fact that wellbeing is the functional and overarching aim of human activity, which Aristotle defines as self-actualization. As such, any sound economic system must, in a fundamental way, enhance individual (...)
- Review of Fitting Things Together: Coherence and the Demands of Structural Rationality.Benjamin Kiesewetter - 2024 - Mind 133 (532):1229-1238.This a review of Alex Worsnip's book 'Fitting Things Together: Coherence and the Demands of Structural Rationality'.
- The very idea of rational irrationality.Spencer Paulson - 2024 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 23 (1):3-21.I am interested in the “rational irrationality hypothesis” about voter behavior. According to this hypothesis, voters regularly vote for policies that are contrary to their interests because the act of voting for them isn’t. Gathering political information is time-consuming and inconvenient. Doing so is unlikely to lead to positive results since one's vote is unlikely to be decisive. However, we have preferences over our political beliefs. We like to see ourselves as members of certain groups (e.g. “rugged individualists”) and being (...)
- Rules for the Inquiring Mind: A Unified Framework of Norms of Inquiry.Luis Rosa - 2024 - New York, NY: Routledge.This book concerns the nature and the norms of inquiry. It tackles not only philosophical issues regarding what inquiry is, but also issues regarding how it should and should not be executed. Roughly put, inquiry is the activity of searching for the true answers to questions of our interest. But what is the difference between empirical and armchair inquiry? And what are the right and the wrong ways to inquire? Under what conditions should one start inquiring? Which questions are such (...)
- An instrumentalist unification of zetetic and epistemic reasons.Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (9):2979-3006.Inquiry is an aim-directed activity, and as such governed by instrumental normativity. If you have reason to figure out a question, you have reason to take means to figuring it out. Beliefs are governed by epistemic normativity. On a certain pervasive understanding, this means that you are permitted – maybe required – to believe what you have sufficient evidence for. The norms of inquiry and epistemic norms both govern us as agents in pursuit of knowledge and understanding, and, on the (...)
- Preferences: What We Can and Can’t Do with Them.Johanna Thoma - 2024 - Philosophia 52 (5).In her Choosing Well, Chrisoula Andreou puts forth an account of instrumental rationality that is revisionary in two respects. First, it changes the goalpost or standard of instrumental rationality to include “categorial” appraisal responses, alongside preferences, which are relational. Second, her account is explicitly diachronic, applying to series of choices as well as isolated ones. Andreou takes both revisions to be necessary for dealing with problematic choice scenarios agents with disorderly preferences might find themselves in. Focusing on problem cases involving (...)
- Effects of the ruse of techne (or, why the repression of instrumentality still matters today).Dimitris Vardoulakis - 2024 - In The Ruse of Techne: Heidegger's Magical Materialism. New York: Fordham University Press. pp. 39-41.
- (1 other version)The distinction between final and instrumental ends and the problematic of action in monism.Dimitris Vardoulakis - 2024 - In The Ruse of Techne: Heidegger's Magical Materialism. New York: Fordham University Press. pp. 90-91.
- (1 other version)The subjectivism of authority (Prometheus).Dimitris Vardoulakis - 2024 - In The Ruse of Techne: Heidegger's Magical Materialism. New York: Fordham University Press. pp. 196-202.
- Causal and instrumental ends in monist materialism.Dimitris Vardoulakis - 2024 - In The Ruse of Techne: Heidegger's Magical Materialism. New York: Fordham University Press. pp. 133-143.
- (1 other version)Technophobia and the repression of instrumentality.Dimitris Vardoulakis - 2024 - In The Ruse of Techne: Heidegger's Magical Materialism. New York: Fordham University Press. pp. 263-265.
- (1 other version)The repression of instrumentality in metaphysics.Dimitris Vardoulakis - 2024 - In The Ruse of Techne: Heidegger's Magical Materialism. New York: Fordham University Press. pp. 126-133.
- A Greek-hating philhellene.Dimitris Vardoulakis - 2024 - In The Ruse of Techne: Heidegger's Magical Materialism. New York: Fordham University Press. pp. 91-94.
- (1 other version)Subjectum absconditum.Dimitris Vardoulakis - 2024 - In The Ruse of Techne: Heidegger's Magical Materialism. New York: Fordham University Press. pp. 184-185.
- (1 other version)The paradox of the final end.Dimitris Vardoulakis - 2024 - In The Ruse of Techne: Heidegger's Magical Materialism. New York: Fordham University Press. pp. 266-271.
- Peroratio.Dimitris Vardoulakis - 2024 - In The Ruse of Techne: Heidegger's Magical Materialism. New York: Fordham University Press. pp. 272-278.
- (1 other version)Teleocracy.Dimitris Vardoulakis - 2024 - In The Ruse of Techne: Heidegger's Magical Materialism. New York: Fordham University Press. pp. 112-114.
- Instrumentality incorporated into causality (the first sense of techne).Dimitris Vardoulakis - 2024 - In The Ruse of Techne: Heidegger's Magical Materialism. New York: Fordham University Press. pp. 239-244.
- (1 other version)The ineffectual.Dimitris Vardoulakis - 2024 - In The Ruse of Techne: Heidegger's Magical Materialism. New York: Fordham University Press. pp. 1-4.
- The underground current of a materialism of instrumentality.Dimitris Vardoulakis - 2024 - In The Ruse of Techne: Heidegger's Magical Materialism. New York: Fordham University Press. pp. 35-38.
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