Self-Improvement Without a Self: Reasons vs Causes
I'm once again going to spend some time talking about actual vs perceived causes. See Post 1 and Post 2.
I was talking about a function last time that models how well our perceived causes line up with the real world, but I'm not super interested in that line of thinking right now.
I think what I want to talk about now are "reasons". Reasons are something introduced by Derek Parfit in his series "On What Matters". The way I view his line of thinking is that there are facts about the world and those facts give us reason to act in some way.
For example,
I want to live. (fact)
I need to eat food to live. (fact)
To satisfy these facts. I ought to eat. (reason)
Initially on first glance I feel like reasons are the same as actual causes, but I think they're different. For example, I ought to eat because I do indeed want to live and need food to eat, but it may as well be a fact that I have some sort of eating disorder that prevents me from eating what I need. So in some particular moment I may have reason to eat, but I don't eat because of some different actual cause.
Reasons are to me a bit more powerful than actual causes. Actual causes are facts telling me why I behaved some way, but reasons are facts telling me how I ought to behave.
Parfit also has another object I want to look at next time that's similar to our notion of a perceived cause.
But I'll save that one for tomorrow.