Practical Unreason

The philosophical literature on failures of practical reason generally takes categories of failure recognized in common-sense morality and in the philosophical tradition-weakness of will, compulsion, wantonness, and the like-and offers a reconstruction of what is involved in such failures. The approach is deferential; it casts philosophy in the role of underlabourer to received wisdom. In this essay we explore a methodologically bolder approach to practical irrationality. We start with a distinction between intentional and deliberative perspectives on the explanation of action and we try to show how it can be used to generate a systematic taxonomy of the different types of failure that we may expect to find in practical reason.