22/09/2026 Hoover Tuesdays "Against the Teleological Conception of Practical Reasons"

The Hoover Chair Research Seminar by Victor MARDELLAT (Chaire Hoover)

The teleological conception of practical reasons (hereafter, ‘TCR’) claims that (i) every intentional action must aim at some result, and infers from this that (ii) all practical reasons are a function of the (un)desirability of the available outcomes. Douglas Portmore, TCR’s leading defender, offers two reasons for accepting it. First, if intentional actions are teleological in the sense specified by (i), then it is natural to suppose that the reasons for performing them are also teleological. Second, (ii) promises to unify all reasons for action under a single framework. Such unification, however, would be an explanatory advantage only if it did not require denying the existence of genuine reasons for action or distorting them. I argue that (i) is not as intuitive as Portmore claims, and that TCR fails adequately to capture all reasons for action. This matters in part because TCR is one of the main assumptions that generate the famous ‘paradox of deontology.’