How does it matter?
I've seen various people become burnt out from philosophy, or worse, fail to engage with it from the off. In many of these cases, I think it's because it's easy to lose sight of what the broader issues at stake are. You can get lost in discussion about the finer points of various views, forgetting why you were there in the first place.
This is aided by the fact that many of us are wary about drawing conclusions beyond what we can safely argue for (though c.f. what I take to be the philosophers' attitude on asserting what they do think they can argue for). I have no great opposition to this attitude. But I'd rather state my views on the broader issues, just far more tentatively. So, as I come to the end of my first year, here's a very rough summary of how I see where I am.
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So my broadest interest in is how I ought to live. But I'm inclined to think that I'm not special, so my question really amounts to the question of how one ought to live. But this question is vastly unclear, in two places.
First, there's the "ought" part. I suspect oughts are merely conglomerations of reasons. Since I take it that when investigating anything, one should investage that thing in the smallest pieces possible, my focus is really on reasons.
Second, there's the "to live" part. This is ambiguous between actions and motives, for a start. So I'd like to know what an action is, what a motive is, and which of these relates most intimately to reasons. My hunch is that reasons relate primarily to actions, but, since we can only truly act via being motivated, I suspect that reasons should attach also to motivation. In fact, I suspect that if we want to distinguish motivation from mere compulsion, we're going to have to make the link between reasons and motivation very close. So close, in fact, that I want to attempt some kind of reduction from motivation to recognition of reasons.
Once this is all in place, I can return to my original question with more precision. But it still needs work, since it seems plausible to suppose that we ought to live in different ways with respect to different kinds of reason that we have. Epistemic, prudential and moral reasons (and others) all pull in different directions. So we need to dintinguish these, and work out what they each require of us. With that in place, we might in turn figure out some way of deciding which reasons are more important under which conditions.
As it happens, I think we can get some grasp on moral and prudential reasons by considering their relation to each other. They bear so much in common that I suspect it will be illuminating to consider them together. If it is true that they have much in common, then knowledge of one provides us with knowledge about the other. That would speed up enquiry into what they each require of us.
So if I had more precise answers to all these issues, I'd have some idea of how I should live.
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There's very obviously more work to be done here than anyone could do in a lifetime, or perhaps in all time. But one can admit this and still want to retain a sense of what the overall questions are to which one hopes to contribute something to answering. Philosophers are sometimes thought to be obsessed with irrelevant minuatae: I hope to have shown that's not true. The reverse charge is that we're arrogant: I'll have to address that another day.
