Commitment and the Relegation of Reasons

Title: Commitment and the Relegation of Reasons

By Lilian O’Brien (Helsinki, Philosophy)

Date: Thursday, November 27, 2025

Time: 1530-1700

Room: H-232

Abstract: Commitments – to projects, people, principles – are central to many of our valuable pursuits. In spite of their importance, they have received comparatively little attention in the philosophy of action and agency. Recent attempts to characterize them have focused on the committed agent’s relationship to practical reasons. According to one view, the agent’s responsiveness to reasons explains the characteristic stability of commitment (Alonso 2024). According to another, committing to a person in an intimate relationship involves designating their interests as reasons for one to act (Chang 2013). But commitment often imposes strict requirements on the agent to act in commitment-relevant ways while rationally precluding the consideration of reasons. Given this, I argue for an alternative approach to commitment that relegates the role of practical reasons. It relies instead on characteristic changes in the agent’s reflexive evaluative attitudes. These rationally insulate the agent from the need to consider or generate reasons. In closing I briefly consider how commitment challenges the dominant reasons-responsiveness model of well-functioning agency.

About the speaker: Lilian O’Brien is Senior Research Fellow at Tampere University and University Researcher at the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on issues in the philosophies of action and mind, and has appeared in such journals as Analysis, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, Philosophical Issues, and the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. She is Co-PI (with Arto Laitinen) of the project, Commitment and Self-Evaluation, Individual and Collective, funded by the Research Council of Finland (2024-2028), and member of the project, The Many Faces of Inquiry: Towards a Dynamic and Pluralistic Epistemology (PI Maria Lasonen), funded by the Kone Foundation, Finland (2024-2029).

Organized by the Department of Philosophy