Keynote 4, Michael Ridge

Michael Ridge

https://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/michael-ridge

Friday 29th June, 5-6.30pm Grimond Lecture Theatre 2

Games and the Disguise of the Good

By Michael Ridge and C. Thi Nguyen

A standard view is that agents always pursue ends under ‘the guise of the good’. That is, a rational agent never desires or intends something without regarding it as good. The view has many significant defenders, including Aristotelean accounts of practical reason such as Elizabeth Anscombe’s and Warren Quinn’s, and Kantian accounts such as Christine Korsgaard’s and Barbara Herman’s. One rationale for the view is that it distinguishes action from mere brute behavior, by insisting that action must be intelligible as oriented towards the agent’s conception of the good.

We suggest that there is a significant tension between the guise of the good and the possibility of a core human activity: play, and especially playing games. In our account, derived from Bernard Suits’ account of game-playing, some game-playing involves striving play. In striving play, players adopt an end, not because it is valuable, but because it enables them to engage in a worthwhile activity. A key example of striving play is that of stupid games — games in which the fun part is failing on the way to a pursued end. In such a game, we pursue an end, while not valuing the end itself but instead valuing the activity made possible by willing that end. In some cases, we actually value our failure to achieve the end, yet realize that pursuing it in earnest is necessary for the activity we find valuable.

We argue that the possibility of striving play therefore conflicts with some (though not all) formulations of the guise of the good. This tension, in turn, undermines certain influential Kantian arguments for the humanity formulation of the categorical imperative – arguments which, on our reading, rely on formulations of the guise of the good too strong to square with the possibility of striving play.  The possibility of striving play also undermines certain accounts of the normativity of instrumental rationality.  Finally, the possibility of striving play conflicts with the influential view (whose roots are in the work of Derek Parfit) that the “right” kind of reason for states relevantly like desire must be object-given rather than state-given.