WIP: Nate Sharadin

“Problems for Pure Probabilism about Promotion”

Humean promotionalists about reasons think that whether there is a
reason for an agent to perform an action depends on whether her
performing that action promotes the satisfaction of at least one of
her desires. Several authors have recently defended probabilistic
accounts of promotion, according to which an agent’s action promotes
the satisfaction of one of her desires just in case her action makes
the satisfaction of that desire more probable relative to some
baseline. In this paper I argue against three such probabilistic
accounts of the baseline. The argument is designed to show that
increase in probability is sufficient but not necessary for promotion.
In light of this result, I lay out an alternative account of promotion
in terms of increase in fit. I argue that disjoining this account with
a probabilistic analysis of promotion yields an acceptable result.