College of Arts and Letters Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2016.03.23 Author George Pavlakos and Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco (eds.) Reasons and Intentions in Law and Practical Agency Published: March 23, 2016 George Pavlakos and Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco (eds.), Reasons and Intentions in Law and Practical Agency, Cambridge University Press, 2015, 331pp., $95.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781107070721. Reviewed by Jonathan Crowe, University of Queensland This is one of those books where the papers from a conference session are gathered together in an edited volume. Books of this kind suffer from two common flaws: the theme may turn out to be too broad to produce a coherent set of papers and the contributions may prove to be of uneven quality. I am pleased to report that the present book avoids both these pitfalls. The essays are tightly grouped around a set of topical and important issues in theories of practical reasoning and philosophy of law. The contributions are uniformly very strong. The book explores the connections between reasons and intentions in practical agency, with a particular focus on legal reasoning. The volume as a whole seeks to present a picture of normativity that emphasises the relationship between agents and reasons for action. The editors argue in their introduction that prominent internalist accounts of practical reasons seek to explain normativity in terms of agent-independent facts about what ought to be done (3). The essays in this collection, by contrast, explore the idea that the normativity of moral and legal reasons is best understood by connecting them with the agent's intentions. This approach links 'knowledge of what the agent is doing with knowledge of what it is good to do' (6). The volume is divided into three parts. The first part, comprising four chapters, asks how intentional actions can give rise to normative reasons. It begins with two fairly technical essays on practical reasoning. Ulrike Heuer's chapter explores the connection between intentions and permissibility. She argues for the existence of what she calls 'reasons to act (or not to act) with a certain intention' (RAWCIs) (14). This offers a simpler and less contentious alternative to the doctrine of double effect in explaining certain kinds of cases where the permissibility of an action seems to turn on the agent's intention. The apparent existence of RAWCIs, Heuer argues, gives us reason to reject the view that intentions are irrelevant to permissibility. Sergio Tenenbaum's chapter looks at the role of satisficing in practical agency. He argues plausibly that a focus on practical rationality as a feature of actions (rather than decisions or preferences) gives satisficing an important role, particularly for actions with long-term indeterminate consequences. Actions, Tenenbaum points out, extend through time. Our goals are often vague or indeterminate in the sense that the precise sequence of acts used to pursue an end is rarely specified by the end itself. Baking a cake or running a marathon, for example, can be done in numerous different ways consistent with that goal (38-40). It is not plausible that successfully performing these actions requires us to maximise the utility of each part of the sequence. The next two chapters turn to legal reasoning. Heidi M. Hurd's clear and focused essay examines the plausibility of intentionalism as a theory of legal interpretation. She notes that defenders of originalism are often motivated by fidelity to intentions, so the plausibility of intentionalism is an indicator of the defensibility of originalism more generally (54). Intentionalism, however, struggles to deal with a fundamental question: what does it mean for a lawmaker to have an intention in relation to a dispute, such that the law should be interpreted in line with that intention (56)? If the content of the intention is merely a range of explicitly contemplated cases, then this will be insufficient to govern decisions the framers never thought about.