Reflections on practical reasoning

When you love a friend, you love, among other things, what you do together.  The "together" is something not in your mind, not in your friend's mind.  Nor is it in your or your friend's will.  Nor is it the sum of your will plus the other's will.  It is, in a sense, between the two of you.  It is something both of you possess.  You both engage, for example, in conversation: the quintessential activity of friends.  Both of you experience and share in one and the same conversation, just as you share one and the same friendship.  In fact, conversation and friendship can exist only by being shared in common.  To regard friendship as good is to regard as a public thing that which cannot be reduced to one individual's will or another's, nor to the summation of their two wills. There is no room for such public goods as conversation, friendship in Kant's conception of a pure will.  Two friends have two wills.  According to Kant, they can ...

The best way to think about Nozik's Experience Machine thought experiment is to see it,  as not just clarifying what it is that we really desire (i.e., we desire to engage reality through our actions) but rather as teaching us how we ought to look at our present situation.  Or rather, since "ought" has deontological resonances that I wish to avoid, I would say that the Experience Machine teaches us what sort of attitude toward reality and toward the imaginary we will have if we are to flourish as human beings.  We are better off preferring reality to the Experience Machine than we would be if we preferred the Experience Machine to reality. If you wish that you could be in the experience machine having a positive experience rather than in the real world, which sometimes gives you situations that are undesirable, then you are looking at everything around you in an instrumentalizing way.  When the EM lover (that is, the person who would prefer a positive experience in...