incapable of thinking of ourselves as less than fully real. When I consider that I might
be less than fully real, I experience a kind of existential vertigo that induces some-
thing akin to nausea. When I look at my children and I look at the heaps my children
make, it seems impossible for me to view the ontological status of my children as
being more like that of the heaps rather than, for example, a fundamental particle.
Perhaps I am nothing in the eyes of God, but my kids damn well better not be!
For better or for worse, though, I doubt that we are psychologically incapable of
considering ourselves to be beings by courtesy. Friends of mine have reported to me
that they have no problem doing so! Philosophers such as F. H. Bradley (1930:
chs. 9–10) argued that selves are not fully real. Moreover, it is one of the central tenets
of certain strands of Buddhism that we are nothing more than heaps or collections of
mental occurrences—that in some fundamental sense, there are no selves, and we do
not exist.^41 Moreover, this metaphysical claim plays a central role in the accompany-
ing ethical and religious components of the system: a necessary condition of achieving
enlightenment and thereby breaking free from the wheel of suffering is to recognize
one’s ontological status as a non-entity (in a fundamental sense). So when construct-
ing practical arguments for our full reality we should also be aware of traditions that
offer practical arguments for our lacking full reality!
Let me be clearer about what I mean by apracticalargument versus a theoretical
argument. The terminology I am using has a Kantian ancestry, but as with many
terms of this lineage, it is unclear what their originator intended them to mean.
A practical argument forPhas as its premise that the truth ofPis a necessary
condition for an aspect of our normative practice to make sense; its conclusion is that
we therefore have a practical reason to believe thatP. In a similar vein, Robert Adams
(1987: 150) says that practical arguments are those that give normative reasons for
belief. On this way of thinking, there are at least two kinds of reasons for belief one
can have. Thefirst kind of reasons areevidential reasons. As the name suggests, these
are reasons for belief that stem from evidence, such as perception, memory, rational
intuition, testimony, good arguments, and so on. The second kind of reasons are
practical reasons. Among the practical reasons for belief might beprudentialreasons;
perhaps what Pascal’s (1995: 121–7) wager teaches us is that it is in our best interests
to believe in God and hence we have a powerful prudential reason to believe in God.
Perhaps also among the practical reasons for belief aremoralreasons for belief; we
have such reasons when it is, in a sense, inmorality’sbest interest for us to believe
accordingly. On this way of thinking, both evidential reasons and practical reasons
are genuine reasons, and can be compared with and weighed against each other,
and perhaps sometimes practical reasons carry the day, thereby making a belief
reasonable in virtue of the practical reasons in its favor despite the paucity of
evidence for it, or even despite the existence of evidence against it.
(^41) See Siderits (2007: ch. 3, 142–4) and Garfield (2015: 102–16) for discussion.