Sympathy for Caligula? A New Defense of Williams' Internalism About Reasons

The purpose of this paper is to argue in defense of Bernard Williams's internalism about practical reason. My intention is to motivate the view in a slightly different way from what has been accustomed in the literature. Thought experiments involving ideally coherent eccentrics are usually brought into this debate as a major point against internalism. I contest that point and argue that our intuitions regarding such characters in fact support an internalist understanding of the notion of reasons for action. To do this, I argue for a supplementation of Williams's view with a speaker-oriented internalist view about the meaning of external reasons ascriptions.