No Grit without Freedom

Abstract

In their article “Grit,” Jennifer Morton and Sarah Paul put forward an account of the rationality of grit. They argue that the gritty agent is epistemically resilient in her response to evidence of incapacity, and she is rational in doing so, insofar as such a response is epistemically permissible once she has taken on a commitment to pursuing a goal. In the present discussion, I argue that Morton and Paul disregard the significance of freedom for understanding the rationality of grit. Their view thus faces the problems of how to coordinate deliberation prior to committing to a goal with deliberation afterwards, and of how to understand the self-consciousness of grit. As an alternative, I propose that the rationality of grit should be understood in terms of an agent’s license to settle matters that are partly up to her through practical reasoning, precisely to the extent that they are up to her. Thus, grit can be understood as an instance of diachronic practical rationality.