Horizons of Decision: Integration, Immanent Evaluation, and the Limits of Deliberation

This paper develops a value-theoretic and decision-theoretic account of practical reason, drawing on Nietzsche's moral psychology, Kierkegaard's existentialism, and the Quinean holism developed in companion papers. I argue that reasons are internal or external only relative to a horizon—a temporal projection of self-understanding. I distinguish between the proximal horizon (immediate satisfaction), the distal horizon (aspirational identity), and the middle horizon (negotiation between them). This framework allows for a relativistic conception of internality and externality that supports robust normative evaluation without appealing to external moral standards. The central criterion is integration—the unification of desires, beliefs, and dispositions over time. But the framework also acknowledges its own limits. When deliberation runs out—when both Φ and Ψ connect to S equally well—the agent must leap. The instant of decision is "madness"—not because it is irrational, but because it is trans-rational. Such moments reveal a form of existential externality that Williams cannot accommodate. Drawing on the coin flip, the phenomenon of reluctance, the insincere promise, and Meursault as a limit-case, I argue that reasons are preferential and that the supremum of decision is the point at which the objective and subjective collide—a regulative ideal that structures the topology of practical reason.