This paper addresses the question of how the ‘weight’ or ‘strength’ of normative reasons is best understood. We argue that, given our preferred analysis of reasons as sources of normative support, this question has a straightforward answer: the weight of a normative reason is simply a matter of how much support it provides. We also critically discuss several competing views of reasons and their weight. These include views which take reasons to be normatively fundamental, views which analyze reasons as evidence (...) concerning what one ought to do, views which analyze reasons in terms of good reasoning, and views which analyze reasons as explanations of ought-facts, fittingness-facts, or goodness-facts. (shrink)

This paper develops and explores a new framework for theorizing about the measurement and aggregation of well-being. It is a qualitative variation on the framework of social welfare functionals developed by Amartya Sen. In Sen’s framework, a social or overall betterness ordering is assigned to each profile of real-valued utility functions. In the qualitative framework developed here, numerical utilities are replaced by the properties they are supposed to represent. This makes it possible to characterize the measurability and interpersonal comparability of (...) well-being directly, without the use of invariance conditions, and to distinguish between real changes in well-being and merely representational changes in the unit of measurement. The qualitative framework is shown to have important implications for a range of issues in axiology and social choice theory, including the characterization of welfarism, axiomatic derivations of utilitarianism, the meaningfulness of prioritarianism, the informational requirements of variable-population ethics, the impossibility theorems of Arrow and others, and the metaphysics of value. (shrink)

In this paper, we present and defend a natural yet novel analysis of normative reasons. According to what we call support-explanationism, for a fact to be a normative reason to φ is for it to explain why there's normative support for φ-ing. We critically consider the two main rival forms of explanationism—ought-explanationism, on which reasons explain facts about ought, and good-explanationism, on which reasons explain facts about goodness—as well as the popular Reasons-First view, which takes the notion of a normative (...) reason to be normatively fundamental. Support-explanationism, we argue, enjoys many of the virtues of these views while avoiding their drawbacks. We conclude by exploring several further important implications: among other things, we argue that the influential metaphor of ‘weighing’ reasons is inapt, and propose a better one; that, contrary to what Berker (2019) suggests, there's no reason for non-naturalists about normativity to accept the Reasons-First view; and that, contrary to what Wodak (2020b) suggests, explanationist views can successfully accommodate what he calls ‘redundant reasons’. (shrink)

This paper defends the claim that if a person P exists, there can be true positive comparisons between P's existence and P's never having existed at all in terms of what is better or worse for P. If correct, this view will have significant implications for various fundamental issues in population ethics. I try to show how arguments to the contrary fail to take note of a general ambiguity in comparisons when compared alternatives contain their own different standards (or, in (...) the case of non-existence, a lack thereof) on which to base these comparisons. After having answered arguments against the possibility of making positive comparisons, the paper develops a positive account of how to make existence/non-existence comparisons in terms of personal value whilst accepting that a person's non-existence fails to make any contact with the relevant categories of personal value. The guiding idea is the following: When some item satisfies some relevant standard, we can, I argue, infer that it satisfies this standard better than something that fails to satisfy this standard (be this failure due to empirical or conceptual reasons). (shrink)