The traditional debate about having reasons for actions has focussed on the motivational and justificatory dimensions. I argue that discussion of these issues has neglected a further and important condition of reasons for action. A person can have a reason only if the considerations that provide the reason are accessible to her. Access means that the agent must be able to see that her reason speaks in favor of her φ-ing. I argue for my thesis by pointing out, first, that (...) theoretical reasons must be accessible in order to justify a person's beliefs and second, that the accessibility of theoretical reasons excludes the inaccessibility of practical reasons. (shrink)

Joseph Raz accepts the ‘normative/explanatory nexus’ which states, roughly, that ‘necessarily normative reasons can explain the actions, beliefs, and the like of rational agents’ (From Normativity to Responsibility, 34). I agree with this rough statement, but I disagree with Raz on the details of the nexus. I further argue that, once we see the correct version of the nexus and the reasons why it is true, we must accept an account of the nature of normative reasons that goes against another (...) central commitment of Raz's. Specifically, we must reject Raz's view that ultimately, normative reasons for action are provided by the value of the relevant action. Instead, what it is to be a normative reason is to be a premise in good reasoning, of a certain sort. Actions supported by normative reasons may be valuable in some way, but it is not ultimately because of their value that we have normative reasons to perform them. I also briefly gesture at why the resulting type of ‘good reasoning’ view of normative reasons offers a more unified and explanatorily satisfying view of normative reasons for action, belief, and other responses than Raz's view. (shrink)

Sentimentalism comes in many varieties: explanatory sentimentalism, judgment sentimentalism, metaphysical sentimentalism, and epistemic sentimentalism. This encyclopedia entry gives an overview of the positions and main arguments pro and con.

Kiesewetter defends the normativity of rationality by presenting a new solution to the problems that arise from the common assumption that we ought to be rational. He provides a defence of a reason-response conception of rationality, an evidence-relative account of reason, and an explanation of structural irrationality in relation to these accounts.

Ever since John Locke, philosophers have discussed the possibility of a normative epistemology: are there epistemic obligations binding the cognitive economy of belief and disbelief? Locke's influential answer was evidentialist: we have an epistemic obligation to believe in accordance with our evidence. In this dissertation, I place the contemporary literature on agency and reasons at the service of some such normative epistemology. I discuss the semantics of obligations, the connection between obligations and reasons to believe, the implausibility of Lockean evidentialism, (...) and some of the alleged connections between agency and justification. (shrink)

Let us give voice to this new demand: we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values should itself, for once, be examined. -Friedrich NietzscheAnyone who, stimulated by education, has come to feel the force of the various obligations in life, at some time or other comes to feel the irksomeness of carrying them out, and to recognize the sacrifice of interest involved; and, if thoughtful, he inevitably puts to himself the question: “Is there really a reason (...) why I should act in the ways in which hitherto I have thought I ought to act? … Should I not really be justified in simply trying to have a good time?” -H.A. Prichard. (shrink)

This chapter addresses the question of what makes expressions meaningful according to the conception of meaning offered by Donald Davidson. It addresses this question by reflecting on Kathrin Glüer’s recent response to it. It argues that Glüer misconstrues both the evidence for meaning that the radical interpreter must rely on and the way in which the principle of charity must be deployed. The articulation of the correct construal of the evidence and the principle reveals the thoroughly non-reductionist aspect of Davidson’s (...) conception of meaning. This aspect becomes even clearer in his later work, through the articulation of the triangulation argument. I try to show how this argument, which is reconstructed in accordance with Claudine Verheggen’s interpretation of it, helps answer the initial question. The question whether the conception has the resources to account for the objectivity of meaning is briefly discussed. (shrink)

A brief explanation and overview of constitutivism.

What is the philosophical role of an historical account of how someone, or some people, came to believe or value as they do? I consider some proposals, due to Bernard Williams and David Wiggins, according to which such an account might either vindicate or subvert our believing or valuing as we do. I suggest some reasons for scepticism about those proposals, at least when construed as providing a fundamental means of assessing cases of believing or valuing. The main problem raised (...) for the proposals, when so construed, is that they conflate reasons that now support believing or valuing with reasons for coming in the first place to believe or value. (shrink)

While there is a vast philosophical literature exploring the conditions under which it is appropriate to hold individuals morally responsible for their actions, relatively little attention has been paid to the related question of which kinds of individuals merit these responsibility ascriptions. Under normal circumstances, typical adult human beings are held morally responsible for their behaviour but infants and nonhuman animals are not. In this thesis, I aim to account for this difference. That is, I aim to give an analysis (...) of the concept of moral agency. In Chapter One, I begin with a schema of moral agency, under which moral agents are characterised by the possession of certain abilities, enabling certain actions, for which certain responses are warranted. The literature on moral responsibility offers many ways of filling in these details, primarily by specifying the relevant agential abilities in terms of various responsibility conditions. My aim in this chapter is to offer a basic account, under which moral agents are characterised by the simplest possible abilities while still being appropriate targets of the relevant responses, such as praise and blame. I draw on the work of Nomy Arpaly, whose account of moral responsibility identifies the relevant ability as the ability to act out of good or ill will. I offer an analysis of this ability, under which basic moral agency is characterised by the ability to have desires about others’ mental states. In Chapter Two, I consider a range of alternative responsibility conditions offered by other philosophers, each of which appears to be necessary for moral agency. I argue that these conditions are not necessary for a basic account of moral agency. In Chapter Three, I move beyond basic moral agency to offer a more restrictive account that aims to capture other important aspects of our moral lives: the practice of justification and our ability to improve our moral character. I claim these aspects are underpinned by the use of moral reasons to guide our behaviour, and in contrast to moral motivation, this guidance is characterised by the ability to have beliefs about the desirability of actions. In Chapter Four, I aim to answer two questions: at what age do humans become moral agents, and are there any nonhuman animals who are moral agents. I draw on the work of Josef Perner, who offers a three-stage framework of the development of mental representation during childhood. I consider the conceptual coherence of this framework, its applicability to both accounts of moral agency developed in the thesis, and the empirical evidence that bears on the framework. As a result, I tentatively conclude that basic moral agency develops at around 18 months of age and may be present in a few species of nonhuman animal, whereas the more restrictive type of moral agency developed in Chapter Three develops no earlier than around 3.5 years of age and is restricted to human beings. (shrink)

Vous pensez peut-être que la peine de mort est injuste ? Ou que l’avortement est moralement acceptable ? Se pourrait-il alors que vous vous trompiez ? C’est en tout cas l’avis des théoriciens de l’erreur. D’après ces philosophes, tous les jugements moraux sont faux parce qu’ils présupposent à tort l’existence de faits moraux à la fois objectifs et non naturels. Organisé autour de ce défi nihiliste, le présent ouvrage aborde les principales théories métaéthiques comme autant de tentatives, plus ou moins (...) fructueuses, de sauver la morale. Les théories qu’on y rencontre combinent invariablement une thèse psychologique (sur la nature des jugements moraux) et une thèse ontologique (sur l’existence d’une réalité morale conforme auxdits présupposés). Dans le style argumentatif sobre et précis qui caractérise la philosophie analytique, ce manuel de métaéthique – le premier en langue française – entreprend d’évaluer minutieusement un ensemble de théories sur la morale. Bien que destiné en premier lieu aux enseignants de philosophie et à leurs étudiants, il se veut accessible à tous ceux qu’intéresse l’éthique. (shrink)

This essay offers a defence of the non-cognitivist approach to the interpretation of moral judgments as disguised imperatives corresponding to social rules. It addresses the body of criticism that faced R. M. Hare, and that currently faces moral anti-realists, on two levels, by providing a full semantic analysis of evaluative judgments and by arguing that anti-realism is compatible with moral aspiration despite the non-existence of obligations as the externalist imagines them. A moral judgment consists of separate descriptive and prescriptive components (...) and is to be understood as a declarative statement prefaced by an 'ideality operator'. Moral beliefs are genuinely representational, but their truth conditions can only be stated with reference to imaginary ideal worlds. Moral judgments are neither confirmed nor verified, but alternative moral positions are preferentially endorsed and adopted by individual agents on the basis of their perceived all-things-considered optimality. High aspiration moralities are normally very costly to agents in terms of their prudential and aesthetic interests, but they are theoretically as eligible as the adoption of other, less demanding sets of rules. (shrink)

Many philosophers have been attracted to the view that reasons are premises of good reasoning – that reasons to φ are premises of good reasoning towards φ-ing. However, while this reasoning view is indeed attractive, it faces a problem accommodating outweighed reasons. In this article, I argue that the standard solution to this problem is unsuccessful and propose an alternative, which draws on the idea that good patterns of reasoning can be defeasible. I conclude by drawing out implications for the (...) debate over pragmatic reasons for belief and other attitudes and for one influential form of reductionism about the normative. (shrink)

I hope to demonstrate the value of a close reading Williams’s ‘Internal and External Reasons’, and to provide a theory of error regarding the substantial body of work which seeks to, in various ways, defang the essay. I do this by providing some historical context for the paper, and sketching where, historically, internalism and certain sorts of moral realism became separated. It will likely not surprise the reader when I suggest that the modern scientific worldview has an important place in (...) the discussion of the notion of external reasons. As mind, motivation, and perception have become less opaque to us, certain avenues for explaining our reasons have come closer to relying on hypotheses which may turn out to be falsifiable, and have thus been abandoned. What may come as more of a surprise is my suggestion that modern egalitarianism is an important factor as well. I suggest that impersonal reason has been used as an (implausible, but perhaps well-intentioned) alternative to the practice of some inflicting their reasons on others. (shrink)

In this paper I argue on two fronts. First, I press for the view that judging is a type of mental action, as opposed to those who think that judging is involuntary and hence not an action. Second, I argue that judging is specifically a type of non-voluntary mental action. My account of the non-voluntary nature of the mental act of judging differs, however, from standard non-voluntarist views, according to which ‘non-voluntary’ just means regulated by epistemic reasons. In addition, judging (...) is non-voluntary, I contend, because it is partially constituted by the exercise of a non-reason-governed skill. This skill, which I call ‘critical pop-out’, consists of an unreflective, often unconscious, ability to detect the kind of situations in which the reflective abilities that also partially constitute our acts of judging should be deployed. We are responsible for our judgments, I conclude, because in identifying such reflection-inviting situations, we reveal the kind of epistemic agents we are. (shrink)

This paper interprets Bernard Williams's claim that all practical reasons must meet the internal reasons constraint. It is argued that this constraint is independent of any substantive Humean claims about reasons and its rationale is a content scepticism about the capacity of pure reason to supply reasons for action. The final sections attempt a positive reconciliation of the internal reasons account with the motivation for external reasons, namely, securing practical objecitivy in the form of a commitment to impartiality. Impartiality is (...) given a contractualist interpretation in the limited sense that socialised agents have a central disposition to hold those reasons that are defensible to reasonable interlocutors, but this is not a substantive constraint on their content. Such a commitment plays a structural role in motivation illustrated by the analogy of the internalisation of a relativised a priori principle. Theorists of moral motivation such as Nagel and Scheffler have uncovered the importance of such structural motivations, but they are best treated as an architectonic feature of a socialised agent's motivational set, not as a principle or motive akin to other principles or motives within that set. This gives us critical leverage on the motivational sets of individuals that goes beyond launching "optimistic internal reasons" statements at them, but it does not violate Williams's constraints on the idea of a practical reason in general. (shrink)

This article is a critical examination of Harry Frankfurt's view of reasons. Frankfurt has argued in a number of recent books for the view which holds that all practical reasons are a function of what we love. This article examines Frankfurt's key argument for this claim. It uses the analogy of a similar argument in the domain of epistemic reasons to show where Frankfurt's argument fails. It also argues that there are a number of plausible views about practical reasons that (...) are available for us as a result. (shrink)

According to a guiding idea in metaethics, there is a necessary link between the concept of normative reasons and the concept of practical rationality. This notion brings up two issues: The exact nature of this link, and the nature of rationality. With regard to the first issue, the debate is dominated by a certain standard claim. With regard to the second issue, the debate is dominated by what I will refer to as ‘subjectivism’ and ‘objectivism’ about rationality, where the latter (...) is assumed to be a necessary condition for the existence of categorical reasons. In this paper, it is argued that subjectivism is able capture an ordinary, non-technical, sense of ‘rational’ whereas objectivism is not. The basic reason is that objectivism fails to account for the essential connection between rationality, malfunctioning, and rational criticism. This means that we face a puzzle: While objectivism appears to be a necessary condition for the existence of categorical reasons, it fails to capture a central sense of ‘rational’. It is finally argued that this puzzle can be solved by abandoning the standard claim about the link between reasons and rationality. (shrink)

According to an influential way of understanding the debate between internalism and externalism about normative reasons, these theories confront us with a dilemma. Internalism is taken to involve a view about rationality which is considered less philosophically problematic than its competitors, whereas externalism is taken to suggest a more contentious view concerning this notion. However, the assumption that externalism involves a more demanding notion of rationality implies that it is able to account for categorical moral reasons, whereas internalism is unable (...) to do so. In this paper, I outline an ecumenical view about normative reasons which involves the same notion of rationality as internalism, at the same time as it is able to account for categorical moral reasons. Thus, it evades the dilemma. (shrink)

These days, just about every philosophical debate seems to generate a position labeledinternalism. The debate I will be joining in this essay concerns reasons for action and their connection, or lack of connection, to motivation. The internalist position in this debate posits a certain essential connection between reasons and motivation, while the externalist position denies such a connection. This debate about internalism overlaps an older debate between Humeans and Kantians about the exclusive reason-giving power of desires. As we will see, (...) however, while these debates overlap, the new debate is importantly different from the old debate. (shrink)

Kieran Setiya begins Reasons Without Rationalism by outlining and arguing for a schema in terms of which he thinks we best understand the nature of normative reasons for action. This is: " Reasons: The fact that p is a reason for A to ϕ just in case A has a collection of psychological states, C, such that the disposition to be moved to ϕ by C-and-the-belief-that-p is a good disposition of practical thought, and C contains no false beliefs. " As (...) Setiya points out, Reasons contrasts with both the ‘advice’ model of normative reasons , which is the view that I myself prefer , and the ‘imitative’ model , preferred by the likes of McDowell .The intuitive idea behind Reasons should be clear enough. Insofar as normative reasons are normative, they are considerations that would justify an agent's acting in a certain way in certain circumstances: there is, thus, a justificatory dimension. But insofar as they are reasons, they are considerations on which the agent might act in those very circumstances: there is thus an explanatory dimension as well. Part of the attraction of Reasons is that it tells us why the considerations that are normative reasons have these two features: a consideration is a normative reason only if, given other things that the agent believes and desires, the disposition to be moved by a belief concerning that consideration is itself a good disposition of practical thought .Reasons is, however, just a schema. …. (shrink)

What makes a subject''s motivationrational is its originating in her practicalreasoning. I explain the appeal of this thesisabout rational motivation, and explore itsrelation to recent discussions of internalismabout reasons for action. I do so in theservice of clarifying an important meta-ethicaldebate between Humean motivational skeptics andtheir Kantian opponents. This debate is oneover whether, as this skeptic contends andKantians deny, considerations about ourmotivational capacities, together withinternalism, restrict genuine reasons foraction to merely instrumental ones. I arguethat properly adjudicating this debate requiresidentifying one (...) particular way in which thethesis about rational motivation has beendeveloped – namely, as a part of what I term``the traditional conception'''' of themotivational efficacy of practical reason. Onthis conception, rational motivation consistsin choosing some course of conduct out of one''scognitive appreciation of the way its relationto one''s practicable good gives one reason todo so. And I side with Kantians against theHumean motivational skeptic in part on groundsthat Kant himself – though not all Kantians –would find congenial: namely, that we shouldaccept the traditional conception. (shrink)

What is the connection between reasons and motives? According to Reasons Internalism there is a non-trivial conceptual connection between normative reasons and the possibility of rationally accessing relevant motivation. Reasons Internalism is attractive insofar as it captures the thought that reasons are for reasoning with and repulsive insofar as it fails to generate sufficient critical distance between reasons and motives. Rather than directly adjudicate this dispute, I extract from it two generally accepted desiderata on theories of normative reasons and argue (...) that a new theory can satisfy both. The new theory locates part of the meaning of normative reason statements in their role in normative discussion. It generates a view of the connection between reasons and motives that is distinct from Reasons Internalism, yet distinctively in its spirit. (shrink)

According to Bernard Williams, if it is true that A has a normative reason to Φ then it must be possible that A should Φ for that reason. This claim is important both because it restricts the range of reasons which agents can have and because it has been used as a premise in an argument for so-called ‘internalist’ theories of reasons. In this paper I rebut an apparent counterexamples to Williams’ claim: Schroeder’s example of Nate. I argue that this (...) counterexample fails since it underestimates the range of cases where agents can act for their normative reasons. Moreover, I argue that a key motivation behind Williams’ claim is compatible with this ‘expansive’ account of what it is to act for a normative reason. (Published with Open Access.). (shrink)

In this paper I argue that only a subset of the reason statementsWilliams defines as external must be rejected as false. `A has areason to '' is necessarily false when the ends and aimsconstitutive of A''s good close off the deliberative route from her S to the conclusion she has reason to . But when less important ends are at stake, it seems that a person''s needs generally provide reasons for action, contrary to Williams''s internalist account. I suspect, however, that (...) there may remain inexorable disagreementover these claims because people value things in two distinct ways. Tosupport my suspicion, I explain how people''s valuation can take either an agency-prioritizing or an end-prioritizing form. I then argue thatresolving the disagreement over Williams''s internalist account ofreasons depends on whether it can be established that the agency-prioritizingform is the rationally superior form of valuation. (shrink)

Hume''s farmer''s dilemma is usually construed as demonstrating the failure of Humeanism in practical reason and as providing an argument in favor of externalism or the theory of resolute choice. But thedilemma arises only when Humeanism is combined with the assumptionthat direct and intentional control of our desires – desiring atwill – is impossible. And such an assumption, albeit widely accepted,has little in its support. Once we reject that assumption we can describe a solution to the dilemma within the bounds (...) of Humeanism. Moreover, wefind in this new solution as argument for the idea of desiring at will. (shrink)

Argues that Hume was a sceptic about practical reason only on a rationalist account of what it would have to be. (This version differs substantially from the published paper.).

Argues that practical irrationality is akin to moral culpability: it is defective practical thought which one could legitimately have been expected to avoid. It is thus a mistake to draw too tight a connection between failure to be moved by reasons and practical irrationality (as in a certain kind of "internalism"): one's failure may be genuine, but not culpable, and therefore not irrational.

The motivational constraint on normative reasons says that a consideration is a normative reason for an agent to act only if it is logically possible for the agent to act for that reason, or at least to be moved so to act. The claim figures Zelig-like in philosophical debates about practical reasons: on hand, occasionally prominent, but never the focus of discussion. However, because it is entailed by a number of prominent views about normative reasons—including various forms of internalism and (...) some views that closely connect reasons to good practical reasoning—its truth or falsehood has important implications. Mark Schroeder (2007) and Julia Markovits (2014) have recently criticized the Motivational Constraint on the grounds of so-called “elusive reasons”: reasons for some agent to act that are such that it is logically impossible both that they are normative reasons for that agent and the agent is moved to act for those reasons. In response, a number of philosophers (Sinclair 2016; Ridge and McKeever 2012; Paakkunainen 2017) have attempted to reconcile blindspot reasons with the motivational constraint. My aim in this paper is to show that these conciliatory strategies fail to overcome the challenge posed by elusive reasons. First, I examine each strategy and argue that it unsuccessful on its own terms. Second, I adduce another type of elusive reason not heretofore discussed in the literature, and I argue that these strategies also cannot make this kind of reason consistent with the motivational constraint. Finally, I defend the existence of this kind of reason against an important objection. (shrink)

According to a common thesis about normative reasons for action, you have a reason to perform a given action only if you can act for that reason. This thesis has long had broad appeal and i...

This section is a discussion of Joseph Raz's Conception of Normativity introduced by Georgios Pavlakos.

I defend the relatively orthodox view that reasons for action are premises in good practical reasoning, against recent counterexamples that suggest that, like “government house” moral justifications, some reasons are to be ignored in deliberation. I also explain, positively, what is right about the orthodoxy. Unless reasons are premises in good practical reasoning, reasons cannot be normative in the way they are usually taken to be, and relatedly, are unfit to play certain familiar theoretical and related everyday roles that give (...) many appeals to reasons their distinctive point. (shrink)

This article challenges the individualism and neutrality of modern moral conscience. It looks to the history of the concept to excavate an older tradition that takes conscience to be social and morally responsive, while arguing that dominant contemporary justifications of conscience in terms of integrity are inadequate without reintroducing these social and moral traits. This prompts a rethinking of the nature and value of conscience: first, by demonstrating that a morally-responsive conscience is neither a contradiction in terms nor a political (...) absurdity; second, by suggesting how a morally-responsive conscience can be informed by the social world without being a mere proxy for social power or moribund tradition. (shrink)

Jonathan Dancy, in his 1994 Aristotelian Society Presidential Address, set out to show ''why there is really no such thing as the theory of motivation''. In this paper I want to agree that there is no such thing, and to offer reasons of a different kind for that conclusion. I shall suggest that the so-called theory of motivation misconstrues the question which it purports to answer, and that when we properly analyse the question and distinguish it clearly from other questions (...) with which it should not be confused, we do not need a theory of motivation at all. (shrink)

Moral requirements apply to rational agents as such. But it is a conceptual truth that if agents are morally required to act in a certain way then we expect them to act in that way. Being rational, as such, must therefore suffice to ground our expectation that rational agents will do what they are morally required to do. But how could this be so? It could only be so if we think of the moral requirements that apply to agents as (...) themselves categorical requirements of rationality or reason. For the only thing we can legitimately expect of rational agents as such is that they do what they are rationally required to do (Smith 1994: 85). (shrink)

My main goal in this article is methodological: I want to spell out how a Kantian perspective could accommodate current empirical work on cognition, and in particular on emotion. Having chosen John McDowell as a guide, I try to characterize his view of moral experience and underline its Kantian traits. I start by identifying the conception of freedom as exemplified in the rational wolf thought experiment in Two Forms of Naturalism as the main Kantian trait. I then go through the (...) characterization of two other crucial aspects of our moral experience – reasons and value. I suggest that McDowell’s approach to moral experience, although not itself strictly Kantian in all of its details, is an instance of a transformative view of rationality, as defended by Matthew Boyle and that such transformative view is the key to accommodate empirical research on cognition within a Kantian perspective. (shrink)

Weak psychological egoism is the doctrine that anything an agent does intentionally, that agent does at least expecting thereby to realize one of her self-regarding ends. (Strong psychological egoism, by contrast, is the doctrine that agents act always intending thereby to realize a self-regarding end.) Though weak psychological egoism is a doctrine ultimately answerable to empirical evidence, we presently have excellent a priori reasons for accepting it and attempting to construct psychological theories that include it as an organizing principle. These (...) reasons have mainly to do with the idea that to understand the motivation behind an action, we need to understand the force of the consideration that motivates the agent, and the way to do this is to find a self-regarding end associated in the agent''s mind with acting on that consideration. (shrink)

Internalists about reasons following Bernard Williams claim that an agent’s normative reasons for action are constrained in some interesting way by her desires or motivations. In this paper, I offer a new argument for such a position—although one that resonates, I believe, with certain key elements of Williams’ original view. I initially draw on P.F. Strawson’s famous distinction between the interpersonal and the objective stances that we can take to other people, from the second-person point of view. I suggest that (...) we should accept Strawson’s contention that the activity of reasoning with someone about what she ought to do naturally belongs to the interpersonal mode of interaction. I also suggest that reasons for an agent to perform some action are considerations which would be apt to be cited in favor of that action, within an idealized version of this advisory social practice. I then go on to argue that one would take leave of the interpersonal stance towards someone—thus crossing the line, so to speak—in suggesting that she do something one knows she wouldn’t want to do, even following an exhaustive attempt to hash it out with her. An internalist necessity constraint on reasons is defended on this basis. (shrink)

According to advocates of internalism about reasons for action, there is an interesting connection between an agent’s reasons and the agent’s present desires. On the simplest version of this view, an agent has a reason to act a certain way at some time if and only if acting that way would promote his present desires. Let us call this the sub-Humean model.1 The sub-Humean model is widely regarded as too simple on the grounds that there are adverse conditions, such as (...) massive confusion, in which desires are irrationally possessed or acquired, thereby failing to provide reasons for action.2. (shrink)

This paper concerns a prima facie tension between the claims that (a) agents have normative reasons obtaining in virtue of the nature of the options that confront them, and (b) there is a non-trivial connection between the grounds of normative reasons and the upshots of sound practical reasoning. Joint commitment to these claims is shown to give rise to a dilemma. I argue that the dilemma is avoidable on a response dependent account of normative reasons accommodating both (a) and (b) (...) by yielding (a) as a substantial constraint on sound practical reasoning. This fact is shown to have significance for the contemporary dialectic between moral realists and their opponents. (shrink)

In this paper I present an argument for the claim that you ought to do something only if you may believe that you ought to do it. More exactly, I defend the following principle about normative reasons: An agent A has decisive reason to φ only if she also has sufficient reason to believe that she has decisive reason to φ. I argue that this principle follows from the plausible assumption that it must be possible for an agent to respond (...) correctly to her reasons. In conclusion, I discuss some implications of this argument (given that some other standard assumptions about reasons hold). One such implication is that we are always in a position to be justified in believing all truths about what we have decisive reason (or ought) to do. (shrink)

In this paper I present a new argument against internalist theories of practical reason. My argument is inpired by Frank Jackson's celebrated Knowledge Argument. I ask what will happen when an agent experiences pain for the first time. Such an agent, I argue, will gain new normative knowledge that internalism cannot explain. This argument presents a similar difficulty for other subjectivist and constructivist theories of practical reason and value. I end by suggesting that some debates in meta-ethics and in the (...) philosophy of mind might be more closely intertwined than philosophers in either area would like to believe. (shrink)

A cosmopolitan education must help us identify with those who are unlike us. In Martha Nussbaum’s words, students must learn “enough to recognize common aims, aspirations, and values, and enough about these common ends to see how variously they are instantiated in the many cultures and their histories.” It is commonly thought that reading serious literature will play a significant role in this process. However, this claim is challenged by theorists we call sentimentalists, who claim that the goals of cosmopolitan (...) education are better served by less sophisticated, overtly sentimental texts which take a certain moral framework as given and encourage straightforward emotional responses within the guidelines of that framework. This paper critiques the sentimentalists’ position, arguing that their conception of a ‘sentimental education’ is inadequate to prepare students for the increasingly diverse, complex, cosmopolitan world their fate it is to inhabit. (shrink)

Ordinary normative discourse includes talk about the reasons for action we had in the past but only came to discover in hindsight. In some cases, we come to discover these reasons not because new information has come to light, but because our values have changed. Contemporary metaethical views, namely Street's Humean constructivism and Blackburn's and Gibbard's quasi-realism, have some difficulty accounting for these reasons and the claims we make about them. This difficulty hinges on the diachronic complexity of these reasons (...) and claims. It cannot be the case that these reasons were constructed by the perspective we had in the past before our values changed. If there were no extant reasons in the past, then it would seem that our claims about them in the present cannot be true. Quasi-realists can account for the way in which reason claims purport to be true by appealing to a deflationary sense of truth and so can remain agnostic on the actual existence of these reasons. Nevertheless, Street argues that t.. (shrink)

Internalists about reasons generally insist that if a putative reason, R, is to count as a genuine normative reason for a particular agent to do something, then R must make a rational connection to some desire or interest of the agent in question. If internalism is true, but moral reasons purport to apply to agents independently of the particular desires, interests, and commitments they have, then we may be forced to conclude that moral reasons are incoherent. Richard Joyce (2001) develops (...) an argument along these lines. Against this view, I argue that we can make sense of moral reasons as reasons that apply to, and are capable of motivating, agents independently of their prior interests and desires. More specifically, I argue that moral agents, in virtue of their capacities for empathy and shared intentionality, are sensitive to reasons that do not directly link up with their pre-existing ends. In particular, they are sensitive to, and hence can be motivated by, reasons grounded in the desires, projects, commitments, concerns, and interests of others. Moral reasons are a subset of this class of reasons to which moral agents are sensitive. Thus, moral agents can be motivated by moral reasons, even where such reasons fail to link up to their own pre-existing ends. (shrink)