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  1. What We Owe to Each Other.Thomas Scanlon (ed.) - 1998 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
    How do we judge whether an action is morally right or wrong? If an action is wrong, what reason does that give us not to do it? Why should we give such reasons priority over our other concerns and values? In this book, T. M. Scanlon offers new answers to these questions, as they apply to the central part of morality that concerns what we owe to each other. According to his contractualist view, thinking about right and wrong is thinking (...)
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  • The sources of normativity.Christine Marion Korsgaard - 1996 - New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Onora O'Neill.
    Ethical concepts are, or purport to be, normative. They make claims on us: they command, oblige, recommend, or guide. Or at least when we invoke them, we make claims on one another; but where does their authority over us - or ours over one another - come from? Christine Korsgaard identifies four accounts of the source of normativity that have been advocated by modern moral philosophers: voluntarism, realism, reflective endorsement, and the appeal to autonomy. She traces their history, showing how (...)
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  • On What Matters: Two-Volume Set.Derek Parfit - 2001 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    This is a major work in moral philosophy, the long-awaited follow-up to Parfit's 1984 classic Reasons and Persons, a landmark of twentieth-century philosophy. Parfit now presents a powerful new treatment of reasons and a critical examination of the most prominent systematic moral theories, leading to his own ground-breaking conclusion.
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  • Ethics without principles.Jonathan Dancy - 2004 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    In this much-anticipated book, Jonathan Dancy offers the only available full-scale treatment of particularism in ethics, a view with which he has been associated for twenty years. Dancy now presents particularism as the view that the possibility of moral thought and judgement does not in any way depend on an adequate supply of principles. He grounds this claim on a form of reasons-holism, holding that what is a reason in one case need not be any reason in another, and maintaining (...)
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  • Self-constitution: agency, identity, and integrity.Christine M. Korsgaard - 2009 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Agency and identity -- Necessitation -- Acts and actions -- Aristotle and Kant -- Agency and practical identity -- The metaphysics of normativity -- Constitutive standards -- The constitution of life -- In defense of teleology -- The paradox of self-constitution -- Formal and substantive principles of reason -- Formal versus substantive -- Testing versus weighing -- Maximizing and prudence -- Practical reason and the unity of the will -- The empiricist account of normativity -- The rationalist account of normativity (...)
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  • What We Owe to Each Other.Thomas Scanlon - 2002 - Mind 111 (442):323-354.
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  • Metaphysical Dependence: Grounding and Reduction.Gideon Rosen - 2010 - In Bob Hale & Aviv Hoffmann (eds.), Modality: metaphysics, logic, and epistemology. qnew York: Oxford University Press. pp. 109-135.
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  • (1 other version)The Concept of Mind.Gilbert Ryle - 1949 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 141:125-126.
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  • On What Matters: Volume Three.Derek Parfit - 2011 - Oxford University Press UK.
    Derek Parfit presents the third volume of On What Matters, his landmark work of moral philosophy. Parfit develops further his influential treatment of reasons, normativity, the meaning of moral discourse, and the status of morality. He engages with his critics, and shows the way to resolution of their differences.
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  • (1 other version)Practical reason and norms.Joseph Raz - 1975 - London: Hutchinson.
    Practical Reason and Norms focuses on three problems: In what way are rules normative, and how do they differ from ordinary reasons? What makes normative systems systematic? What distinguishes legal systems, and in what consists their normativity? All three questions are answered by taking reasons as the basic normative concept, and showing the distinctive role reasons have in every case, thus paving the way to a unified account of normativity. Rules are a structure of reasons to perform the required act (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Concept of Mind.Gilbert Ryle - 1949 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 1 (4):328-332.
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  • The question of realism.Kit Fine - 2001 - Philosophers' Imprint 1:1-30.
    This paper distinguishes two kinds of realist issue -- the issue of whether the propositions of a given domain are factual and the issue of whether they are fundamental. It criticizes previous accounts of what these issues come to and suggests that they are to be understood in terms of a basic metaphysical concept of reality. This leaves open the question of how such issues are to be resolved; and it is argued that this may be done through consideration of (...)
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  • Why be rational.Niko Kolodny - 2005 - Mind 114 (455):509-563.
    Normativity involves two kinds of relation. On the one hand, there is the relation of being a reason for. This is a relation between a fact and an attitude. On the other hand, there are relations specified by requirements of rationality. These are relations among a person's attitudes, viewed in abstraction from the reasons for them. I ask how the normativity of rationality—the sense in which we ‘ought’ to comply with requirements of rationality—is related to the normativity of reasons—the sense (...)
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  • The Sources of Normativity.Christine Korsgaard - 1999 - Philosophical Quarterly 49 (196):384-394.
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  • From Normativity to Responsibility.Joseph Raz - 2011 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    What are our duties or rights? How should we act? What are we responsible for? Joseph Raz examines the philosophical issues underlying these everyday questions. He explores the nature of normativity--the reasoning behind certain beliefs and emotions about how we should behave--and offers a novel account of responsibility.
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  • The constitution of agency: essays on practical reason and moral psychology.Christine M. Korsgaard - 2008 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Christine M. Korsgaard is one of today's leading moral philosophers: this volume collects ten influential papers by her on practical reason and moral psychology ...
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  • The possibility of parity.Ruth Chang - 2002 - Ethics 112 (4):659-688.
    This paper argues for the existence of a fourth positive generic value relation that can hold between two items beyond ‘better than’, ‘worse than’, and ‘equally good’: namely ‘on a par’.
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  • Normativity.Judith Jarvis Thomson - 2008 - Open Court. Edited by Russ Shafer-Landau.
    Goodness -- Goodness properties -- Expressivism -- Betterness relations -- Virtue/kind properties -- Correctness properties (acts) -- Correctness properties (mental states) -- Reasons-for (mental states) -- Reasons-for (acts) -- On some views about "ought" : relativism, dilemmas, means-ends -- On some views about "ought" : belief, outcomes, epistemic ought -- Directives -- Addendum 1: "Red" and "good" -- Addendum 2: Correctness -- Addendum 3: Reasons -- Addendum 4: Reasoning.
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  • Engaging Reason: On the Theory of Value and Action.Joseph Raz - 1999 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.
    Joseph Raz presents a penetrating exploration of the interdependence of value, reason, and the will. These essays illuminate a wide range of questions concerning fundamental aspects of human thought and action. Engaging Reason is a summation of many years of original, compelling, and influential work by a major contemporary philosopher.
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  • Practical Reason and Norms.Joseph Raz - 1975 - Law and Philosophy 12 (3):329-343.
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  • Moral Reason.Julia Markovits - 2014 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Julia Markovits develops a desire-based, internalist account of what normative reasons are--an account which is compatible with the idea that moral reasons can apply to all of us, regardless of our desires. She builds on Kant's formula of humanity to defend universal moral reasons, and addresses the age-old question of why we should be moral.
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  • Agency, shmagency: Why normativity won't come from what is constitutive of action.David Enoch - 2006 - Philosophical Review 115 (2):169-198.
    There is a fairly widespread—and very infl uential—hope among philosophers interested in the status of normativity that the solution to our metaethical and, more generally, metanormative problems will emerge from the philosophy of action. In this essay, I will argue that these hopes are groundless. I will focus on the metanormative hope, but—as will become clear—showing that the solution to our metanormative problems will not come from what is constitutive of action will also devastate the hope of gaining significant insight (...)
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  • The Reflective Life: Living Wisely With Our Limits.Valerie Tiberius - 2008 - , GB: Oxford University Press.
    How should you live? Should you devote yourself to perfecting a single talent or try to live a balanced life? Should you lighten up and have more fun, or buckle down and try to achieve greatness? Should you try to be a better friend? Should you be self-critical or self-accepting? And how should you decide among the possibilities open to you? Should you consult experts, listen to your parents, or should you do lots of research? Should you make lists of (...)
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  • What are the Options?Jonathan Dancy - 2004 - In Ethics without principles. New York: Oxford University Press.
    An introductory chapter that maps the possible views about the relation between moral thought and moral principles, showing how extreme the particularist position is. Particularism is contrasted with Rossian intuitionism and its use of prima facie principles; and the particularist account of moral reasoning is contrasted with non-monotonic theories, and with the views of Kagan and Scanlon.
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  • (2 other versions)Normativity.J. J. Thomson - 2008 - Analysis 70 (4):713-715.
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  • The Myth of Instrumental Rationality.Joseph Raz - 2005 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 1 (1):28.
    The paper distinguishes between instrumental reasons and instrumental rationality. It argues that instrumental reasons are not reasons to take the means to our ends. It further argues that there is no distinct form of instrumental reasoning or of instrumental rationality. In part the argument proceeds through a sympathetic examination of suggestions made by M. Bratman, J. Broome, and J. Wallace, though the accounts of instrumental rationality offered by the last two are criticised.
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  • Autonomy and self-respect.Thomas Hill - 1991 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    This stimulating collection of essays in ethics eschews the simple exposition and refinement of abstract theories. Rather, the author focuses on everyday moral issues, often neglected by philosophers, and explores the deeper theoretical questions which they raise. Such issues are: Is it wrong to tell a lie to protect someone from a painful truth? Should one commit a lesser evil to prevent another from doing something worse? Can one be both autonomous and compassionate? Other topics discussed are servility, weakness of (...)
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  • The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy.Jerome B. Schneewind - 1997 - New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.
    This remarkable book is the most comprehensive study ever written of the history of moral philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its aim is to set Kant's still influential ethics in its historical context by showing in detail what the central questions in moral philosophy were for him and how he arrived at his own distinctive ethical views. The book is organised into four main sections, each exploring moral philosophy by discussing the work of many influential philosophers of the (...)
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  • Practical Reason and Norms.C. H. Whiteley - 1976 - Philosophical Quarterly 26 (104):287-288.
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  • Voluntarist reasons and the sources of normativity.Ruth Chang - 2009 - In David Sobel & Steven Wall (eds.), Reasons for Action. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 243-71.
    This paper investigates two puzzles in practical reason and proposes a solution to them. First, sometimes, when we are practically certain that neither of two alternatives is better than or as good as the other with respect to what matters in the choice between them, it nevertheless seems perfectly rational to continue to deliberate, and sometimes the result of that deliberation is a conclusion that one alternative is better, where there is no error in one’s previous judgment. Second, there are (...)
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  • Realism and Constructivism in Twentieth-Century Moral Philosophy.Christine M. Korsgaard - 2003 - Journal of Philosophical Research 28 (9999):99-122.
    In this paper I trace the development of one of the central debates of late twentieth-century moral philosophy—the debate between realism and what Rawls called “constructivism.” Realism, I argue, is a reactive position that arises in response to almost every attempt to give a substantive explanation of morality. It results from the realist’s belief that such explanations inevitably reduce moral phenomena to natural phenomena. I trace this belief, and the essence of realism, to a view about the nature of concepts—that (...)
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  • (3 other versions)The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy.Jerome B. Schneewind - 1998 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 61 (2):398-400.
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  • (1 other version)In defense of future tuesday indifference: Ideally coherent eccentrics and the contingency of what matters.Sharon Street - 2009 - Philosophical Issues 19 (1):273-298.
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  • (1 other version)Commitments, Reasons, and the Will.Ruth Chang - 2013 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 8.
    This chapter argues that there is a particular kind of ‘internal’ commitment typically made in the context of romantic love relationships that has striking meta-normative implications for how we understand the role of the will in practical normativity. Internal commitments cannot plausibly explain the reasons we have in committed relationships on the usual model—as triggering reasons that are already there, in the way that making a promise triggers a reason via a pre-existing norm of the form ‘If you make a (...)
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  • Reason-based choice.E. Shafir - 1993 - Cognition 49 (1-2):11-36.
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  • Are hard choices cases of incomparability?Ruth Chang - 2012 - Philosophical Issues 22 (1):106-126.
    This paper presents an argument against the widespread view that ‘hard choices’ are hard because of the incomparability of the alternatives. The argument has two parts. First, I argue that any plausible theory of practical reason must be ‘comparativist’ in form, that is, it must hold that a comparative relation between the alternatives with respect to what matters in the choice determines a justified choice in that situation. If comparativist views of practical reason are correct, however, the incomparabilist view of (...)
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  • Giving Practical Reasons.David Enoch - 2011 - Philosophers' Imprint 11.
    I am writing a mediocre paper on a topic you are not particularly interested in. You don't have, it seems safe to assume, a (normative) reason to read my draft. I then ask whether you would be willing to have a look and tell me what you think. Suddenly you do have a (normative) reason to read my draft. By my asking, I managed to give you the reason to read the draft. What does such reason-giving consist in? And how (...)
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  • (3 other versions)The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy.J. B. Schneewind - 1998 - Philosophy 74 (289):446-448.
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  • (3 other versions)The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy.J. B. Schneewind - 1998 - Journal of Religious Ethics 29 (1):175-197.
    J. B. Schneewind's "The Invention of Autonomy" has been hailed as a major interpretation of modern moral thought. Schneewind's narrative, however, elides several serious interpretive issues, particularly in the transition from late medieval to early modern thought. This results in potentially distorted accounts of Thomas Aquinas, Hugo Grotius, and G. W. Leibniz. Since these thinkers play a crucial role in Schneewind's argument, uncertainty over their work calls into question at least some of Schneewind's larger agenda for the history of ethics.
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  • Voluntary Obligations and Normative Powers.Neil MacCormick & Joseph Raz - 1972 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 46 (1):59 - 102.
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  • (3 other versions)The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy.J. B. Schneewind - 1998 - Philosophy 74 (3):446-460.
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  • (1 other version)Metaphysics and morals.T. M. Scanlon - 2010 - In Mario De Caro & David Macarthur (eds.), Naturalism and Normativity. Cambridge University Press. pp. 7 - 22.
    This essay argues that normative judgments, in general, and moral judgments, in particular, are "truth apt" and can be objects of belief. Other main claims are: judgments about reasons, if interpreted as true, do not have metaphysical implications that are incompatible with a scientific view of the world. Two kinds of normative claims should be distinguished: substantive claims about what reasons people have and structural claims about what attitudes people must have insofar as they are rational. Employing this distinction, the (...)
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  • The Practical Turn in Ethical Theory: Korsgaard’s Constructivism, Realism, and the Nature of Normativity.William J. FitzPatrick - 2005 - Ethics 115 (4):651-691.
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  • (1 other version)Commitment, Reasons, and the Will.Ruth Chang - 2013 - In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Volume 8. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press. pp. 74-113.
    This paper argues that there is a particular kind of ‘internal’ commitment typically made in the context of romantic love relationships that has striking meta-normative implications for how we understand the role of the will in practical normativity. Internal commitments cannot plausibly explain the reasons we have in committed relationships on the usual model – as triggering reasons that are already there, in the way that making a promise triggers a reason via a pre-existing norm of the form ‘If you (...)
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  • (1 other version)Metaphysics and Morals.T. M. Scanlon - 2003 - Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 77 (2):7-22.
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  • How to Engage Reason: The Problem of Regress.Peter Railton - 2004 - In R. Jay Wallace, Philip Pettit, Samuel Scheffler & Michael Smith (eds.), Reason and Value: Themes From the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz. New York: Clarendon Press.
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  • Reasons: A Puzzling Duality?T. M. Scanlon - 2004 - In R. Jay Wallace, Philip Pettit, Samuel Scheffler & Michael Smith (eds.), Reason and Value: Themes From the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz. New York: Clarendon Press.
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  • Autonomy and Self-Respect.Martina Herrmann - 1994 - Philosophical Review 103 (4):736.
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  • Practical Reasons: The problem of gridlock.Ruth Chang - 2013 - In Barry Dainton & Howard Robinson (eds.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 474-499.
    The paper has two aims. The first is to propose a general framework for organizing some central questions about normative practical reasons in a way that separates importantly distinct issues that are often run together. Setting out this framework provides a snapshot of the leading types of view about practical reasons as well as a deeper understanding of what are widely regarded to be some of their most serious difficulties. The second is to use the proposed framework to uncover and (...)
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  • Humean heroism: Value commitments and the source of normativity.Valerie Tiberius - 2000 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 81 (4):426–446.
    This paper addresses the question "In virtue of what do practical reasons have normative force or justificatory power?" There seems to be good reason to doubt that desires are the source of normativity. However, I argue that the reasons to be suspicious of desire-based accounts of normativity can be overcome by a sufficiently sophisticated account. The position I defend in this paper is one according to which desires, or more generally, proattitudes, do constitute values and provide rational justifications of actions (...)
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