Practical Reality is a lucid original study of the relation between the reasons why we do things and the reasons why we should. Jonathan Dancy maintains that current philosophical orthodoxy bowdlerizes this relation, making it impossible to understand how anyone can act for a good reason. By giving a fresh account of values and reasons, he finds a place for normativity in philosophy of mind and action, and strengthens the connection between these areas and ethics.

What is the Moral Problem? NORMATIVE ETHICS VS. META-ETHICS It is a common fact of everyday life that we appraise each others' behaviour and attitudes from ...

Practical Reality is about the relation between reasons for acting in the sense of good reasons, reasons why we should act or reasons in favour of acting, and reasons for acting in the sense of the reasons why someone did what he did—his reasons for acting as he did. This distinction I take to be mere commonsense. It is sometimes expressed by talking about motivating or explanatory reasons as opposed to normative or justifying reasons. Though I do use the motivating/normative (...) distinction, I am wary of any suggestion that I am thereby distinguishing two types of reasons. I think of it rather as distinguishing two contexts in which we use the notion of a reason. (shrink)

Russ Schafer-Landau’s ‘Moral judgement and normative reasons’ is admirably clear and to the point (Schafer-Landau 1999). He presents his own version of the argument for the practicality requirement on moral judgement – that is, for the claim that those who have moral beliefs are either motivated or practically irrational – that I gave in The Moral Problem (Smith 1994), and he then proceeds to identify several crucial problems. In what follows I begin by making some comments about his presentation of (...) the argument. I then confront the problems. (shrink)