2026
ABSTRACT: The phenomenology of heroic action seems to be at odds with commonsense morality: while the latter tells us that heroic acts of self-sacrifice are morally optional, heroes reliably believe that such acts are morally required of them. Do heroes systematically exhibit false moral beliefs, or does our commonsense commitment to the possibility of supererogation need revising? This paper argues, contrary to both supererogationists and anti-supererogationists, that we need not decide: as what we are morally required to do depends on how virtuous we are, heroes are right to believe that heroic actions are morally required of them, while ordinary folk morality is right that, for ordinary folk, these very same actions are morally optional. I arrive at this conclusion by supplementing the foremost contemporary account of supererogation with two naturally plausible claims about the virtue of selflessness.
ABSTRACT: According to the Balancing View of Ought, we ought to perform an action if and only if performing the action is most strongly supported by the balance of our reasons. The Balancing View faces the objection from exclusionary reasons, which are second-order reasons not to act for certain other reasons. According to Joseph Raz, the existence of exclusionary reasons undermines the Balancing View: a reason might tip the balance in favour of performing an act but at the same time be excluded by an undefeated second-order reason, in which case one ought not conform to the balance of reasons. I argue that the Balancing View can be defended against this objection and that the existence of exclusionary reasons is compatible with the Balancing View.
ABSTRACT: While the Is-Ought Gap has recently been a topic of growing interest, most contributions are firmly fixed on logical, often quite technical accounts of the autonomy thesis. This book defends two complementary autonomy theses—a modal and ground-based thesis—that provide a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the nature of normativity. The autonomy thesis is often motivated by claims about the nature of the normative domain and its categorical difference from the non-normative domain. This book develops two novel interpretations of the autonomy thesis, one based on the notion of grounding and the other based on a notion of logical-semantic entailment, developed within a framework of truthmaker semantics. Together these accounts capture best the informal idea that we cannot ‘get’ something normative from the non-normative. The proposal is based on an analysis of what it means to say that certain propositional content parts are relevant to the instantiation of entailment and grounding relations. Moreover, the book relates the autonomy debate to other important metaethical debates, and it offers a more explicit account of the theoretical commitments of an autonomist position. Finally, it develops simple and elegant formal equivalents of the proposed autonomy theses which facilitate the evaluation of structurally complex proposed counterexamples, which have impeded a substantive autonomy debate.
ABSTRACT: What is it for an agent to have a moral obligation, or, equivalently, to be overall morally required, to perform an act? In this article, I present an informative account of moral obligations in terms of reasons and show how it can be put to use to solve some pressing problems in moral philosophy. The core idea is that morality is the realm of what we can legitimately expect of one another: for agents to be morally required to ɸ is for them to have reasons to ɸ that are at the same time reasons for everyone to expect them to ɸ. This account is superior to standard rationalist and sentimentalist approaches in capturing both the first-personal deliberative as well as the socio-emotional dimension of moral obligations. Over and above, it provides illuminating explanations of supererogation and the imperatival character of moral requirements.
2025
ABSTRACT: Thomas Schmidt argues that a widely held combination of views about reasons and ought — the Balancing View of Ought and the claim that reasons against ɸ are reasons for not-ɸ — is extensionally adequate only if it is complemented by two principles of reasons transmission. In this paper I present three problems for Schmidt’s package of views and two problems for his transmission principles considered in isolation. I then defend a rival package of views — a version of the Balancing View and the claim that reasons against ɸ are reasons that bear on ɸ with negative weight — that avoids these problems and secures extensional adequacy without Schmidt’s principles. I conclude that friends of the Balancing View should prefer my package of views.
ABSTRACT: In this paper, I present and defend a novel way for non-naturalists to account for the sui generis status of normative facts, which is consistent with the claim that contingent normative facts obtain in virtue of non-normative facts. According to what I call Unsupplemented Partial Ground Approach, non-derivative normative facts have non-normative partial grounds, but are not fully grounded in any collection of facts. This view entails that an explanatory gap separates the normative from the non-normative domain. I argue that this account provides non-naturalists with a metaphysically coherent response to the challenge of accounting for explanatory dependence relations between two domains while positing metaphysical discontinuity (explanatory challenge), and avoids serious objections that alternative non-naturalist accounts face. Moreover, I show that the Unsupplemented Partial Ground Approach is an attractive option for the popular Reasons-First approach, which is often, but I argue prematurely, considered a particularly promising account for non-naturalists.
ABSTRACT: It is often taken for granted that right-makers, that is, the things that make something — say, an action — right, do so by explaining why it is right. This view can be spelled out in terms of metaphysical ground: right-making just is grounding of rightness facts. In this paper, I present three challenges to this view and argue that no purely ground-based account of right-making is fully satisfactory. Instead, I defend a novel version of a reasons-based account, according to which right-makers are grounds that ground in virtue of being a normative reason. This reasons-based account, I shall argue, provides a unified solution to the challenges outlined and entails nuanced distinctions that alternative accounts brush aside. I show that my account is applicable to value-making relations on the assumption that value is not prior to normative reasons. The discussion thus reveals a novel argument for buck-passing accounts of value, that is, the view that value can be explained in terms of normative reasons.
ABSTRACT: Perspectivism is the view that what an agent ought to do always needs to be determined relative to this agent’s epistemic position. Despite its many virtues, this theory appears crucially flawed in its inability to properly account for the existence of universal claim rights. This article draws out this incompatibility through a set of plausible and widely accepted conceptual claims. It then discusses options available to the perspectivist in reaction to this problem. A wholesale denial of universal rights is rejected and a different approach suggested. Perspectivists should reconceptualize the notion of obligation that is correlative to rights and should conceive of obligations as only prima facie normative, which means that obligations can fail to give any normative reasons under certain circumstances. Such a move might first appear radical. However, this article shows that a prima facie view still manages to retain some of the most important conceptual features of rights.
ABSTRACT: This is a comment on Sebastian Schmidt's ‘Responsibility for Rationality’.
ABSTRACT: There are many relations that are popularly believed to be factive. Knowing, seeing, reason why, explanation, showing, and proving are a non-exhaustive list of such relations. But, famously, Allan Hazlett provided examples of felicitous sentences that picked out some of these relations and seem to suggest that these relations are non-factive. More recently, Jacob Nebel has challenged the factivity of reason why for similar reasons. And it’s not hard to generate these kinds of cases for factive relations that these authors do not explicitly consider. If they are right, this threatens to undermine significant portions of philosophical theorizing across many different areas of philosophy. My aim in this paper is to provide a unified, factivity-preserving explanation of what makes these apparent factivity violations felicitous, an explanation that itself presupposes that these relations are factive. My hope is that, in doing so, I will provide philosophers with a general way to resist these kinds of challenges. I begin by arguing that Nebel’s and Hazlett’s cases, along with the cases I present, ought to be seen as different instances of a single problem. I then argue that, despite the existence of these cases, we still have compelling reason to think these relations are factive. I then present my explanation of the apparent violations and reply to important objections to the account.
ABSTRACT: The Golden Rule is regularly used in ordinary life, across many different cultures, to acquire new moral knowledge. At the same time, the Golden Rule is widely ignored both in ethics and metaethics because it seems to be an implausible normative theory. Most philosophers who have paid it any attention have thought that, at best, it is an initially tempting thought whose appeal should be explained by the ultimately correct normative theory. My aim in this paper is to attend to an alternative possibility: the Golden Rule teaches us something about metaethics, in the form of moral epistemology, rather than normative ethics. I will argue that sentimentalism, the view that the emotions are an essential source of moral knowledge, provides a compelling explanation of the usefulness of the Golden Rule. Before giving the sentimentalist explanation, I explain why proposed alternative sources of moral knowledge provide less compelling explanations of its usefulness.
2024
ABSTRACT: This article is concerned with a puzzle that arises from three initially plausible assumptions that form an inconsistent triad: (i) Epistemic reasons are normative reasons (normativism); (ii) reasons are normative only if conformity with them is good (the reasons/value-link); (iii) conformity with epistemic reasons need not be good (the nihilist assumption). I start by defending the reasons/value-link, arguing that normativists need to reject the nihilist assumption. I then argue that the most familiar view that denies the nihilist assumption — epistemic teleology — is untenable. Finally, I consider two alternative ways of accounting for the goodness of conformity with epistemic reasons: it may be good because it accords with the virtue of reasons-responsiveness, and it may be good because it is good to conform with normative reasons as such. I argue that both of these conceptions avoid the problems of epistemic teleology and merit serious consideration as potential solutions to the puzzle.
ABSTRACT: Two views that have dominated the recent literature on rationality are the coherence-based and the reasons-based conceptions of rationality. According to the first of these views, rationality is a matter of establishing internal coherence between one’s mental states (for example, Scanlon 2007; Broome 2013). On this conception of rationality, it is an open question whether we ought or have any reason to be rational, and some have argued that this question must receive a negative answer (Kolodny 2005). According to the second view, rationality is most fundamentally a matter of responding to reasons (for example, Kiesewetter 2017; Lord 2018). Insofar as incoherence is irrational, this is to be explained in terms of a failure to respond to available reasons, and consequently the normative significance of rationality cannot sensibly be questioned. In Fitting Things Together, Alex Worsnip seeks to establish an alternative to both of these views, which he dubs ‘dualism about rationality’. According to this third view, there are both structural requirements of rationality, which demand coherence among our attitudes, and substantive requirements of rationality, which demand responsiveness to reasons, and these requirements are irreducible to each other. Dualism agrees with the reasons-based view that there is an important dimension of rationality, the normative significance of which cannot sensibly be questioned; but it rejects the thesis that the irrationality of incoherence can be explained in terms of this substantive dimension. Dualism thus agrees with the coherence-based view that there is an important dimension of rationality, the normative significance of which can sensibly be questioned, but denies that this structural dimension exhausts what rationality is about.
ABSTRACT: Practical reason is the general human capacity for resolving, through reflection, the question of what one is to do. Deliberation of this kind is practical in at least two senses. First, it is practical in its subject matter, insofar as it is concerned with action. But it is also practical in its consequences or its issue, insofar as reflection about action itself directly moves people to act. Our capacity for deliberative self-determination raises two sets of philosophical problems. For one thing, there are questions about how deliberation can succeed in being practical in its issue. What do we need to assume — both about agents and about the processes of reasoning they engage in — to make sense of the fact that deliberative reflection can directly give rise to action? Can we do justice to this dimension of practical reason while preserving the idea that practical deliberation is genuinely a form of reasoning? For another, there are large issues concerning the content of the standards that are brought to bear in practical reasoning. Which norms for the assessment of action are binding on us as deliberating agents? Do these norms provide resources for critical reflection about our ends, or are they exclusively instrumental? Under what conditions do moral norms yield valid standards for reasoning about action? The first set of issues is addressed in sections §§1—3 of the present article, while sections §§4—6 cover the second set of issues.
2023
ABSTRACT: In this essay, I argue that the objections that have been raised against the view that equality is intrinsically valuable also provide objections to the view that all practical reasons can be explained in terms of value. Plausible egalitarian principles entail that under certain conditions people have claims to an equal share. These claims entail reasons to distribute goods equally that cannot be explained by value if equality has no intrinsic value.
ABSTRACT: This chapter has two aims. The first is to present and defend a new argument for rights contributionism — the view that the notion of a moral claim-right is a contributory (or pro tanto) rather than overall normative notion. The argument is an inference to the best explanation: it is argued that (i) there are contributory moral factors that contrast with standard moral reasons by way of having a number of formal properties that are characteristic of rights, even though they can be overridden, and (ii) that this is best explained by a view that takes these factors to correlate with rights. The second aim is to show that the truth of rights contributionism matters for normative ethics. More specifically, it is argued that rights contributionism clears the way for deontologists to justify the pre-theoretically plausible verdict that we have a duty to save the greater number in so-called Taurek scenarios — scenarios in which we have to choose between saving either a greater or a smaller number of different people. The chapter offers a novel and distinctively deontological explanation of this verdict that is based on the assumption that everyone has a pro tanto right to be saved in a Taurek scenario.
ABSTRACT: Many paradigm instances of irrationality involve one’s mental states failing to cohere with one another, in a fairly broad sense of ‘cohere’. For example, it’s commonly thought to be irrational to hold (obviously) inconsistent beliefs — say, to believe that you are a great cook, to believe that great cooks never overcook eggs, and yet to believe that you have overcooked the eggs. These three beliefs are jointly incoherent. Similarly, many central instances of practical irrationality, such as instrumental irrationality, can be thought of as instances of incoherence: it is incoherent to simultaneously intend to shop for groceries today, believe that to shop for groceries today you must get on your bike now, but yet not intend to get on your bike now. Structural rationality is often contrasted with ‘substantive rationality’, which is typically understood in terms of responsiveness to normative reasons. So, for example, when we say that it isn’t rational to (intend to) gamble one’s life savings on the outcome of a horse race, this seems to reflect the existence of strong normative reasons against gambling (or intending to gamble) one’s life savings on the outcome of the race, rather than pinpointing any incoherence that must be present in the mental states of anyone who gambles her life savings on the outcome of the race. Similarly, when we say it isn’t rational to believe in astrology, this seems to reflect a judgment that there are strong normative reasons — presumably supplied by the available evidence — against believing in astrology, rather than presuming that anyone who believes in astrology must be incoherent. This entry is composed of three sections. In §1, we survey debates about what structural rationality is, including the emergence of the concept in the contemporary literature, its key characteristics, its relationship to substantive rationality, its paradigm instances, and the questions of whether these instances are unified and, if so, how. In §2, we turn to the debate about structural requirements of rationality — including controversies about whether they are “wide-scope” or “narrow-scope”, synchronic or diachronic, and whether they govern processes or states; as well as examining various forms of skepticism about structural requirements of rationality. In §3, we turn to the debate about the normative significance of structural rationality, surveying central challenges for the view that structural rationality is normatively significant and the theoretical options that arise in light of these challenges.
