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: 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.
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.
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.
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.
