TY - JOUR
T1 - Explaining normative reasons
AU - Fogal, Daniel
AU - Risberg, Olle
N1 - Funding Information:
For valuable feedback, we thank Joseph Cunningham, Matti Eklund, Chris Howard, Nathan Howard, Zoë Johnson King, Alex King, Christos Kyriacou, Nicholas Laskowski, Stephanie Leary, Errol Lord, Barry Maguire, Victor Moberger, Jonas Olson, Andrew Reisner, Knut Olav Skarsaune, Daniel Star, Folke Tersman, Daniel Wodak, Alex Worsnip, and Michael Young, as well as audiences at the Boston University Ethics Seminar, the Cyprus Metaethics Workshop, the Higher Seminar in Practical Philosophy at Uppsala University, the Normativity Reading Group at the University of Pennsylvania, the Slippery Slope Normativity Summit, and the Virtual Metaethics Colloquium. We owe an extra debt of gratitude to Selim Berker and an anonymous reviewer for this journal for multiple rounds of helpful feedback. Work on this paper was supported by Grant 2020‐01955 from the Swedish Research Council.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors. Noûs published by Wiley Periodicals LLC
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - In this paper, we present and defend a natural yet novel analysis of normative reasons. According to what we call support-explanationism, for a fact to be a normative reason to φ is for it to explain why there's normative support for φ-ing. We critically consider the two main rival forms of explanationism—ought-explanationism, on which reasons explain facts about ought, and good-explanationism, on which reasons explain facts about goodness—as well as the popular Reasons-First view, which takes the notion of a normative reason to be normatively fundamental. Support-explanationism, we argue, enjoys many of the virtues of these views while avoiding their drawbacks. We conclude by exploring several further important implications: among other things, we argue that the influential metaphor of ‘weighing’ reasons is inapt, and propose a better one; that, contrary to what Berker (2019) suggests, there's no reason for non-naturalists about normativity to accept the Reasons-First view; and that, contrary to what Wodak (2020b) suggests, explanationist views can successfully accommodate what he calls ‘redundant reasons’.
AB - In this paper, we present and defend a natural yet novel analysis of normative reasons. According to what we call support-explanationism, for a fact to be a normative reason to φ is for it to explain why there's normative support for φ-ing. We critically consider the two main rival forms of explanationism—ought-explanationism, on which reasons explain facts about ought, and good-explanationism, on which reasons explain facts about goodness—as well as the popular Reasons-First view, which takes the notion of a normative reason to be normatively fundamental. Support-explanationism, we argue, enjoys many of the virtues of these views while avoiding their drawbacks. We conclude by exploring several further important implications: among other things, we argue that the influential metaphor of ‘weighing’ reasons is inapt, and propose a better one; that, contrary to what Berker (2019) suggests, there's no reason for non-naturalists about normativity to accept the Reasons-First view; and that, contrary to what Wodak (2020b) suggests, explanationist views can successfully accommodate what he calls ‘redundant reasons’.
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U2 - 10.1111/nous.12393
DO - 10.1111/nous.12393
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85111363226
JO - Nous
JF - Nous
SN - 0029-4624
ER -