Reasons and Oughts Edited by Errol Lord (Princeton University)

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  1. Robert Audi (2009). Moral Virtue and Reasons for Action. Philosophical Issues 19 (1):1-20.
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  2. Matthew S. Bedke (2009). The Iffiest Oughts: A Guise of Reasons Account of End‐Given Conditionals. Ethics 119 (4):672-698.
    It often seems that what one ought to do depends on what contingent ends one has adopted and the means to pursuing them. Imagine, for example, that you are applying for jobs, and a particularly attractive one comes your way. It offers excellent colleagues in a desirable location, the pay is good, and acquiring a job like this is one of your ends. If practicing your job talk is a means to getting the job, the following seems true: (1) If (...)
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  3. Campbell Brown, The Composition of Reasons.
    How do reasons combine? How is it that several reasons taken together can have a combined weight which exceeds the weight of any one alone? I propose an answer in mereological terms: reasons combine by composing a further, complex reason of which they are parts. Their combined weight is the weight of their combination. I develop a mereological framework, and use this to investigate some structural views about reasons, the main two being "Atomism" and "Holism". Atomism is the view that (...)
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  4. John Brunero (2010). The Scope of Rational Requirements. Philosophical Quarterly 60 (238):28-49.
    Niko Kolodny has argued that some (local) rational requirements are narrow-scope requirements. Against this, I argue here that all (local) rational requirements are wide-scope requirements. I present a new objection to the narrow-scope interpretations of the four specific rational requirements which Kolodny considers. His argument for the narrow-scope interpretations of these four requirements rests on a false assumption, that an attitude which puts in place a narrow-scope rational requirement somewhere thereby puts in place a narrow-scope rational requirement everywhere. My argument (...)
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  5. John Brunero (2009). Reasons and Evidence One Ought. Ethics 119 (3):538-545.
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  6. Martin Curd (1983). Some Inconclusive Reasons Against 'Conclusive Reasons'. Philosophy Research Archives 9:293-302.
    In, “Some Conclusive Reasons Against ‘Conclusive Reasons’”, Pappas and Swain have criticized Dretske’s theory that conclusive reasons are necessary for knowledge. In their view this condition is too strong. They attempt to show this by means of two purported counterexamples: the cup-hologram case and the generator case. This paper defends Dretske’s analysis against these challenges.
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  7. Jonathan Dancy (2003). Précis of Practical Reality. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (2):423–428.
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  8. Fred Dretske (1971). Conclusive Reasons. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 49 (1):1 – 22.
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  9. Daan Evers (forthcoming). In Defence of Proportionalism. European Journal of Philosophy.
    In his book Slaves of the Passions, Mark Schroeder defends a Humean theory of reasons. Humeanism is the view that you have a reason to X only if X-ing promotes at least one of your desires. But Schroeder rejects a natural companion theory of the weight of reasons, which he calls proportionalism. According to it, the weight of a reason is proportionate to the strength of the desire that grounds it and the extent to which the act promotes the object (...)
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  10. Daan Evers (forthcoming). Weight for Stephen Finlay. Philosophical Studies:-.
    According to Stephen Finlay, ‘A ought to X’ means that X-ing is more conducive to contextually salient ends than relevant alternatives. This in turn is analysed in terms of probability. I show why this theory of ‘ought’ is hard to square with a theory of a reason’s weight which could explain why ‘A ought to X’ logically entails that the balance of reasons favours that A X-es. I develop two theories of weight to illustrate my point. I first look at (...)
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  11. Daan Evers (2011). The Standard-Relational Theory of 'Ought' and the Oughtistic Theory of Reasons. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 89 (1):131-147.
    The idea that normative statements implicitly refer to standards has been around for quite some time. It is usually defended by normative antirealists, who tend to be attracted to Humean theories of reasons. But this is an awkward combination: 'A ought to X' entails that there are reasons for A to X, and 'A ought to X all things considered' entails that the balance of reasons favours X-ing. If the standards implicitly referred to are not those of the agent, then (...)
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  12. Daan Evers (2011). Two Objections to Wide-Scoping. Grazer Philosophische Studien 83 (13):251-255.
    Wide-scopers argue that the detachment of intuitively false ‘ought’ claims from hypothetical imperatives is blocked because ‘ought’ takes wide, as opposed to narrow, scope. I present two arguments against this view. The first questions the premise that natural language conditionals are true just in case the antecedent is false. The second shows that intuitively false ‘ought’s can still be detached even WITH wide-scope readings. This weakens the motivation for wide-scoping.
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  13. Daan Evers (2010). The End-Relational Theory of 'Ought' and the Weight of Reasons. Dialectica 64 (3):405-417.
    Stephen Finlay analyses ‘ought’ in terms of probability. According to him, normative ‘ought's are statements about the likelihood that an act will realize some (contextually supplied) end. I raise a problem for this theory. It concerns the relation between ‘ought’ and the balance of reasons. ‘A ought to Φ’ seems to entail that the balance of reasons favours that A Φ-es, and vice versa. Given Finlay's semantics for ‘ought’, it also makes sense to think of reasons and their weight in (...)
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  14. Daan Evers (2009). Humean Agent-Neutral Reasons? Philosophical Explorations 12 (1):55 – 67.
    In his recent book Slaves of the Passions , Mark Schroeder defends a Humean account of practical reasons ( hypotheticalism ). He argues that it is compatible with 'genuinely agent-neutral reasons'. These are reasons that any agent whatsoever has. According to Schroeder, they may well include moral reasons. Furthermore, he proposes a novel account of a reason's weight, which is supposed to vindicate the claim that agent-neutral reasons ( if they exist), would be weighty irrespective of anyone's desires. If the (...)
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  15. Stephen Finlay (2011). Errors Upon Errors: A Reply to Joyce. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 89 (3):535 - 547.
    In his response to my paper ?The Error in the Error Theory? criticizing his and J. L. Mackie's moral error theory, Richard Joyce finds my treatment of his position inaccurate and my interpretation of morality implausible. In this reply I clarify my objection, showing that it retains its force against their error theory, and I clarify my interpretation of morality, showing that Joyce's objections miss their mark.
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  16. Stephen Finlay (2010). What Ought Probably Means, and Why You Can't Detach It. Synthese 177 (1):67-89.
    ‘Ought’ is a very important and common word that everybody seems to know how to use perfectly well. But it has proven stubbornly resistant to definition and seems to have indefinitely many different senses. This emerges in a particularly clear and acute way from a puzzle that continues to vex philosophers, the Detaching problem. I first explore this problem, and how extant attempts to solve it either fail or have to indulge rampant proliferation of senses of ‘ought.’ I then propose (...)
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  17. Stephen Finlay (2009). Oughts and Ends. Philosophical Studies 143 (3):315 - 340.
    This paper advances a reductive semantics for ‘ought’ and a naturalistic theory of normativity. It gives a unified analysis of predictive, instrumental, and categorical uses of ‘ought’: the predictive ‘ought’ is basic, and is interpreted in terms of probability. Instrumental ‘oughts’ are analyzed as predictive ‘oughts’ occurring under an ‘in order that’ modifer (the end-relational theory). The theory is then extended to categorical uses of ‘ought’: it is argued that they are special rhetorical uses of the instrumental ‘ought’. Plausible conversational (...)
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  18. Gerald Gaus, What is Deontology?, Part Two: Reasons to Act Gerald F. Gaus.
    Part One of this essay considered familiar ways of characterizing deontology, which focus on the notions of the good and the right. Here we will take up alternative approaches, which stress the type of reasons for actions that are generated by deontological theories. Although some of these alternative conceptualizations of deontology also employ a distinction between the good and the right, all mark the basic contrast between deontology and teleology in terms of reasons to act.
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  19. Joshua Gert (2007). Normative Strength and the Balance of Reasons. Philosophical Review 116 (4):533-562.
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  20. Joshua Gert (2005). A Functional Role Analysis of Reasons. Philosophical Studies 124 (3):353 - 378.
    One strategy for providing an analysis of practical rationality is to start with the notion of a practical reason as primitive. Then it will be quite tempting to think that the rationality of an action can be defined rather simply in terms of ‘the balance of reasons’. But just as, for many philosophical purposes, it is extremely useful to identify the meaning of a word in terms of the systematic contribution the word makes to the meanings of whole sentences, this (...)
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  21. Joshua Gert (2003). Requiring and Justifying: Two Dimensions of Normative Strength. Erkenntnis 59 (1):5 - 36.
    Many contemporary accounts of normative reasons for action accord a single strength value to normative reasons. This paper first uses some examples to argue against such views by showing that they seem to commit us to intransitive or counterintuitive claims about the rough equivalence of the strengths of certain reasons. The paper then explains and defends an alternate account according to which normative reasons for action have two separable dimensions of strength: requiring strength, and justifying strength. Such an account explains (...)
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  22. P. S. Greenspan (1975). Conditional Oughts and Hypothetical Imperatives. Journal of Philosophy 72 (10):259-276.
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  23. Patricia Greenspan, Asymmetrical Practical Reasons.
    Current treatments of practical rationality understand reasons as considerations counting in favor of or against some practical option, treating the positive and the negative case as symmetrical. Typically the focus is on examples of positive reasons. However, I want to shift the spotlight to negative reasons, as making a tighter or more direct link to rationality — and ultimately to morality, which is what much of the current interest in reasons is meant to clarify. Recognizing a positive/negative asymmetry in normative (...)
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  24. Patricia Greenspan (2010). Making Room for Options : Moral Reasons, Imperfect Duties, and Choice. In Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred Dycus Miller & Jeffrey Paul (eds.), Moral Obligation. Cambridge University Press.
    The notion of an “imperfect” obligation or duty, which most of us associate with Kantian ethics, affords a way of mitigating morality’s demands, while recognizing moral obligation as “binding” or inescapable, in Kant’s terms – something an agent cannot get out of just by appealing to ends or priorities of her own.2 Understood as duties of indeterminate content, imperfect duties such as the charitable duty to aid those in need leave leeway for personal choice – of whom to aid and (...)
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  25. Patricia Greenspan (2007). Practical Reasons and Moral 'Ought'. In Russell Schafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. II.
    Morality is a source of reasons for action, what philosophers call practical reasons. Kantians say that it ‘gives’ reasons to everyone. We can even think of moral requirements as amounting to particularly strong or stringent reasons, in an effort to demystify deontological views like Kant’s, with its insistence on inescapable or ‘binding’ moral requirements or ‘oughts.’¹ When we say that someone morally ought not to harm others, perhaps all we are saying is that he has a certain kind of reason (...)
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  26. Matthew Hanser (2005). Permissibility and Practical Inference. Ethics 115 (3):443-470.
    I wish to examine a rather different way of thinking about permissibility, one according to which, roughly speaking, an agent acts impermissibly if and only if he acts for reasons insufficient to justify him in doing what he does. For reasons that will emerge in Section II, I call this the inferential account of permissibility. I shall not here try to prove that this account is superior to its rivals. My aims are more modest. I shall develop the inferential account, (...)
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  27. Chris Heathwood (2008). Fitting Attitudes and Welfare. Oxford Studies in Metaethics 3:47-73.
    The purpose of this paper is to present a new argument against so-called fittingattitude analyses of intrinsic value, according to which, roughly, for something to be intrinsically good is for there to be reasons to want it for its own sake. The argument is indirect. First, I submit that advocates of a fitting-attitude analysis of value should, for the sake of theoretical unity, also endorse a fitting-attitude analysis of a closely related but distinct concept: the concept of intrinsic value for (...)
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  28. Pamela Hieronymi (2005). The Wrong Kind of Reason. Journal of Philosophy 102 (9):437 - 457.
    A good number of people currently thinking and writing about reasons identify a reason as a consideration that counts in favor of an action or attitude.1 I will argue that using this as our fundamental account of what a reason is generates a fairly deep and recalcitrant ambiguity; this account fails to distinguish between two quite different sets of considerations that count in favor of certain attitudes, only one of which are the “proper” or “appropriate” kind of reason for them. (...)
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  29. John Horty (2007). Reasons as Defaults. Philosophers' Imprint 7 (3):1-28.
    The goal of this paper is to frame a theory of reasons--what they are, how they support actions or conclusions--using the tools of default logic. After sketching the basic account of reasons as provided by defaults, I show how it can be elaborated to deal with two more complicated issues: first, situations in which the priority relation among defaults, and so reasons as well, is itself established through default reasoning; second, the treatment of undercutting defeat and exclusionary reasons. Finally, and (...)
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  30. Stan Husi (forthcoming). Why Reasons Skepticism is Not Self-Defeating. European Journal of Philosophy.
    Abstract: Radical meta-normative skepticism is the view that no standard, norm, or principle has objective authority or normative force. It does not deny that there are norms, standards of correctness, and principles of various kinds that render it possible that we succeed or fail in measuring up to their prerogatives. Rather, it denies that any norm has the status of commanding with objective authority, of giving rise to normative reasons to take seriously and follow its demands. Two powerful transcendental arguments (...)
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  31. Stephen Kearns & Daniel Star (forthcoming). Weighing Reasons. Journal of Moral Philosophy.
    Responses to John Broome and John Brunero.
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  32. Stephen Kearns & Daniel Star (2011). On Good Advice: A Reply to McNaughton and Rawling. Analysis 71 (3):506-508.
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  33. Stephen Kearns & Daniel Star (2009). Reasons as Evidence. Oxford Studies in Metaethics 4:215-42.
    In this paper, we argue for a particular informative and unified analysis of normative reasons. According to this analysis, a fact F is a reason to act in a certain way just in case it is evidence that one ought to act in that way. Similarly, F is a reason to believe a certain proposition just in case it is evidence for the truth of this proposition. Putting the relatively uncontroversial claim about reasons for belief to one side, we present (...)
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  34. Stephen Kearns & Daniel Star (2008). Reasons: Explanations or Evidence? Ethics 119 (1):31-56.
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  35. James Lenman, Reasons for Action: Justification Vs. Explanation. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Modern philosophical literature distinguishes between explanatory reasons and justifying reasons. The former are reasons we appeal to in attempting to explain actions and attitudes. The latter are reasons we appeal to in attempting to justify them.
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  36. Clayton Littlejohn (2009). ‘Ought’, ‘Can’, and Practical Reasons. American Philosophical Quarterly 46 (4):363-73.
    Some recent defenses of the 'ought' implies 'can' (OIC) principle try to derive that principle from uncontroversial claims about reasons for action. Reasons for action, it's said, are reasons only for 'potential' actions, which are actions that an agent can perform. Given that 'ought' implies 'reasons', it seems we have our proof of OIC. In this paper, I argue that this latest strategy for defending OIC fails.
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  37. Errol Lord (2010). Having Reasons and the Factoring Account. Philosophical Studies 149 (3).
    It’s natural to say that when it’s rational for me to φ, I have reasons to φ. That is, there are reasons for φ-ing, and moreover, I have some of them. Mark Schroeder calls this view The Factoring Account of the having reasons relation. He thinks The Factoring Account is false. In this paper, I defend The Factoring Account. Not only do I provide intuitive support for the view, but I also defend it against Schroeder’s criticisms. Moreover, I show that (...)
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  38. Errol Lord (2008). Dancy on Acting for the Right Reason. Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy:1-7.
    It is a truism that agents can do the right action for the right reason. To put the point in terms more familiar to ethicists, it is a truism that one’s motivating reason can be one’s normative reason. In this short note, I will argue that Jonathan Dancy’s preferred view about how this is possible faces a dilemma. Dancy has the choice between accounting for two plausible constraints while at the same time holding an outlandish philosophy of mind by his (...)
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  39. Duncan Macintosh (2007). Reasons and Purposes: Human Rationality and the Teleological Explanation of Action - By G.F. Schueler. Philosophical Books 48 (1):86-88.
  40. Richard Norman (2007). Particularism and Reasons: A Reply to Kirchin. Journal of Moral Philosophy 4 (1):33-39.
    Valency switching can appear especially puzzling if we think of moral reasons as ‘pushes and pulls’—considerations whose job it is to get us to act or to stop us acting. Talk of ‘default valency’ doesn't remove the puzzle, it merely restates it. We need a different picture of reasons—perhaps as providing a map of the moral terrain which helps us to see which actions are appropriate to which situations, and who the appropriate agents are. The role of virtue concepts in (...)
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  41. Douglas W. Portmore, What Are Our Options?
    We ought to perform our best option—that is, the option that we have most reason, all things considered, to perform. This is perhaps the most fundamental and least controversial of all normative principles concerning action. Yet, it is not, I believe, well understood. For even setting aside questions about what our reasons are and about how best to formulate the principle, there is a question about how we should construe our options. This question is of the upmost importance, for which (...)
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  42. Douglas W. Portmore, Perform Your Best Option.
    We ought to perform our best option—that is, the option that we have most reason, all things considered, to perform. This is perhaps the most fundamental and least controversial of all normative principles concerning action. Yet, it is not, I believe, well understood. For even setting aside questions about what our options are and what our reasons are, there are prior questions concerning how best to formulate the principle. In this paper, I address these questions. One of the more interesting (...)
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  43. Andrew Reisner (2011). Is There Reason to Be Theoretically Rational? In Andrew Reisner & Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen (eds.), Reasons for Belief. Cambridge University Press.
    An important advance in normativity research over the last decade is an increased understanding of the distinction, and difference, between normativity and rationality. Normativity concerns or picks out a broad set of concepts that have in common that they are, put loosely, guiding. For example, consider two commonly used normative concepts: that of a normative reason and that of ought. To have a normative reason to perform some action is for there to be something that counts in favour of performing (...)
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  44. Andrew Reisner & Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen (2011). Reasons for Belief. Cambridge University Press.
    Philosophers have long been concerned about what we know and how we know it. Increasingly, however, a related question has gained prominence in philosophical discussion: what should we believe and why? This volume brings together twelve new essays that address different aspects of this question. The essays examine foundational questions about reasons for belief, and use new research on reasons for belief to address traditional epistemological concerns such as knowledge, justification and perceptually acquired beliefs. This book will be of interest (...)
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  45. Simon Robertson (2008). Not so Enticing Reasons. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 11 (3):263 - 277.
    A common view of the relation between oughts and reasons is that you ought to do something if and only if that is what you have most reason to do. One challenge to this comes from what Jonathan Dancy calls ‘enticing reasons.’ Dancy argues that enticing reasons never contribute to oughts and that it is false that if the only reasons in play are enticing reasons then you ought to do what you have most reason to do. After explaining how (...)
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  46. Benjamin Sachs (2008). Reasons and Requirements. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 11 (1):73 - 83.
    In this essay I defend the claim that all reasons can ground final requirements. I begin by establishing a prima facie case for the thesis by noting that on a common-sense understanding of what finality is, it must be the case that all reasons can ground such requirements. I spend the rest of the paper defending the thesis against two recent challenges. The first challenge is found in Joshua Gert’s recent book, Brute Rationality. In it he argues that reasons play (...)
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  47. Mark Schroeder (2011). Holism, Weight, and Undercutting. Noûs 45 (2):328-344.
    Particularists in ethics emphasize that the normative is holistic, and invite us to infer with them that it therefore defies generalization. This has been supposed to present an obstacle to traditional moral theorizing, to have striking implications for moral epistemology and moral deliberation, and to rule out reductive theories of the normative, making it a bold and important thesis across the areas of normative theory, moral epistemology, moral psychology, and normative metaphysics. Though particularists emphasize the importance of the holism of (...)
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  48. Mark Schroeder (2007). Weighting for a Plausible Humean Theory of Reasons. Noûs 41 (1):110–132.
    This paper addresses the two extensional objections to the Humean Theory of Reasons—that it allows for too many reasons, and that it allows for too few. Although I won’t argue so here, manyof the other objections to the Humean Theoryof Reasons turn on assuming that it cannot successfully deal with these two objections.1 What I will argue, is that the force of the too many and the too few objections to the Humean Theorydepend on whether we assume that Humeans are (...)
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  49. Kieran Setiya, What is a Reason to Act?
    Argues for a conception of reasons as premises of practical reasoning. This conception is applied to questions about ignorance, advice, enabling conditions, "ought," and evidence.
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  50. Kieran Setiya (2009). Reply to Bratman and Smith. Analysis 69 (3):531-540.
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  51. Daniel Star (forthcoming). Two Levels of Moral Thinking. Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics.
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  52. Daniel Star & Candice Delmas (2011). Three Conceptions of Practical Authority. Jurisprudence 2 (1):143-160.
    Joseph Raz’s much discussed service conception of practical authority has recently come under attack from Stephen Darwall, who proposes that we instead adopt a second- personal conception of practical authority.1 We believe that the best place to start understanding practical authority is with a pared back conception of it, as simply a species of normative authority more generally, where this species is picked out merely by the fact that the normative authority in question is authority in relation to action, rather (...)
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  53. Pekka Väyrynen (2010). A Wrong Turn to Reasons? In Michael S. Brady (ed.), New Waves in Metaethics. Palgrave Macmillan.
    This paper argues that the recent metaethical turn to reasons as the fundamental units of normativity offers no special advantage in explaining a variety of other normative and evaluative phenomena, unless perhaps a form of reductionism about reasons is adopted which is rejected by many of those who advocate turning to reasons.
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  54. Pekka Väyrynen (2004). Particularism and Default Reasons. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 7 (1):53-79.
    This paper addresses a recent suggestion that moral particularists can extend their view to countenance default reasons (at a first stab, reasons that are pro tanto unless undermined) by relying on certain background expectations of normality. I first argue that normality must be understood non-extensionally. Thus if default reasons rest on normality claims, those claims won't bestow upon default reasons any definite degree of extensional generality. Their generality depends rather on the contingent distributional aspects of the world, which no theory (...)
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  55. Aaron Z. Zimmerman (2009). A Conflict in Common Sense Moral Psychology. Utilitas 21 (4):401-423.
    Ordinary moral thinking about morality and rationality is inconsistent. To arrive at a view of morality that is as faithful to common thought as consistency will allow we must admit that it is not always irrational to knowingly act against the weight of reasons.
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