Reasons as Defaults

Oxford, England: Oxford University Press USA (2012)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Although the study of reasons plays an important role in both epistemology and moral philosophy, little attention has been devoted to the question of how, exactly, reasons interact to support the actions or conclusions they do. In this book, John F. Horty attempts to answer this question by providing a precise, concrete account of reasons and their interaction, based on the logic of default reasoning. The book begins with an intuitive, accessible introduction to default logic itself, and then argues that this logic can be adapted to serve as a foundation for a concrete theory of reasons. Horty then shows that the resulting theory helps to explain how the interplay among reasons can determine what we ought to do by developing two different deontic logics, capturing two different intuitions about moral conflicts.In the central part of the book, Horty elaborates the basic theory to account for reasoning about the strength of our own reasons, and also about the related concepts of undercutting defeaters and exclusionary reasons. The theory is illustrated with an application to particularist arguments concerning the role of principles in moral theory. The book concludes by introducing a pair of issues new to the philosophical literature: the problem of determining the epistemic status of conclusions supported by separate but conflicting reasons, and the problem of drawing conclusions from sets of reasons that can vary arbitrarily in strength, or importance.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Reasons as Defaults.John Horty - 2007 - Philosophers' Imprint 7:1-28.
Deontic Modals: Why Abandon the Classical Semantics?John Horty - 2014 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 95 (4):424-460.
Moral reasons, epistemic reasons, and rationality.Alex Worsnip - 2016 - Philosophical Quarterly 66 (263):341-361.
Particularism and reasons: A reply to Kirchin.Richard Norman - 2007 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 4 (1):33-39.
Humean agent-neutral reasons?Daan Evers - 2009 - Philosophical Explorations 12 (1):55 – 67.
Subjective Reasons.Eric Vogelstein - 2012 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 15 (2):239-257.
Reasons for belief, reasoning, virtues.Christopher Hookway - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 130 (1):47--70.
Beyond Obligation: Reasons and Supererogation.Michael Ferry - 2015 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 77:49-65.
The Weight of Moral Reasons.Ralph Wedgwood - 2013 - Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics (Ed. Mark Timmons) 3:35-58.
Particularism and default reasons.Pekka Väyrynen - 2004 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 7 (1):53-79.

Analytics

Added to PP
2015-10-14

Downloads
9 (#1,080,087)

6 months
3 (#447,120)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

John Horty
University of Maryland, College Park

Citations of this work

The Ethics of Conceptualization: A Needs-Based Approach.Matthieu Queloz - forthcoming - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Deontic logic.Paul McNamara - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Hyperintensionality and Normativity.Federico L. G. Faroldi - 2019 - Cham, Switzerland: Springer Verlag.
The balance and weight of reasons.Nicholas Makins - 2023 - Theoria 89 (5):592-606.
Formal Representations of Belief.Franz Huber - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

View all 11 citations / Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references