Commitment: Worth the Weight

In Errol Lord & Barry Maguire (eds.), Weighing Reasons. New York, NY: Oxford University Press USA. pp. 104-120 (2016)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

This chapter takes an indirect approach to the question of how people weigh conflicting reasons to determine what they ought to do. It is argued that obligations are a distinct normative concept that also admits of weighing. A natural, simple way due to W. D. Ross—Simple Weighing—of construing the manner in which both reasons and obligations are weighed is introduced. Commitments are introduced as a third normative concept that admits of weighing, and it is argued that Simple Weighing is inadequate for commitments. Commitments, it is argued, are actually a special case of self-imposed obligations; it follows that obligations in general need a more sophisticated weighing process than it first appears. The payoff for our understanding of the weight of reasons is a challenge: if Ross was wrong about how obligations weigh, could Simple Weighing also be wrong about how reasons weigh?

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive

External links

  • This entry has no external links. Add one.
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

The weight of reasons: a framework for ethics.Chris Tucker - 2024 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Weighing Reasons.Chris Tucker - forthcoming - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Weighing Reasons Against.Chris Tucker - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Metaethics.
weighing reasons.Garrett Cullity - 2018 - In Daniel Star (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity. New York, NY, United States of America: Oxford University Press.
Comparative Value and the Weight of Reasons.Itai Sher - 2019 - Economics and Philosophy 35 (1):103-158.
Competing Reasons.Justin Snedegar - 2021 - In Jessica Brown & Mona Simion (eds.), Reasons, Justification, and Defeat. Oxford Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bearing the Weight of Reasons.Stephen Kearns - 2016 - In Errol Lord & Barry Maguire (eds.), Weighing Reasons. New York, NY: Oxford University Press USA. pp. 173-190.
Still waiting for a plausible Humean theory of reasons.Nicholas Shackel - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 167 (3):607-633.
An Opinionated Guide to the Weight of Reasons.Barry Maguire & Errol Lord - 2016 - In Errol Lord & Barry Maguire (eds.), Weighing Reasons. New York, NY: Oxford University Press USA.

Analytics

Added to PP
2024-06-12

Downloads
81 (#261,756)

6 months
15 (#222,143)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author Profiles

Alida Liberman
Southern Methodist University
Mark Schroeder
University of Southern California

Citations of this work

Instrumental Rationality.John Brunero & Niko Kolodny - 2013 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references