Skepticism about the ‘wrong kind’ of reasons—the view that wrong-kind reasons are reasons to want and bring about certain attitudes, but not reasons for those attitudes—is more often assumed than argued for. Jonathan Way sets out to remedy this: he argues that skeptics about, but not defenders of, wrong-kind reasons can explain a distinctive pattern of transmission among such reasons and claims that this fact lends significant support to the skeptical view. I argue that Way's positive case for wrong-kind reason (...) skepticism fails. I conclude with an account of what's needed to resolve the debate between wrong-kind reason skeptics and defenders. (shrink)

The normative notion of fittingness figures saliently in the work of a number of ethical theorists writing in the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries and has in recent years regained prominence, occupying an important place in the theoretical tool kits of a range of contemporary writers. Yet the notion remains strikingly undertheorized. This article offers a (partial) remedy. I proceed by canvassing a number of attempts to analyze the fittingness relation in other terms, arguing that none is fully adequate. In (...) explaining why various analyses of fittingness fail, I draw into relief certain of the relation’s constitutive features and spotlight some of its interesting and important connections to various other properties. Along the way, I highlight the relation’s relevance to a number of ongoing debates in normative and metanormative philosophy. I conclude by indicating some directions for further research. (shrink)

A central dispute in the ethics of belief concerns what kinds of considerations can be reasons for belief. Nishi Shah has recently argued that the correct explanation of transparency in doxastic deliberation—the psychological phenomenon that only considerations taken to bear on the truth of p can be deliberated from to conclude in believing that p—settles this debate in favor of strict evidentialism, the view that only evidence can be a reason for belief. I argue that Shah’s favored explanation of transparency (...) fails to imply this result—that it leaves open the possibility that there can be non-evidential reasons for belief. The upshot is that practical non-evidentialists—those who hold that there are at least some non-evidential, practical reasons for belief—can happily accept the fact of transparency, and Shah’s explanation of it, without having to abandon their view. (shrink)

Many authors, including Derek Parfit, T.M. Scanlon, and Mark Schroeder, favor a “reasons-first” ontology of normativity, which treats reasons as normatively fundamental. Others, most famously G.E. Moore, favor a “value-first” ontology, which treats value or goodness as normatively fundamental. I argue that both the reasons-first and value-first ontologies should be rejected because neither can account for all of the normative reasons that, intuitively, there are. I advance an ontology of normativity, originally suggested by Franz Brentano and A.C. Ewing, according to (...) which fittingness is normatively fundamental. The normative relation of fittingness is the relation in which a response stands to an object when the object merits—or is worthy of—that response. I argue that my “fittingness-first” ontology is no less parsimonious than either the reasons- or the value-first ontology, but it can plausibly accommodate the existence of all the normative reasons there are. It therefore provides a superior ontology of normativity. (shrink)

Psychologists have often been criticized for their reluctance to engage with history, so it is interesting to find that historical accounts play an important role in the recovered memory/false memory syndrome debate. Using techniques of rhetorical and discursive analysis, we examined accounts of the historical origins of repression and of battlefield trauma in popular texts. The flexible and selective nature of these accounts was highlighted, and was discussed in terms of the rhetorical practice of ontological gerrymandering. Also, the employment of (...) discursive practices similar to Gilbert and Mulkay's (1984) `empiricist' and `contingent' repertoires was noted. We also comment upon how different understandings of the nature of history (as linear, cyclical, or geographical) were rhetorically employed by participants, and suggest that historical contexts are constructed for rhetorical effect. (shrink)