•  2944
    This is a Japanese translation of my article "Dürfen wir Kindern das Wahlrecht vorenthalten" ("Are We Justified to Deny Children the Right to Vote?"), which presents a basic moral argument against any age limit with respect to voting rights.
  •  2583
    The right and the wrong kind of reasons
    Philosophy Compass 12 (5). 2017.
    In a number of recent philosophical debates, it has become common to distinguish between two kinds of normative reasons, often called the right kind of reasons (henceforth: RKR) and the wrong kind of reasons (henceforth: WKR). The distinction was first introduced in discussions of the so-called buck-passing account of value, which aims to analyze value properties in terms of reasons for pro-attitudes and has been argued to face the wrong kind of reasons problem. But nowadays it also gets applied…Read more
  •  2170
    Are all practical reasons based on value?
    Oxford Studies in Metaethics 17 27-53. 2022.
    According to an attractive and widely held view, all practical reasons are explained in terms of the (instrumental or final) value of the action supported by the reason. I argue that this theory is incompatible with plausible assumptions about the practical reasons that correspond to certain moral rights, including the right to a promised action and the right to an exclusive use of one’s property. The argument is an explanatory rather than extensional one: while the actions supported by the rele…Read more
  •  2075
    Dürfen wir Kindern das Wahlrecht vorenthalten?
    Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie 95 (2): 252-273. 2009.
    Up to a certain age, young people are denied the right to vote. In this paper, it is argued that this general exclusion from democratic participation is unjustified and should be abandoned. After a short survey of some of the pedagogic, legal, and political arguments that have been brought forward to support a liberalisation of electoral law in favour of children, the essay presents a basic moral argument against any age limit with respect to voting rights. First of all, it is argued that the ri…Read more
  •  1965
    A dilemma for Parfit's conception of normativity
    Analysis 72 (3): 466-474. 2012.
    In his discussion of normative concepts in the first part of On What Matters (2011), Parfit holds that apart from the ‘ought’ of decisive reason, there are other senses of ‘ought’ which do not imply any reasons. This claim poses a dilemma for his ‘reason-involving conception’ of normativity: either Parfit has to conclude that non-reason-implying ‘oughts’ are not normative. Or else he is forced to accept that normativity needs only to involve ‘apparent reasons’ – a certain kind of hypothetical tr…Read more
  •  1936
    You ought to ϕ only if you may believe that you ought to ϕ
    Philosophical Quarterly 66 (265): 760-82. 2016.
    In this paper I present an argument for the claim that you ought to do something only if you may believe that you ought to do it. More exactly, I defend the following principle about normative reasons: An agent A has decisive reason to φ only if she also has sufficient reason to believe that she has decisive reason to φ. I argue that this principle follows from the plausible assumption that it must be possible for an agent to respond correctly to her reasons. In conclusion, I discuss some implic…Read more
  •  1843
    If you ought to perform a certain act, and some other action is a necessary means for you to perform that act, then you ought to perform that other action as well – or so it seems plausible to say. This transmission principle is of both practical and theoretical significance. The aim of this paper is to defend this principle against a number of recent objections, which (as I show) are all based on core assumptions of the view called actualism. I reject actualism, provide an alternative explanati…Read more
  •  1749
    What Kind of Perspectivism?
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 15 (4): 415-443. 2018.
    According to perspectivism about moral obligation, our obligations are affected by our epistemic circumstances. But how exactly should this claim be understood? On Zimmerman’s “Prospective View”, perspectivism is spelled out as the thesis that an option is obligatory if and only if it maximizes what Zimmerman calls “prospective value”, which is in turn determined by the agent’s present evidence. In this article, I raise two objections to this approach. Firstly, I argue that spelling out the diff…Read more
  •  1703
    Thomas Kroedel argues that the lottery paradox can be solved by identifying epistemic justification with epistemic permissibility rather than epistemic obligation. According to his permissibility solution, we are permitted to believe of each lottery ticket that it will lose, but since permissions do not agglomerate, it does not follow that we are permitted to have all of these beliefs together, and therefore it also does not follow that we are permitted to believe that all tickets will lose. I p…Read more
  •  1603
    Are epistemic reasons normative?
    Noûs 56 (3): 670-695. 2021.
    According to a widely held view, epistemic reasons are normative reasons for belief – much like prudential or moral reasons are normative reasons for action. In recent years, however, an increasing number of authors have questioned the assumption that epistemic reasons are normative. In this article, I discuss an important challenge for anti-normativism about epistemic reasons and present a number of arguments in support of normativism. The challenge for anti-normativism is to say what kind of …Read more
  •  1475
    Actualists hold that contrary-to-duty scenarios give rise to deontic dilemmas and provide counterexamples to the transmission principle, according to which we ought to take the necessary means to actions we ought to perform. In an earlier article, I have argued, contrary to actualism, that the notion of ‘ought’ that figures in conclusions of practical deliberation does not allow for deontic dilemmas and validates the transmission principle. Here I defend these claims, together with my possibilis…Read more
  •  1362
    Rationality as Reasons-Responsiveness
    Australasian Philosophical Review 4 (4): 332-342. 2020.
    John Broome argues that rationality cannot consist in reasons-responsiveness since rationality supervenes on the mind, while reasons-responsiveness does not supervene on the mind. I here defend this conception of rationality by way of defending the assumption that reasons-responsiveness supervenes on the mind. Given the many advantages of an analysis of rationality in terms of reasons-responsiveness, and in light of independent considerations in favour of the view that reasons-responsiveness sup…Read more
  •  1293
    How reasons are sensitive to available evidence
    In Conor McHugh, Jonathan Way & Daniel Whiting (eds.), Normativity: Epistemic and Practical, Oxford University Press. pp. 90-114. 2018.
    In this paper, I develop a theory of how claims about an agent’s normative reasons are sensitive to the epistemic circumstances of this agent, which preserves the plausible ideas that reasons are facts and that reasons can be discovered in deliberation and disclosed in advice. I argue that a plausible theory of this kind must take into account the difference between synchronic and diachronic reasons, i.e. reasons for acting immediately and reasons for acting at some later point in time. I provid…Read more
  •  1278
    Normative und motivierende Gründe. Ein Kommentar zu Susanne Mantels Determined by Reasons
    Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 72 (3): 421-428. 2018.
    One of the central aims of Susanne Mantel’s book "Determined by Reasons" (2018) is to reject the idea that normative and motivating reasons can be identical. In her own words, Mantel denies the “Identity Thesis”, according to which “when an agent acts for a normative reason N, there is a motivating reason M of that agent such that M is identical with N” (Mantel 2018, 93). In this comment, I offer a simple argument for the Identity Thesis: (1) When an agent acts for a normative reason N, there is…Read more
  •  952
    Epistemic normativity without epistemic teleology
    Philosophical Issues 34 (1): 349-370. 2024.
    This article is concerned with a puzzle that arises from three initially plausible assumptions that form an inconsistent triad: (i) Epistemic reasons are normative reasons (normativism); (ii) reasons are normative only if conformity with them is good (the reasons/value‐link); (iii) conformity with epistemic reasons need not be good (the nihilist assumption). I start by defending the reasons/value‐link, arguing that normativists need to reject the nihilist assumption. I then argue that the most f…Read more
  •  949
    Klimaaktivismus als ziviler Ungehorsam
    Zeitschrift für Praktische Philosophie 9 (1): 77-114. 2022.
    Political actions by Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, and other climate activists often involve violations of legal regulations – such as compulsory education requirements or traffic laws – and have been criticized for this in the public sphere. In this essay, I defend the view that these violations of the law constitute a form of morally justified civil disobedience against climate policies. I first show that these actions satisfy the criteria of civil disobedience even on relatively s…Read more
  •  929
    Structural Rationality
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2023.
    This entry is composed of three sections. In §1, we survey debates about what structural rationality is, including the emergence of the concept in the contemporary literature, its key characteristics, its relationship to substantive rationality, its paradigm instances, and the questions of whether these instances are unified and, if so, how. In §2, we turn to the debate about structural requirements of rationality – including controversies about whether they are “wide-scope” or “narrow-scope”, s…Read more
  •  864
    Practical conflicts as a problem for epistemic reductionism about practical reasons
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (3): 677-686. 2021.
    According to epistemic reductionism about practical reasons, facts about practical reasons can be reduced to facts about evidence for ought-judgements. We argue that this view misconstrues practical conflicts. At least some conflicts between practical reasons put us in a position to know that an action ϕ is optional, i.e. that we neither ought to perform nor ought to refrain from performing the action. By understanding conflicts of practical reasons as conflicts of evidence about what one ought …Read more
  •  777
    How Do Reasons Transmit to Non-Necessary Means?
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 99 (2): 271-285. 2021.
    Which principles govern the transmission of reasons from ends to means? Some philosophers have suggested a liberal transmission principle, according to which agents have an instrumental reason for an action whenever this action is a means for them to do what they have non-instrumental reason to do. In this paper, we (i) discuss the merits and demerits of the liberal transmission principle, (ii) argue that there are good reasons to reject it, and (iii) present an alternative, less liberal transmi…Read more
  •  775
    Pro Tanto Rights and the Duty to Save the Greater Number
    Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 13 190-214. 2023.
    This paper has two aims. The first is to present and defend a new argument for rights contributionism – the view that the notion of a moral claim-right is a contributory (or pro tanto) rather than overall normative notion. The argument is an inference to the best explanation: it is argued that (i) there are contributory moral factors that contrast with standard moral reasons by way of having a number of formal properties that are characteristic of rights, even though they can be overridden, and …Read more
  •  771
    Some of our reasons for action are grounded in the fact that the action in question is a means to something else we have reason to do. This raises the question as to which principles govern the transmission of reasons from ends to means. In this paper, we discuss the merits and demerits of a liberal transmission principle, which plays a prominent role in the current literature. The principle states that an agent has an instrumental reason to whenever -ing is a means for him to do what he has in…Read more
  •  690
    Egalitarian Justice as a Challenge for the Value-Based Theory of Practical Reasons
    In Andrés Garcia, Mattias Gunnemyr & Jakob Werkmäster (eds.), Value, Morality & Social Reality: Essays dedicated to Dan Egonsson, Björn Petersson & Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen, Department of Philosophy, Lund University. pp. 239-249. 2023.
    In this essay, I argue that the objections that have been raised against the view that equality is intrinsically valuable also provide objections to the view that all practical reasons can be explained in terms of value. Plausible egalitarian principles entail that under certain conditions people have claims to an equal share. These claims entail reasons to distribute goods equally that cannot be explained by value if equality has no intrinsic value.
  •  646
    Repliken
    Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 71 (4): 578-83. 2017.
    This a a reply to Gerhard Ernst's and Erasmus Mayr's critical comments on my book 'The Normativity of Rationality'
  •  557
    Practical reason
    The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2024.
    Practical reason is the general human capacity for resolving, through reflection, the question of what one is to do. Deliberation of this kind is practical in at least two senses. First, it is practical in its subject matter, insofar as it is concerned with action. But it is also practical in its consequences or its issue, insofar as reflection about action itself directly moves people to act. Our capacity for deliberative self-determination raises two sets of philosophical problems. For one thi…Read more
  •  481
    According to the Balancing View of Ought, we ought to perform an action if and only if performing the action is most strongly supported by the balance of our reasons. The Balancing View faces the objection from exclusionary reasons, which are second-order reasons not to act for certain other reasons. According to Joseph Raz, the existence of exclusionary reasons undermines the Balancing View: a reason might tip the balance in favour of performing an act but at the same time be excluded by an und…Read more
  •  295
    "Ought" and the Perspective of the Agent
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 5 (3): 1-24. 2011.
    Objectivists and perspectivists disagree about the question of whether what an agent ought to do depends on the totality of facts or on the agent’s limited epistemic perspective. While objectivism fails to account for normative guidance, perspectivism faces the challenge of explaining phenomena (occurring most notably in advice, but also in first-personal deliberation) in which the use of “ought” is geared to evidence that is better than the evidence currently available to the agent. This paper …Read more