Eliot Watkins

Consider the following two popular and plausible principles. First principle: facts about what you ought to do are tightly bound up with facts about what there’s reason to do. For example, if you ought to Φ, then there must be more reason for you to Φ than there is for you to not-Φ. Second principle: ought is ‘upwards monotonic’ – if Φing entails Ѱing, then if S ought to Φ is true, so is S ought to Ѱ. I argue that these two principles are incompatible. If I’m right, then respecting the connections between reasons and oughts requires giving up monotonicity, and so requires giving up the classical semantics for deontic modals. We need something new. I sketch a non-monotonic meaning for ‘ought’ which builds the ought/reason connections directly into the semantics, while aiming to accommodate the data that made monotonicity look attractive in the first place.

ABSTRACT We can use “reason,” with its normative sense, as both a count noun (“there is a reason for her to Φ”) and a mass noun (“there is plenty of reason for her to Φ”). How are the count and mass senses of “reason” related? Daniel Fogal argues that the mass sense is fundamental: Just as lights are merely those things that give light and anxieties are merely those things that give anxiety, reasons are merely those things that give reason. In this article, I develop an opposing analysis of the mass noun “reason” that puts reasons first. Just as the detail on the Mona Lisa is composed of particular details (brushstrokes and colors) and the crime in L.A. is composed of particular crimes (pickpocketings and speeding offenses), so the reason for you to go to the dentist is composed of your reasons to go. Reasons stand to reason as parts to a whole. Such a picture makes reasons fundamental once more, but it has a cost of entry. In order to accommodate the behavior of “reason” in comparative constructions, you need to abandon the idea that reasons are facts we can count up. On the contrary: They're not facts, and you can't count them.

According to a standard picture, normative reasons do not extend beyond the boundaries of agency. If something isn’t an agent, then there can’t be normative reasons for it to do one thing rather than another. This paper argues that the standard picture is false. There are reasons for smoke detectors to alarm when exposed to smoke, and for Venus Flytraps to close around their prey when stimulated. I argue that the collapse of the standard picture has important implications for philosophical debates about reasons, and especially serious consequences for theories that analyse normative reasons in terms of the standards of good practical reasoning.