Euan Metz

This thesis is about what a normative reason is and how reasons relate to oughts. I argue that normative reasons are to be understood as relational properties of favouring or disfavouring. I then examine the question: What is the relation between reasons, so understood, and what we ought to do, believe, or feel? I argue that the relation is an explanatory one. We should explain what we ought to do in terms of reasons, and not the other way around. This view faces a number of difficulties, in particular in accounting for supererogatory acts and the distinction between an action being required and an action being recommended. The analysis that I provide explains how we can solve these problems. In providing such an analysis, this thesis aims to be a contribution to the discussion of how we might elucidate the structure of what is sometimes called normativity.

In a recent paper, Gregory defends the claim that a normative reason is a good basis for Φ-ing. He claims that a “basis” is what is commonly known as a motivating reason. By “good” Gregory means good in its attributive sense, as something which is good as a kind. In this paper I argue that it is not plausible that normative reasons are motivating reasons that are good as an instance of their kind. I argue that in order to assess this claim, pace Gregory, we need to know what it is for a motivating reason to be good as a kind. I canvas some potential answers to this question provided by Gregory, first that motivating reasons are things that play a role in a causal structure, and second that motivating reasons are what is believed to be a normative reason. I argue that since neither of these is plausibly good as a kind, we should reject RGB.

Deontic, as opposed to evaluative buck-passing theories seem to be easier to accept, since there appears to be an intimate connection between deontic properties, such as ‘ought’, ‘requirement’, and ‘permission’ on the one hand, and normative reasons on the other. However, it is far from obvious what, precisely, the connection consists in, and this topic has suffered from a paucity of discussion. This paper seeks to address that paucity by providing a novel deontic buck-passing view, one that avoids the pitfalls both of the most straightforward view on the matter (what I call the “standard view”) as well as a recently articulated view, due to Matt Bedke. It does so by appealing first to the distinction between a reason for, and a reason against, and uses this distinction to clarify what are taken to be two fundamental, but distinct, deontic properties—ought and requirement. The resulting view allows us to capture these properties, the structural relations between them, and does so in a way that avoids making supererogation impossible.