Jonathan Way

Many philosophers have been attracted to the view that reasons are premises of good reasoning – that reasons to φ are premises of good reasoning towards φ‐ing. However, while this reasoning view is indeed attractive, it faces a problem accommodating outweighed reasons. In this article, I argue that the standard solution to this problem is unsuccessful and propose an alternative, which draws on the idea that good patterns of reasoning can be defeasible. I conclude by drawing out implications for the debate over pragmatic reasons for belief and other attitudes and for one influential form of reductionism about the normative.

This book has two main aims. First, it develops and defends a constitutive account of normative reasons as premises of good reasoning. This account says, roughly, that to be a normative reason for a response (such as a belief or intention) is to be premise of good reasoning, from fitting responses, to that response. Second, building on the account of reasons, it develops and defends a fittingness-first account of the structure of the normative domain. This account says that there is a single normative property, fittingness, which is normatively basic, and on which all other normative properties depend. On this view, reasons, oughts, value, and other normative phenomena all ultimately depend on fittingness. The account of normative reasons is a part of this general view of the normative domain. The book begins, in Chapter 1, by motivating the account of reasons as premises of good reasoning. Chapter 2 argues that good reasoning is, roughly, reasoning that preserves fittingness. Chapter 3 addresses the question of what fittingness is. Chapter 4 defends constitutive accounts of evaluative properties, like goodness, in terms of fitting attitudes. Chapters 5 and 6 shows how the view provides an attractive account of how reasons determine the deontic status of a response—whether you ought or may so respond. Chapter 7 addresses some challenges concerning certain reasons for belief, the relationship between reasons for action and reasons for intention, and reasons for emotion.

Norm-attitude accounts of value say that for something to be valuable is for there to be norms that support valuing that thing. For example, according to fitting-attitude accounts, something is of value if it is fitting to value, and according to buck-passing accounts, something is of value if the reasons support valuing it. Norm-attitude accounts face the partiality problem: in cases of partiality, what it is fitting to value, and what the reasons support valuing, may not line up with what’s valuable. Buck-passers have a solution to this problem and may claim that this gives them an advantage over fitting-attitude accounts. In this paper, we show how fitting-attitudes accounts can offer a broadly analogous, and equally attractive, solution to the problem.

Epistemology, like ethics, is normative. Just as ethics addresses questions about how we ought to act, so epistemology addresses questions about how we ought to believe and enquire. We can also ask metanormative questions. What does it mean to claim that someone ought to do or believe something? Do such claims express beliefs about independently existing facts, or only attitudes of approval and disapproval towards certain pieces of conduct? How do putative facts about what people ought to do or believe fit in to the natural world? In the case of ethics, such questions have been subject to extensive and systematic investigation, yielding the thriving subdiscipline of metaethics. Yet the corresponding questions have been largely ignored in epistemology; there is no serious subdiscipline of metaepistemology. This surprising state of affairs reflects a more general tendency for ethics and epistemology to be carried out largely in isolation from each other, despite the important substantive and structural connections between them. A movement to overturn the general tendency has only recently gained serious momentum, and has yet to tackle metanormative questions in a sustained way. This edited collection aims to stimulate this project and thus advance the new subdiscipline of metaepistemology. Its original essays draw on the sophisticated theories and frameworks that have been developed in metaethics concerning practical normativity, examine whether they can be applied to epistemic normativity, and consider what this might tell us about both.

As rational agents, we are governed by reasons. The fact that there’s beer at the pub might be a reason to go there and a reason to believe you’ll enjoy it. As this example illustrates, there are reasons for both action and for belief. There are also many other responses for which there seem to be reasons – for example, desire, regret, admiration, and blame. This diversity raises questions about how reasons for different responses relate to each other. Might certain such reasons be more fundamental than others? Should certain reasons and not others be treated as paradigmatic? At least implicitly, many philosophers treat reasons for action as the fundamental or paradigmatic case. In contrast, this paper articulates and defends an alternative approach, on which reasons for attitudes are fundamental, and reasons for action are both derivative and, in certain ways, idiosyncratic. After outlining this approach, we focus on defending its most contentious thesis, that reasons for action are fundamentally reasons for intention. We offer two arguments for this thesis, which turn on central roles of reasons: that reasons can be responded to, and that reasons can feature as premises of good reasoning.  We then examine objections to the thesis and argue that none succeed. We conclude by sketching some ways in which our approach is significant for theorising about reasons.

Central to Errol Lord’s The Importance of Being Rational is the notion of a possessed (objective, normative) reason. For Lord, rationality is a matter of correctly responding to possessed reasons, what rationality requires and permits is that we react in ways that are appropriate given our possessed reasons, and we ought – full stop – to react in ways that are decisively supported by our possessed reasons. Thus for Lord, possessed (objective, normative) reasons are very important indeed. This paper raises some challenges about this picture. In §1, I offer objections to Lord’s accounts of rational requirements. In §2, I offer objections to a central argument for his view of what we ought to do. If successful, these objections suggest that possessed reasons are not as important as Lord thinks. In §3, I consider his account of possessed reasons itself.

Enkratic reasoning—reasoning from believing that you ought to do something to an intention to do that thing—seems good. But there is a puzzle about how it could be. Good reasoning preserves correctness, other things equal. But enkratic reasoning does not preserve correctness. This is because what you ought to do depends on your epistemic position, but what it is correct to intend does not. In this paper, I motivate these claims and thus show that there is a puzzle. I then argue that the best solution is to deny that correctness is always independent of your epistemic position. As I explain, a notable upshot is that a central epistemic norm directs us to believe, not simply what is true, but what we are in a position to know.

What makes the difference between good and bad reasoning? In this paper we defend a novel account of good reasoning—both theoretical and practical—according to which it preserves fittingness or correctness: good reasoning is reasoning which is such as to take you from fitting attitudes to further fitting attitudes, other things equal. This account, we argue, is preferable to two others that feature in the recent literature. The first, which has been made prominent by John Broome, holds that the standards of good reasoning derive from rational requirements. The second holds that these standards derive from reasons. We argue that these accounts face serious difficulties in correctly distinguishing good from bad reasoning, and in explaining what's worthwhile about good reasoning. We then propose our alternative account and argue that it performs better on these counts. In the final section, we develop certain elements of the account in response to some possible objections.

The Wide-Scope approach to instrumental reason holds that the requirement to intend the necessary means to your ends should be understood as a requirement to either intend the means, or else not intend the end. In this paper I explain and defend a neglected version of this approach. I argue that three serious objections to Wide-Scope accounts turn on a certain assumption about the nature of the reasons that ground the Wide-Scope requirement. The version of the Wide-Scope approach defended here allows us to reject this assumption, and so defuse the objections.

The Wide-Scope view of instrumental reason holds that you should not intend an end without also intending what you believe to be the necessary means. This, the Wide-Scoper claims, provides the best account of why failing to intend the believed means to your end is a rational failing. But Wide-Scopers have struggled to meet a simple Explanatory Challenge: why shouldn't you intend an end without intending the necessary means? What reason is there not to do so? In the first half of this paper, I argue that the Wide-Scope view struggles to meet this challenge because it takes the principles of instrumental reason to have unlimited application—to apply to all agents, in all circumstances. I then go on to offer a new account of these principles. The new account is very much in the spirit of the Wide-Scope view, and shares its central advantages, but lacks its unlimited application. This view should, therefore, find the Explanatory Challenge more tractable. In the second half of the paper, I argue that this prediction is confirmed. If the requirements of instrumental reason apply only when a means is, or is believed to be, necessary for your end, then plausible independent claims, about reasons, rationality, and intentions, explain why failing to intend the necessary means to your ends is a rational failing.

According to fitting-attitudes accounts of value, the valuable is what there is sufficient reason to value. Such accounts face the famous wrong kind of reason problem. For example, if an evil demon threatens to kill you unless you value him, it may appear that you have sufficient reason to value the demon, although he is not valuable. One solution to this problem is to deny that the demon’s threat is a reason to value him. It is instead a reason to want to value the demon, and to bring it about that you value him. However, many proponents of the wrong kind of reason problem find this solution unmotivated. This paper thus offers a new argument for this solution. The argument turns on the ‘transmission’ of reasons – the familiar fact that there is often reason for one action or attitude because there is reason for another. I observe that putative reasons of the wrong kind transmit in a very different way to other reasons. I then argue that this difference is best explained by the hypothesis that putative reasons of the wrong kind are not reasons for the attitude in question, but are instead reasons to want and bring about that attitude.

According to the fitting-attitudes account of value, for X to be good is for it to be fitting to value X. But what is it for an attitude to be fitting? A popular recent view is that it is for there to be sufficient reason for the attitude. In this paper we argue that proponents of the fitting-attitudes account should reject this view and instead take fittingness as basic. In this way they avoid the notorious ‘wrong kind of reason’ problem, and can offer attractive accounts of reasons and good reasoning in terms of fittingness.

Recent views of reasons and rationality make it plausible that it can sometimes be rational to do what you have no reason to do. A number of writers have concluded that if this is so, rationality is not normative. But this is a mistake. Even if we assume a tight connection between reasons and normativity, the normativity of rationality does not require that there is always reason to be rational. The first half of this paper illustrates this point with reference to the subjective reasons account of rationality. The second half suggest that this point may have been missed because of certain similarities between the subjective reasons account and the importantly different transparency account. On the transparency account, rationality seems not to be normative. I think it is often assumed that what goes for the transparency account goes for the subjective reasons account as well. But I argue that this is a mistake. A corollary is that the subjective reasons account has an important advantage over the transparency account, given how plausible it is that rationality is normative

This article is an introduction to the recent debate about whether rationality is normative – that is, very roughly, about whether we should have attitudes which fit together in a coherent way. I begin by explaining an initial problem – the “detaching problem” – that arises on the assumption that we should have coherent attitudes. I then explain the prominent “wide-scope” solution to this problem, and some of the central objections to it. I end by considering the options that arise if we reject the wide-scope solution

Reasoning is a certain kind of attitude-revision. What kind? The aim of this paper is to introduce and defend a new answer to this question, based on the idea that reasoning is a goodness-fixing kind. Our central claim is that reasoning is a functional kind: it has a constitutive point or aim that fixes the standards for good reasoning. We claim, further, that this aim is to get fitting attitudes. We start by considering recent accounts of reasoning due to Ralph Wedgwood and John Broome, and argue that, while these accounts contain important insights, they are not satisfactory: Wedgwood’s rules out too much, and Broome’s too little. We then introduce and defend our alternative account, discuss some of its implications and attractions, and, finally, consider objections.