•  719
    Reason claims and contrastivism about reasons
    Philosophical Studies 166 (2): 231-242. 2013.
    Contrastivism about reasons is the view that ‘reason’ expresses a relation with an argument place for a set of alternatives. This is in opposition to a more traditional theory on which reasons are reasons for things simpliciter. I argue that contrastivism provides a solution to a puzzle involving reason claims that explicitly employ ‘rather than’. Contrastivism solves the puzzle by allowing that some fact might be a reason for an action out of one set of alternatives without being a reason for t…Read more
  •  636
    Contrastive Reasons and Promotion
    Ethics 125 (1). 2014.
    A promising but underexplored view about normative reasons is contrastivism, which holds that considerations are fundamentally reasons for things only relative to sets of alternatives. Contrastivism gains an advantage over non-contrastive theories by holding that reasons relative to different sets of alternatives can be independent of one another. But this feature also raises a serious problem: we need some way of constraining this independence. I develop a version of contrastivism that provides…Read more
  •  391
    Deontic Reasoning Across Contexts
    In F. Cariani (ed.), DEON 2014, Springer. pp. 208-223. 2014.
    Contrastivism about ‘ought’ holds that ‘ought’ claims are relativized, at least implicitly, to sets of mutually exclusive but not necessarily jointly exhaustive alternatives. This kind of theory can solve puzzles that face other linguistic theories of ‘ought’, via the rejection or severe restriction of principles that let us make inferences between ‘ought’ claims. By rejecting or restricting these principles, however, the contrastivist takes on a burden of recapturing acceptable inferences that …Read more
  •  353
    Reasons, Competition, and Latitude
    In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics Volume 16, Oxford University Press. 2021.
    The overall moral status of an option—whether it is required, permissible, forbidden, or something we really should do—is explained by competition between the contributory reasons bearing on that option and the alternatives. A familiar challenge for accounts of this competition is to explain the existence of latitude: there are usually multiple permissible options, rather than a single required option. One strategy is to appeal to distinctions between reasons that compete in different ways. Phil…Read more
  •  343
    Competing Reasons
    In Jessica Brown & Mona Simion (eds.), Reasons, Justification, and Defeat, Oxford University Press. 2021.
    This chapter investigates different ways that pro tanto reasons bearing on our options can compete with one another in order to determine the overall normative status of those options. It argues for two key claims: (i) any theory of this competition must include a distinct role for reasons against, in addition to reasons for, and (ii) any theory must allow for comparative verdicts about how strongly supported the options are by the reasons, rather than simply which options are permissible or req…Read more
  •  283
    One Ought Too Many
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (1): 102-124. 2014.
    Some philosophers hold that „ought‟ is ambiguous between a sense expressing a propositional operator and a sense expressing a relation between an agent and an action. We defend the opposing view that „ought‟ always expresses a propositional operator against Mark Schroeder‟s recent objections that it cannot adequately accommodate an ambiguity in „ought‟ sentences between evaluative and deliberative readings, predicting readings of sentences that are not actually available. We show how adopting an…Read more
  •  259
    This paper argues for contrastivism about the deontic modals, 'ought', 'must', and 'may'. A simple contrastivist semantics that predicts the desired entailment relations among these modals is offered.
  •  221
    Explaining Loss of Standing to Blame
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 1-29. forthcoming.
    Both in everyday life and in moral philosophy, many think that our own past wrongdoing can undermine our standing to indignantly blame others for similar wrongdoing. In recent literature on the ethics of blame, we find two different kinds of explanation for this. Relative moral status accounts hold that to have standing to blame, you must be better than the person you are blaming, in terms of compliance with the norm. Fault-based accounts hold that those who blame others for things of which they…Read more
  •  184
    Dismissing Blame
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 26 (3). 2024.
    When someone blames you, you might accept the blame or you might reject it, challenging the blamer’s interpretation of the facts or providing a justification or excuse. Either way, there are opportunities for edifying moral discussion and moral repair. But another common, and less constructive, response is to simply dismiss the blame, refusing to engage with the blamer. Even if you agree that you are blameworthy, you may refuse to engage with the blame—and, specifically, with blame coming from t…Read more
  •  120
    Normative metaphysics for accountants
    Philosophical Studies 178 (2): 363-384. 2020.
    We use normative reasons in a bewildering variety of different ways. And yet, as many recent theorists have shown, one can discern systematic distinctions underlying this complexity. This paper is a contribution to this project of constructive normative metaphysics. We aim to bring a black sheep back into the flock: the balancing model of weighing reasons. This model is threatened by a variety of cases in which distinct reasons overlap, in the sense that they do not contribute separate weight fo…Read more
  •  111
    Deliberation, Reasons, and Alternatives
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (3): 682-702. 2018.
    A plausible constraint on normative reasons to act is that it must make sense to use them as premises in deliberation. I argue that a central sort of deliberation – what Bratman calls partial planning – is question-directed: it is over, and aims to resolve, deliberative questions. Whether it makes sense to use some consideration as a premise in deliberation in a case of partial planning can vary with the deliberative question at issue. I argue that the best explanation for this is that reasons a…Read more
  •  110
    Contrastivism About Reasons and Ought
    Philosophy Compass 10 (6): 379-388. 2015.
    Contrastivism about some concept says that the concept is relativized to sets of alternatives. Relative to some alternatives, the concept may apply, but relative to others, it may not. This article explores contrastivism about the central normative concepts of reasons and ought. Contrastivism about reasons says that a consideration may be a reason for an action A rather than one alternative, B, but may not be a reason for A rather than some other alternative, C. Likewise, contrastivism about oug…Read more
  •  82
    Reasons, oughts, and requirements
    Oxford Studies in Metaethics 11 155-181. 2016.
    This paper raises a challenge for the recently popular reasons first approach to normativity, according to which all normative notions can be explained in terms of reasons. The reasons first theorist owes us an account of how these explanations go for all other normative notions. I focus here on requirement, and to a lesser extent, permission. There is a very plausible, widely accepted account of the relationship between your reasons and what you ought to do|roughly, what you ought to do is just…Read more
  •  81
    Reasons for and reasons against
    Philosophical Studies 175 (3): 725-743. 2018.
    What an agent ought to do is determined by competition between reasons bearing on the options open to her. The popular metaphor of balancing or weighing reasons on a scale to represent this competition encourages a focus on competition between reasons for competing options. But what an agent ought to do also depends on the reasons against those options. The balancing metaphor does not provide an obvious way to represent reasons against. Partly as a result of this, there is a serious lack of work…Read more
  •  80
    Negative Reason Existentials
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 2 (2): 108-116. 2013.
    (Schroeder 2007) presents a puzzle about negative reason existentials—claims like ‘There's no reason to cry over spilled milk’. Some of these claims are intuitively true, but we also seem to be committed to the existence of the very reasons that are said not to exist. I argue that Schroeder's own pragmatic solution to this puzzle is unsatisfactory, and propose my own based on a contrastive account of reasons, according to which reasons are fundamentally reasons for one thing rather than another,…Read more
  •  75
    Time-slice rationality and filling in plans
    Analysis 77 (3): 595-607. 2017.
    In Reasons Without Persons, Brian Hedden argues that a theory of rationality need not provide diachronic norms for reasoning, since we can explain all we need to explain about rationality using purely synchronic norms. This article argues that a theory of rationality should contain at least one diachronic norm for reasoning, namely a norm to fill in the details of one's coarse-grained or partial plans. It also explores a possible synchronic approach to this aspect of rationality.
  •  72
    Ethics and Contrastivism
    Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2014.
    A contrastive theory of some concept holds that the concept in question only applies or fails to apply relative to a set of alternatives. Contrastivism has been applied to a wide range of philosophically important topics, including several topics in ethics. Contrastivism about reasons, for example, holds that whether some consideration is […]
  •  46
    Contrastive Reasons
    Oxford University Press. 2017.
    Justin Snedegar develops and defends contrastivism about reasons. This is the view that normative reasons are fundamentally reasons for or against actions or attitudes only relative to sets of alternatives. Simply put, reasons are always reasons to do one thing rather than another, instead of simply being reasons to do something, full stop.