Roberto Keller

Conner Schultz (2025) has claimed that there are no normative reasons for the emotions, and perhaps not even for desire and preference. I will argue, in reply, that his argument for this claim fails, for we ought to distinguish two different constraints on normative reasons: the response constraint and the deliberative constraint. An upshot of my discussion is that our take on what normative reasons are affects our take on what there can be normative reasons for—a crucial observation, if we want to find a general theory of normative reasons.

Reasons-first theorists claim that facts about reasons for attitudes are normatively primitive, and that all other normative facts ultimately reduce to facts about reasons. According to their view, for example, the fact that something is good ultimately reduces to facts about reasons to favour it. I argue that these theories face a challenging dilemma due to the normativity of arational lifeforms, for instance the fact that water is good for plants. If all normative facts are, ultimately, facts about reasons for attitudes, then reasons-first theorists must either (a) show that these facts do reduce to facts about reasons, or (b) concede that they do not and, instead, show that this is not a problem for their view. Both options, however, are riddled with difficulties—or so I will try to argue.

In a recent article, Jon Bebb (2023, Analysis) has argued that we have no reason to believe, contrary to what is often assumed, that ‘normal’ is ambiguous between a statistical and a normative sense. I argue that his case rests on two false premisses, and that we have very good reasons to believe that ‘normal’ is, in fact, ambiguous in this way. As part of my argument, I will go on to suggest that if ‘normal’ is ambiguous between a statistical and a normative sense, that is because of the deep but seldom recognized connection between regularities and rules. This suggestion, if correct, will in turn help us elucidate three familiar thoughts about normality.