Ruth Chang

Derek Parfit thought that his continuum argument in population ethics leading to the Repugnant Conclusion—viz., that a world with a vast number of people leading lives barely worth living is better than a world with many people enjoying excellent lives—raised a puzzle that must be solved before we can hope to arrive at a correct theory of morality, what he called ‘Theory X’. This chapter critically examines four possible ‘structural’ solutions to continua arguments like Parfit’s—solutions according to which the structure of continua is not as continua arguments suppose. It is argued that incommensurability, incomparability, indeterminacy, and indeed Parfit’s own preferred solution, ‘lexical imprecision’, fail to provide the break in structure needed to defuse continua arguments. An alternative structural solution is then proposed according to which, somewhere along the continuum, items are on a par with their immediate predecessors. Being on a par is a _sui generis_ fourth basic way two items can be compared beyond being better or worse than one another or equally good. The parity solution is shown to have two significant advantages over the other structural proposals. First, only the parity solution allows us to maintain the very plausible thought at the heart of continua arguments, viz., that as we proceed along the continuum, a small diminution in quality of value can be compensated for by a large increase in quantity of value. Second, by appealing to a tetrachotomous, rather than a trichotomous, view of value—a view of value that includes parity—we can vindicate first-blush, untutored, intuitive reactions as to what goes wrong in continua arguments. Thinking about what some may have too readily dismissed as a ‘mere puzzle’ opens up new ways of thinking about the very structure of normativity and the shape of Theory X.

What makes a choice rational? This chapter defends _comparativism_ the view that what makes a choice rational is a comparative fact about the alternatives or their reasons. Comparativism is a view that, if correct, any first-order normative theory must accept. There are three important challenges to comparativism: (1) that noncomparative relations among reasons, such as “exclusion,” can be what makes a choice rational; (2) that in some or all choice situations there is just “the” or “a” thing to do, and so comparative facts are irrelevant to what makes a choice rational; and (3) that the incomparability of the alternatives is compatible with the possibility of a rational choice. These challenges are explored and addressed.

What sorts of consideration can be normative reasons for action? If we systematize the wide variety of considerations that can be cited as normative reasons, do we find that there is a single kind of consideration that can always be a reason? Desire-based theorists think that the fact that you want something or would want it under certain evaluatively neutral conditions can always be your normative reason for action. Value-based theorists, by contrast, think that what plays that role are evaluative facts (or the facts that subvene them) about what you want, such as the fact that having it would be good in some way. This paper argues that value-based theorists are wrong; if we try to find a single kind of consideration that can always be normative reason, we find that sometimes our reason is the fact that we want something and not any corresponding evaluative fact.

What is it to be a rational agent? The orthodox answer to this question can be summarized by a slogan: Rationality is a matter of recognizing and responding to reasons. But is the orthodoxy correct? In this chapter, I explore an alternative way of thinking about what it is to be a rational agent according to which a central activity of rational agency is the creation of reasons. I explain how the idea of metaphysical grounding can help make sense of the idea that as rational agents, we can, quite literally, create reasons. I end by suggesting a reason to take this alternative view of rational agency seriously. The orthodoxy faces a challenge: How do rational agents make choices within ‘well-formed choice situations’? By allowing that we have the normative power to create reasons, we have a satisfying and attractive solution to this question.

What, exactly, is so hard about hard choices? I suggest that what is distinctively hard about hard choices is that they present us with the volitional difficulty of putting ourselves behind an alternative and thereby making it true of ourselves that we have most reason to do one thing rather than another. Making it true through your commitments that, for instance, you have most reason to be a philosopher rather than a lawyer makes the choice between the careers hard. This answer is in contrast to that of Sergio Tenenbaum, who understands the hardness of a hard choice as a deliberative difficulty in specifying our alternatives and ends in ways that conform with certain proposed constraints of rationality. For Tenenbaum, the hardness of hard choices is not distinctive to such choices but is a general difficulty rational agents face when they need to further specify their alternatives and ends, even if the choice is easy.

Many philosophers are completely unaware of the world of executive education and business events, and Specialist Public Lectures often arise from these occasions. They range from informal retreats, usually held in some tawny spot of nature for the purpose of team‐building among the employees of a firm, to exclusive, luxury junkets for C‐suite executives and VIPs at a spa or golfing resort for the purpose of networking and “upping one's game.” Most public lectures involve a sharing of information – arresting facts or gasp‐inducing statistics – interwoven with a large interpretive claim, usually left quite vague. Metaphysicians can illuminate ideas of gender; epistemologists can weigh in on the epistemic authority afforded new technologies; philosophers of religion can reveal insights into character and secular civic education; and legal philosophers can guide debates about regulation.

‘Normative powers’ are capacities to create normative reasons by our willing or say-so. They are significant, because if we have them and exercise them, then sometimes the reasons we have are ‘up to us’. But such powers seem mysterious. How can we, by willing, create reasons? In this paper, I examine whether normative powers can be adequately explained normatively, by appeal to norms of a practice, normative principles, human interests, or values. Can normative explanations of normative powers explain how an exercise of the will can afford us special freedom in determining our reasons? I argue that normative approaches to answering this question prove to be inadequate. To vindicate the thought that normative powers can make our reasons ‘up to us’, we need an altogether different approach to understanding them, one that is located not in the normative but in the metaphysical. I end the paper by sketching a metaphysical explanation of normative powers. This metaphysical defence of normative powers provides a window into a different, more agent-centered way of thinking about rational agency.

In this article, I identify and critically examine 3 dogmas of normativity that support a commonly accepted ‘Passivist View' of rational agency. I raise some questions about these dogmas, suggest what we should believe in their place, and moot an alternative ‘Activist View' of what it is to be a rational agent that grows out of rejection of the 3 dogmas. Underwriting the dogmas and the Passivist View, I suggest, is a deeply held but mistaken assumption that the normative domain is fundamentally akin to the nonnormative domain. Once we allow that the normative may be fundamentally unlike the nonnormative in certain key ways, a shift in our thinking about what it is to be rational becomes possible. I end by considering some implications of this paradigm shift in rationality from the passive to the active for various applied matters.

This chapter argues that there is a particular kind of ‘internal’ commitment typically made in the context of romantic love relationships that has striking meta-normative implications for how we understand the role of the will in practical normativity. Internal commitments cannot plausibly explain the reasons we have in committed relationships on the usual model—as triggering reasons that are already there, in the way that making a promise triggers a reason via a pre-existing norm of the form ‘If you make a promise to x, then you have a reason to x’. Instead, internal commitments are that in virtue of which one has the special reasons of committed relationships; they are the grounds of such reasons. In this way, the will is a source of practical normativity.

The Routledge Handbook of Practical Reasonis an outstanding reference source to this exciting and distinctive subject area. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors the handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the field covering questions such as: What is the nature of the reasons for which we act and what is the nature of the faculty of practical reason? What are normative reasons for action? What is practical irrationality and what are the requirements, permissions, and powers that explain what it is to be practically rational and irrational? What is the relationship between ethics and the philosophy of practical reason? This handbook will be essential reading for philosophy students and researchers in metaethics, philosophy of action, action theory, ethics and history of philosophy.

On a ‘comparative’ conception of practical reasons, reasons are like ‘weights’ that can make an action more or less rational. Bernard Gert adopts instead a ‘toggle’ conception of practical reasons: something counts as a reason just in case it alone can make some or other otherwise irrational action rational. I suggest that Gert’s conception suffers from various defects, and that his motivation for adopting this conception – his central claim that actions can be rational without there being reasons for them – does not require adoption of the toggle conception. The more intuitive comparative conception of reasons for action can accommodate the insight.

The paper has two aims. The first is to propose a general framework for organizing some central questions about normative practical reasons in a way that separates importantly distinct issues that are often run together. Setting out this framework provides a snapshot of the leading types of view about practical reasons as well as a deeper understanding of what are widely regarded to be some of their most serious difficulties. The second is to use the proposed framework to uncover and diagnose what I believe is a structural problem that plagues the debate about practical reasons. A common move in the debate involves a proponent of one type of view offering what she and others proposing that type consider to be a devastating criticism of an opposing type of view, only to find that her criticism is shrugged off by her opponents as easy to answer, misguided, or having little significance for their view. This isn’t due to conceptual blindness or mere slavish devotion to a theory but something fundamental about the argumentative structure of a debate over genuinely shared issues. Hence, the debate about practical reasons suffers from argumentative gridlock. The proposed framework helps us to see why this is so, and what we might do to move beyond it.

This paper proposes a way to understand transformative choices, choices that change ‘who you are.’ First, it distinguishes two broad models of transformative choice: 1) ‘event-based’ transformative choices in which some event—perhaps an experience—downstream from a choice transforms you, and 2) ‘choice-based’ transformative choices in which the choice itself—and not something downstream from the choice—transforms you. Transformative choices are of interest primarily because they purport to pose a challenge to standard approaches to rational choice. An examination of the event-based transformative choices of L. A. Paul and Edna Ullman-Margalit, however, suggests that event-based transformative choices don’t raise any difficulties for standard approaches to rational choice. An account of choice-based transformative choices—and what it is to be transformed—is then proposed. Transformative choices so understood not only capture paradigmatic cases of transformative choice but also point the way to a different way of thinking about rational choice and agency.

‘Value pluralism’ as traditionally understood is the metaphysical thesis that there are many values that cannot be ‘reduced’ to a single supervalue. While it is widely assumed that value pluralism is true, the case for value pluralism depends on resolution of a neglected question in value theory: how are values properly individuated? Value pluralism has been thought to be important in two main ways. If values are plural, any theory that relies on value monism, for example, hedonistic utilitarianism, is mistaken. The plurality of values is also thought to raise problems for rational choice. If two irreducibly distinct values conflict, it seems that there is no common ground that justifies choosing one over the other. The metaphysical plurality of values does not, however, have the implications for rational choice that many have supposed. A charitable interpretation of value pluralist writings suggests a ‘nonreductive’ form of value pluralism. Nonreductive value pluralism maintains that in the context of practical choice, there are differences between values—whether or not those values reduce to a single supervalue—that have important implications for rational choice. This article examines the main arguments for metaphysical value pluralism, argues that metaphysical value pluralism does not have certain implications that it is widely thought to have, and outlines three forms of nonreductive value pluralism.

In other work I have argued that items can be on a par, where being on a par is a fourth, basic, sui generis value relation beyond the usual trichotomy of ‘better than’, ‘worse than’, and ‘equally good’. In this paper, I aim to marshal non-technical, intuitive arguments for this view. First, I try to cast doubt on the leading source of intuitive resistance to parity, the conviction that if two items are comparable, one must be better than the other, worse than it, or they must be equally good. Second, I explain how parity can arise by appealing to an uncontroversial distinction between quantity and quality of value. I propose both sufficient conditions for parity and a nontechnical model of the notion. My overall aim is to bring into view a simple and intuitive picture of value – and more generally of normativity – in which parity plays a significant role.

What, normatively speaking, are the grounds of rational choice? This paper defends ‘comparativism’, the view that a comparative fact grounds rational choice. It examines three of the most serious challenges to comparativism: 1) that sometimes what grounds rational choice is an exclusionary-type relation among alternatives; 2) that an absolute fact such as that it’s your duty or conforms to the Categorial Imperative grounds rational choice; and 3) that rational choice between incomparables is possible, and in particular, all that is needed for the possibility of rational choice is that one alternative is not worse than the others. Each challenge is questioned. If comparativism is correct, then no matter what normative theory you favor, your answer to the question, ‘What makes my choice rational?’ must be comparative in form. In this way, comparativism provides a framework for normative theorizing.

Most familiar approaches to social conflict moot reasonable ways of dealing with conflict, ways that aim to serve values such as legitimacy, justice, morality, fairness, fidelity to individual preferences, and so on. In this paper, I explore an alternative approach to social conflict that contrasts with the leading approaches of Rawlsians, perfectionists, and social choice theorists. The proposed approach takes intrinsic features of the conflict—what I call a conflict's evaluative ‘structure’—as grounds for a rational way of responding to that conflict. Like conflict within a single person, social conflict can have a distinctive evaluative structure that supports certain rational responses over others. I suggest that one common structure in both intra- and interpersonal cases of conflict supports the rational response of ‘self-governance’. Self-governance in the case of social conflict involves a society's deliberating over the question, ‘What kind of society should we be?’ In liberal democracies, this rational response is also a reasonable one.