The Pitfalls of ‘Reasons’

These days, many philosophers are tempted by an approach that can be epitomized by the slogan “Reasons First”. According to this approach, there is a crucial notion of a “normative reason” for an action or attitude, which is the most central of all normative concepts that appear in the parts of our thinking that are concerned with normative questions. As Joseph Raz (1999, 67) says, “The normativity of all that is normative consists in the way it is, or provides, or is otherwise related to reasons.” In a similar vein, T. M. Scanlon (2014, 2) says that he is “inclined to believe” that “reasons are fundamental” in the “sense of being the only fundamental elements of the normative domain, other normative notions such as good and ought being analysable in terms of reasons.” Besides Raz and Scanlon, many other contemporary philosophers are drawn to a similar approach – including John Skorupski (2010) and Mark Schroeder (2007 and 2010), among others.