Getting Things Right

Some of our attitudes are fitting, others unfitting. It seems fitting to admire Mandela, but not Idi Amin, and to believe that the Seine flows through Paris, but not that the Thames does. Fitting attitudes get things right. Conor McHugh and Jonathan Way argue that fittingness is the key to understanding the normative domain - the domain of reasons, obligations, and value. They develop and defend a novel 'fittingness first' approach, on which fittingness is a normatively basic property, on which all other normative properties depend, and they show how this approach illuminates central questions in ethics and epistemology. Getting Things Right begins with normative reasons. Much influential recent work holds that reasons are normatively basic. McHugh and Way argue, in contrast, that reasons should be analysed as premises of good reasoning. Good reasoning, in turn, should be understood in terms of the preservation of fittingness. Thus, reasons are ultimately understood in terms of fittingness. Getting Things Right shows, among other things, how this account can capture the way that reasons determine deontic status - what you ought or may do. Deontic status depends on how reasons' weights compete and combine. This, it is argued, is a matter of where good reasoning from those reasons can lead - and thus, again, is ultimately explained by fittingness. Additionally, Getting Things Right also explains how value can be understood in terms of fitting attitudes, and how reasons for action, belief, and emotions can be understood in a unified way.