Thinking About Reasons

Thinking about Reasons is a collection of fourteen new essays on topics in ethics and the philosophy of action, inspired in one way or another by the work of Jonathan Dancy—one of his generation's most influential moral philosophers. Many of the most influential living thinkers in the area are contributors to this collection, which also contains an autobiographical afterword by Dancy himself. Topics discussed in this volume include: · the idea that the facts that explain action are non-psychological ones · buck passing theories of goodness and rightness · the idea that some moral reasons justify action without requiring it · the particularist idea that there are no true informative moral principles · the idea that egoism and impartial consequentialism are self-defeating · the idea that moral reasons are dependent on either impersonal value, or benefits to oneself, or benefits to those with whom one has some special connection, but not on deontological constraints · the idea that we must distinguish between reasons and enablers, disablers, intensifiers, and attenuators of reasons · the idea that, although the lived ethical life is shaped by standing commitments, uncodifable judgement is at least sometimes needed to resolve what to do when these commitments conflict · the idea that the value of a whole need not be a mathematical function of the values of the parts of that whole · the idea that practical reasoning is based on inference the idea that there cannot be irreducibly normative properties.