New York, USA: Routledge (
2018)
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Abstract
This book offers a new account of what it is to act for a normative reason.
The first part of the book examines the problems of causal accounts of acting
for reasons and suggests to solve them by a dispositional approach. The
author argues for a dispositional account which unites epistemic, volitional,
and executional dispositions in a complex normative competence. This
‘Normative Competence Account’ allows for more and less reflective ways
of acting for normative reasons. The second part of the book clarifies the
relation between the normative reason that an agent acts for and his or her
motivating reasons. It refutes the widely held ‘identity view’ that acting for
a normative reason requires the normative reason to be identical with a
motivating reason. The author describes how normative reasons are related
to motivating reasons by a relation of correspondence, and proposes a new
understanding of how normative reasons explain those actions that are
performed for them. Determined by Reasons engages with current debates
from a wide range of different philosophical areas, including action theory,
metaethics, moral psychology, epistemology, and ontology, to develop a new
account of acting for normative reasons.