Abstract

The central thought of Jonathan Dancy’s Practical Reality is that any philosophically adequate account of reasons for action has to preserve the sense of the idea that agents can act for good reasons. Though platitudinous enough, this notion embodies the central difficulty faced in the theory of reasons for action: that the notion of a reason for action serves two roles, that of explaining action and that of justifying it. It is sometimes suggested that there is mere ambiguity here: there are motivating reasons and there are justifying reasons, and never the twain shall meet. However, to adopt this expedient is to commit oneself to the view that the reasons that are good and the reasons for which agents act are entities of two very different kinds, and thus that it is impossible for an agent to act for good reasons. An account of good reasons and of motivation that enables us to explain how this is indeed possible fixes the agenda for Practical Reality.