Abstract

1. The idea of a reason should be taken as the central notion for understanding desire, motivation, value, and morality. The argument of the book takes the idea of a reason as primitive. Nothing I go on to claim depends on the thesis that this notion cannot be explained in other terms, but I do not see how this could be done. It is often held that in all, or at least most, cases in which a person has a reason for some action this is so because acting in this way would promote the satisfaction of some desire that the agent has. I argue that this is almost never the case. I argue that while the reasons a person has may depend on subjective factors, desires almost never provide reasons for action in the way that the desire-satisfaction model suggests. Desires are best understood not as states that provide reasons but rather as states that involve seeing other considerations as a reasons.