Weighing Reasons

Edited by Errol Lord and Barry Maguire

Includes new papers by prominent senior philosophers and promising young philosophers
Focuses on an undertheorised notion that is central to a lot of work in ethics and epistemology
Features work at the intersection of epistemology, ethics, metaethics, decision theory, economics

Weighing Reasons

Edited by Errol Lord and Barry Maguire

Description

In recent decades normative reasons-considerations that count in favor of one thing or another-have come to the theoretical fore in ethics and epistemology. A major attraction of normative reasons is that they have weight or strength. Reasons are particular considerations that count in favor of actions or attitudes to some degree. This feature is attractive to theorists who want to explain more complex normative phenomena in terms of a notion that is weighted.

This volume aims to provide the beginnings for a theory of weight. The fourteen new essays fall into three groups. One set of essays addresses questions about the nature of weight. Topics include the relations between reasons and conditions and modifiers, between reasons and other weighted notions such as commitments, and different models of the interaction of reasons. A second set of essays addresses substantive questions: questions about weight relevant to value-first, desire-first, evidence-first and other normative research programs. A third set of essays applies issues in the theory of weight to broader ethical debates. The book thus not only makes novel contributions to debates in ethics and epistemology about the nature of normative reasons and their weight, it also makes a strong case for the theoretical fruitfulness of the ideology of normative reasons.

Weighing Reasons

Edited by Errol Lord and Barry Maguire

Contributors
Introduction
1. An Opinionated Guide to the Weight of Reasons
Errol Lord & Barry Maguire
Section One: Machinery in the Theory of Weight
2. Conditions, Modifiers, and Holism
Ralf Bader
3. How do reasons accrue?
Shyam Nair
4. Reasons, Reason, and Context
Daniel Fogal
5. Commitment: Worth the Weight
Alida Liberman & Mark Schroeder
Section Two: Analytic Issues in the Theory of Weight
6. Democratizing Humeanism
Kate Manne
7. Value and the Weight of Practical Reasons
Joseph Raz
8. The Distinction between Justifying and Requiring: Nothing to Fear
Joshua Gert
9. Bearing the Weight of Reasons
Stephen Kearns
Section Three: Applications of the Theory of Weight
10. Reasoning with Precedents as Constrained Natural Reasoning
John F. Horty
11. Comparativism: The Grounds of Rational Choice
Ruth Chang
12. The Modesty of the Moral Point of View
Karl Schafer
13. Making the "Hard " Problem of Moral Normativity Easier
Stephen Darwall
14. The Implementation Problem for Deontology
Michael Smith and Frank Jackson
Index

Weighing Reasons

Edited by Errol Lord and Barry Maguire

Author Information

Edited by Errol Lord, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania, and Barry Maguire, Research Assistant Professor in Philosophy, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Errol Lord is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. He works on ethical theory, epistemology, philosophy of action, and aesthetics. He has published papers in these areas in Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Philosophical Studies, The Philosophical Quarterly, and Australasian Journal of Philosophy, among other places.

Barry Maguire is a Research Assistant Professor in Philosophy at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Core Faculty Member in the joint UNC/Duke program in Politics, Philosophy, & Economics. He was previously a Bersoff Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow in Philosophy at New York University. He works in ethical theory, epistemology, political philosophy, and metaphysics.

Contributors:

Ralf Bader, University of Oxford
Ruth Chang, Rutgers University
Stephen Darwall, Yale University
Daniel Fogal, New York University
Joshua Gert, College of William and Mary
John F. Horty, University of Maryland, College Park
Frank Jackson, Princeton University, ANU
Stephen Kearns, Florida State University
Alida Liberman, USC
Errol Lord, University of Pennsylvania
Barry Maguire, UNC Chapel Hill
Kate Manne, Cornell University
Joseph Raz, Columbia University
Shyam Nair, Lignan University
Karl Schafer, University of Pittsburgh
Mark Schroeder, USC
Michael Smith, Princeton University

Weighing Reasons

Edited by Errol Lord and Barry Maguire

Reviews and Awards

"Even to those who, like this reader, are not particularly enthusiastic about this program's impact on the course of practical philosophy, the fourteen papers in the volume offer a worthwhile opportunity to reflect on its scope and significance." - Patricio A. Fernandez, Journal of Moral Philosophy

"[T]he book contains a wealth of exciting topics on reasons ... you have definitely very weighty reasons to read [it] all." - Krister Bykvist, Analysis

"Weighing Reasons is a refreshing collection ... All too often volumes of this type contain very little new work and so are sometimes a little bit stale. They tend to be on already much-debated topics and their famous contributors rarely venture outside their well-known views. This anthology, in contrast, is on a relatively unexplored topic, and its editors and many of its authors belong to a stellar younger generation of philosophers." - Jussi Suikkanen, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews