Reasons, Oughts, and Normative Force

Ask someone why they gave up the seat on the train and the answer will not be a theory. It will be a consideration: she was older, she was carrying bags, nobody else was going to. Moral theories are attempts to systematise considerations of that kind, and the considerations are available before any theory is. Whatever a theory of right action turns out to say, it is answerable to these, so they should be understood first.

Reasons in two senses

The counting-in-favour formulation is T. M. Scanlon's, and its usefulness lies in its refusal to explain. Counting in favour is not defined in terms of anything more basic, because the attempts to define it keep smuggling it back in. Saying that a reason is what a rational person would act on presupposes an account of rationality that will itself have to mention reasons. Scanlon's proposal is that the notion is primitive, and the job is to say what has it and what follows, rather than to reduce it.

The distinction is not a technicality, and two familiar cases show why.

A person can act on a motivating reason that is not a normative reason at all. Someone who avoids the lift because a number on the panel is unlucky has a reason in the second sense and none in the first, and describing the case requires both notions. Reduce reasons to what moves people and the criticism cannot be stated.

And a person can have a normative reason they never act on. The evidence that the roof is failing counts in favour of repairing it whether or not the owner has looked at the ceiling. Reduce reasons to what actually motivates and you lose the fact that reasons can be missed, which is most of what reasoning is for.

The general phenomenon

The contrast with theoretical reasoning is worth holding onto, because the two are structurally similar and their materials are not. Evidence bears on what to believe. That a claim would be comforting bears on nothing at all in that domain, as the epistemology ladder argues at length under the heading of epistemic reasons. In practical reasoning the range of relevant considerations is wider: what you promised, what it will cost, whom it affects, what kind of person it would make you.

Ethics is one region of the normative and not the whole of it. Rationality is normative, and so is the epistemic assessment of belief, and so in a thinner way are the standards internal to games and crafts. What unites them is that they generate claims of the sort the previous article isolated. What divides them, and whether the moral case is special, is one of the questions the subject exists to answer.

Reasons do not come one at a time

Almost every reason is like this. That an evening out would be enjoyable counts in favour of going, and it keeps counting in favour of going even when the deadline wins. This is what makes deliberation a matter of weighing rather than of looking up an answer.

The evidence that an outweighed reason is still there is what it leaves behind. Break a minor promise to do something more important and you have done the right thing and still owe an apology, because the promise was a real consideration that lost rather than a consideration that evaporated. A theory on which the defeated reason simply vanishes cannot explain the apology.

An ought-claim, by contrast, is usually all things considered. "You ought to finish the report" is a verdict about what to do given everything, and it is the output of the weighing rather than an input to it. This is why the two vocabularies are not interchangeable: reasons are contributory and oughts are conclusive.

A terminological note prevents a common confusion. Some writers say prima facie where this article says pro tanto. The phrase prima facie suggests something that merely appears to be a reason and might turn out not to be, which is not what is meant. A pro tanto reason genuinely is a reason and genuinely loses. The intermediate tier meets prima facie duties in W. D. Ross, where the phrase has a settled technical use.

Why start here

A moral theory is, at bottom, a claim about which considerations count and how much. Consequentialism says that what counts is what happens; deontology says that some considerations constrain regardless of what happens; virtue ethics says the question is malformed until you ask what a good person would see. Those are disagreements about reasons before they are disagreements about anything else, which is why the vocabulary of reasons is more basic than the vocabulary of theories.

What is now available

Normative claims have been distinguished from descriptive ones, and the normative claims have been analysed into contributory reasons and all-things-considered verdicts.

A moral theory is what connects them: a general account of which reasons there are and how they combine into verdicts. The next article says what such a theory has to supply.