Karol Milczarek
University of Warsaw
While providing examples of reasons to act – i.e., normative or justifying reasons, which are the reasons that count in favour of the action (Alvarez, Way 2024) – it is a common practice to switch between descriptions containing exclusively non-normative and explicitly normative terms. It seems equally acceptable to say that one should jump into the water “because a child is drowning” and “because saving a drowning child is a good thing to do”. Sometimes this distinction is taken to be reflective of a genuine difference between two kinds of justification – as in Dancy’s claim that “[j]ustifying reasons are facts or states of affairs-largely, but not exclusively, normative ones” (1995: 13) – but most often it is not discussed, supposedly on the assumption that any claims about normative reasons identify good-making properties of certain actions (Alvarez 2018). Focusing on the purely normatively phrased justifications such as “because you should do it” or “because it is wrong”, I argue that there is an important difference between normatively and non-normatively phrased reasons-explanations. Namely, the former only indicate that there are reasons for or against some action, while the latter are necessary to specify what those reasons are. So, the explanation such as “because it is wrong” is not yet sufficient to make the reasons against some action intelligible, since in itself it is tantamount to something along the lines of “because there are decisive reasons against it”. A further step is necessary to reveal what these reasons are. In the course of the presentation, I analyze this argument within the context of buck-passing accounts of value (Scanlon 1998, Suikkanen 2009) and reasons-first views of normativity (Lord 2018, Schroder 2021), to the conclusion that its soundness partly depends on the reducibility of the normative facts.
References:
Alvarez M. (2018). False Beliefs and the Reasons We Don’t Have, in: V. Mitova (red.), The Factive Turn in Epistemology (pp. 161-176), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Alvarez M., Way J. (2024). Reasons for Action: Justification, Motivation, Explanation, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024 Edition), edited by E. N. Zalta, and U. Nodelman, URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/reasons-just-vs-expl/>.
Dancy J. (1995). The Presidential Address: Why There Is Really No Such Thing as the Theory of Motivation, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series 95: 1-18.
Lord E. (2018). The Importance of Being Rational, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Scanlon T. (1998). What We Owe to Each Other, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Schroeder M. (2021). Reasons First, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Suikkanen J. (2009). Buck-Passing Accounts of Value, Philosophy Compass 4: 768-779.
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SOPhiA 2026 