Religious Reasons and Public Healthcare Deliberations

This paper critically explores the path of some of the controversiesover public reason and religion through four distinct steps.The first part of this article considers the engagement of JohnFinnis and Robert P. George with John Rawls over the natureof public reason. The second part moves to the question of religionby looking at the engagement of Nicholas Wolterstorff with Rawls,Robert Audi, and others. Here the question turns specificallyto religious reasons, and their permissible use by citizensin public debate and discourse. The third part engages JürgenHabermas's argument that while citizens must be free to makereligious arguments, still, there is an obligation of translation,and a motivational constraint on lawmakers. The final sectionargues that even though Habermas's proposal fails, neverthelesshe recognizes a key difficulty for religious citizens in contemporaryliberal polities. Restoration of a full role for religiouslygrounded justificatory reasons in public debate is one partof an adequate solution to this problem, but a second plankmust be added to the solution: recognition that religious reasonscan enter into public deliberation not just as first-order justificationsof particular policies, but as second-order reasons, to be consideredby any polity that respects its religious citizens and, morebroadly, the good of religion.     

Beyond the 'Awkward Embrace': DisabilityRights, Dialogue and 'Law, Loveand Language' Revisited

Despite the perceived 'human rights revolution' within Church teaching since Vatican II, a measure of dissonance survives between secular rights theory and practice on the one hand and, on the other, ethical thinking informed by the natural law tradition. This article examines some recent developments in that secular theory and practice for signs of possible rapprochement. In particular, it considers the way in which the emergence of 'disability' as a rights issue, for example in the recently ratified United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, has contributed to the transformation of equality and human rights law and so has helped shape a broader transformation of rights theory and practice. Central to that transformation has been the ambition of establishing human rights as the basis of a progressive political programme, as witnessed for example by the work of Sandra Fredman and by the Hamlyn Lectures of Conor Gearty, whose Catholic provenance makes his approach especially salient. The article concludes by considering Herbert McCabe's interpretation of Aquinas' ethics, especially in his Law, Love and Language , and proposes some potentially fruitful points of contact between McCabe's approach and the identified developments in secular rights theory.     

On the Connection between Normative Reasons and the Possibility of Acting for those Reasons

According to Bernard Williams, if it is true that A has a normative reason to Φ then it must be possible that A should Φ for that reason. This claim is important both because it restricts the range of reasons which agents can have and because it has been used as a premise in an argument for so-called ‘internalist’ theories of reasons. In this paper I rebut an apparent counterexamples to Williams’ claim: Schroeder’s (2007) example of Nate. I argue that this counterexample fails since it underestimates the range of cases where agents can act for their normative reasons. Moreover, I argue that a key motivation behind Williams’ claim is compatible with this ‘expansive’ account of what it is to act for a normative reason.     

Wrongness and Reasons

Is the wrongness of an action a reason not to perform it? Of course it is, you may answer. That an action is wrong both explains and justifies not doing it. Yet, there are doubts. Thinking that wrongness is a reason is confused, so an argument by Jonathan Dancy. There can’t be such a reason if ‘?-ing is wrong’ is verdictive, and an all things considered judgment about what (not) to do in a certain situation. Such judgments are based on all the relevant reasons for and against ?-ing. If that ?-ing is wrong, while being an all things considered verdict, would itself be a reason, it would upset the balance of reasons: it would be a further reason which has not yet been considered in reaching the verdict. Hence, the judgment wasn’t ‘all things considered' after all. I show that the argument against wrongness being a reason is unsuccessful, because its main assumption is false. Is main assumption is that a consideration which necessarily does not affect the balance of reasons is not a reason. I also argue that there can be no deontic buck-passing account.     

Internal Reasons and the Conditional Fallacy

Internalists about normative reasons hold that they are necessarily connected to motives. This view is most plausible when it is construed in a conditional form - that there is a reason for one to perform a certain action guarantees that, at least if one were not rationally defective, one would be motivated to perform it. However, the conditional form that renders internalism plausible also renders it vulnerable to the 'conditional fallacy'. For instance, this conditional form implies that one could have no reason to improve one's rationality, for if one were already fully rational, one would not be motivated to do so. Most internalists have reformulated internalism to solve this problem. However, I argue that these reformulations fail to maintain the theoretical virtue of the internalist doctrine, namely, the virtue it has of showing how reasons can both explain and justify actions.     

Reasons and Promotion

A number of philosophers accept promotionalism, the view that whether there is a normative reason for an agent to perform an action or have an attitude depends on whether her doing so promotes a value, desire, interest, goal, or end. I show that promotionalism faces a prima facie problem when it comes to reasons for belief: it looks extensionally inadequate. I then articulate two general strategies promotionalists can (and have) used to solve this problem and argue that, even if one of these two strategies can successfully solve the problem with reasons for belief, promotionalists face a symmetrical problem in a range of structurally similar cases. As I'll argue, the problem is that promotionalism cannot account for reasons grounded in the ‘fit’ between an attitude and its object. I offer an alternative to promotionalism and explain how adopting this alternative solves the problems with promotionalism while preserving much of what made promotionalism attractive in the first place.     

Reasons and ideals

This paper contributes to the debate on whether we can have reason to do what we are unable to do. I take as my starting point two papers recently published in Philosophical Studies, by Bart Streumer and Ulrike Heuer, which defend the two dominant opposing positions on this issue. Briefly, whereas Streumer argues that we cannot have reason to do what we are unable to do, Heuer argues that we can have reason to do what we are unable to do when we can get closer to success but cannot have reason to try to do what we are unable to do when we cannot get closer to success. In this paper, I reject both positions as they are presented, on the grounds that neither can accommodate an important category of reasons, which are the reasons to realise and to try to realise dimensions of value that lie at the boundary of what is realisable, specifically, genuinely valuable ideals. I defend a third view that we can have reason to do and to try to do what we are unable to do even when we cannot, in Heuer’s sense, get closer to success. Moreover, I argue that we can have reason to realise and to try to realise genuinely valuable ideals for their own sake and not simply for the sake of achieving mundane, realisable ends.     

Reasons and Entailment

What is the relation between entailment and reasons for belief? In this paper, I discuss several answers to this question, and I argue that these answers all face problems. I then propose the following answer: for all propositions p ₁,…,p _n and q, if the conjunction of p ₁,…, and p _n entails q, then there is a reason against a person’s both believing that p ₁,…, and that p _n and believing the negation of q. I argue that this answer avoids the problems that the other answers to this question face, and that it does not face any other problems either. I end by showing what the relation between deductive logic, reasons for belief and reasoning is if this answer is correct.     

Reasons and impossibility

In this paper, I argue that a person can have a reason to do what she cannot do. In a nutshell, the argument is that a person can have derivate reasons relating to an action that she has a non-derivative reason to perform. There are clear examples of derivative reasons that a person has in cases where she cannot do what she (non-derivatively) has reason to do. She couldn’t have those derivative reasons, unless she also had the non-derivative reason to do what she cannot do. I discuss a number of objections to this view, in particular two: (1) The objection that if there were reasons to do what one cannot do, many of those would be ‘crazy reasons’, and (2) the worry that if there were such reasons, then agents would have reasons to engage in futile deliberations and tryings. I develop an explanation of ‘crazy reasons’ that shows that not all reasons to do the impossible are crazy and only those that are need to be filtered out, and, regarding the second objecting, I show that the reasons for trying as well as for taking the means to doing something—instrumental reasons in a broad sense—are different from the reasons for performing the action in the first place. They are affected by impossibility, and we can explain why that is so. The view I argue for is that a person may have a reason to do what she cannot do, but she does not have a reason to try to do so or to take means to realizing the impossible.     

Reasons and Agent-neutrality

This paper considers the connection between the three-place relation, R is a reason for X to do A and the two-place relation, R is a reason to do A. I consider three views on which the former is to be analyzed in terms of the latter. I argue that these views are widely held, and explain the role that they play in motivating interesting substantive ethical theories. But I reject them in favor of a more obvious analysis, which goes the other way around.     

Reasons and Decisions

The central notion of Gibbard's splendid book, Thinking How to Live , is the idea of something's being "the thing to do." In ordinary English, the phrase, "X is the thing to do" can express either a judgment:     

Reasons and Requirements

In this essay I defend the claim that all reasons can ground final requirements. I begin by establishing a prima facie case for the thesis by noting that on a common-sense understanding of what finality is, it must be the case that all reasons can ground such requirements. I spend the rest of the paper defending the thesis against two recent challenges. The first challenge is found in Joshua Gert’s recent book, Brute Rationality. In it he argues that reasons play two logically distinct roles – requiring action and justifying action. He argues, further, that some reasons – ‘purely justificatory’ reasons – play only the latter role. Jonathan Dancy offers the second challenge in his Ethics Without Principles, where he distinguishes between the ‘favoring’ and ‘ought-making’ roles of reasons. While all reasons play the former role, some do not play the latter, and are therefore irrelevant to what one ought to do. My contention is that both Gert and Dancy are going to have trouble accounting for our intuitions in a number of cases.

Reasons

The temptation to look for the “purely normative essence” of argument stems from the understandable ambition to distinguish rational persuasion from mere persuasion. But in seeking a purely normative notion of argument it is easy to overlook—or actually deny—that rational persuasion is a kind of persuasion. The burden of this essay is to show that the concept of reason from which our interest in argument derives can only exist and have normative force as a kind of persuasion, that is, as something (also) causal.