Abstract
In Normative Reasons: Between Reasoning and Explanation (2022), Arturs Logins provides a novel reductivist account of normative reasons, what he calls the Erotetic View of Reasons. In this paper, I provide three challenges to this view. The first two concern the extensional adequacy of the Erotetic View. The view may fail to count as normative reasons all and only considerations that are such. In particular, the view seems to both overgenerate and undergenerate reasons. My third concern is that the view may fail to capture the essential, practice-independent nature of reasons, as well as reasons’ constitutive and grounding role with respect to other normative properties.
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Notes
See Kearns and Star (2009).
See Peterson (2023, p. 40). Peterson observes that explanations have epistemic properties that truth-making and grounding relations lack. For instance, the former presuppose that someone must be able to understand them, but the latter do not. Conversely, some truth-making and grounding relations are not explanatory. For instance, the singleton {Socrates} is grounded in the individual Socrates, but the existence of Socrates doesn’t explain the existence of {Socrates}.
This claim requires some qualification. Logins is careful to stress that not all facts that count as reasons for the Reasoning View also count as reasons for the Erotetic View. The latter view involves a restriction to considerations that count as appropriate answers to a ‘Why F?’ in a given context (pp.179–180). This restriction allows the Erotetic View to avoid classifying all enabling conditions as normative reasons, as the Reasoning View does, thus avoiding a specific way in which the latter theory overgenerates reasons. This strategy is however effective only for the overgeneration of specific types of consideration such as enabling conditions and other modifiers.
With the qualification I mentioned in footnote 5 concerning enabling conditions, which however does not affect the present point.
Logins ascribes this objection to Brunero (2018).
Logins does not consider cases where the Explanation View undergenerates. A similar case is discussed by Whiting (2021, p. 23): Nadia promised to leave the party at 11pm. The fact that the clock reads 11pm seems a reason for Nadia to leave the party. This fact justifies Nadia’s decision to leave, and might be cited by Nadia in defending her decision to leave. However, this fact doesn’t explain why Nadia should leave (as would her promise). Thus, according to the Explanation View, this fact is not a reason for Nadia to leave.
The above point is also compatible with the claim that answers to normative “why F” questions are essentially related to reasons to F. This relation could be the inverse of that assumed by the Erotetic View. Normative ‘why F’ questions could be essentially or conceptually dependent on normative reasons that answer them, not vice versa.
Logins briefly considers this alleged constitutive role of reasons (2022, pp. 17–18). He seems to suggest that the attribution of this role to reasons is specific to philosophers endorsing a reason-first approach, which he rejects. However, the idea that most normative terms can be analyzed in terms of reasons is also shared by many authors endorsing reductive accounts of reasons. For recent examples see Whiting (2021) and McHugh and Way (2022).
References
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Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this article was presented at the Normative Reasons: Research Day around the book of Logins (Collège de France 26/06/2024). Thanks to the audience for their helpful feedback. In particular, I would like to thank Arturs Logins, Jacques Vollet, Santiago Echeverri, Pascal Engel and Roberto Keller for helpful comments. Part of the research work that led to this article was supported by the he National Social Science Fund of China (No. 21CZX016).
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Fassio, D. Are Reasons Answers to Questions?. Philosophia (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-024-00760-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-024-00760-2