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Because of its extremely ecumenical view of what considerations might count as reasons, particularism threatens to ‘flatten the moral landscape’ by making it seem that there is no deep difference between, for example pain and shoelace color. After all, particularists have claimed, either could provide a reason provided a suitable moral context. To avoid this result, particularists can try to draw a distinction between default and non-default reasons. This chapter argues that all but the most deflationary ways of drawing this distinction are either implausible or else insufficient to help the particularist avoid flattening the moral landscape. The difficulty can be avoided if the particularist’s extremely ecumenical view of reasons is rejected.

This chapter identifies moral particularism as a family of theses all of which involve some sort of negative assessment of moral principles. Family members are distinguished by the different negative attitudes taken and by different conceptions of what a moral principle is. It argues that a proper evaluation of the arguments for moral particularism must be sensitive to these distinctions.

This chapter offers a partial defence of Scanlon's buck-passing account of the relation between base properties, goodness, and practical reasons. Jonathan Dancy and Roger Crisp have both argued that even if Scanlon's buck-passing account is superior to the Moorean account, there are other contending accounts that Scanlon does not consider. Against Dancy and Crisp, Stratton–Lake and Hooker argue that these proposed accounts, although genuine alternatives to the Moorean and buck-passing accounts, are nevertheless deeply problematic and do nothing to harm the case for Scanlon's account. Regarding Scanlon's two arguments, the authors find that the parsimony argument, once clarified, does offer some support for the buck-passing view, but that the appeal to value pluralism does not. Finally, they defend Scanlon's account against an ‘open question’ worry about the relation between the fact that something has reason-giving properties and its goodness.

Jonathan Dancy is renowned both for his moral particularism and his reasons holism. In certain formulations the two positions are closely related, if not identical. We focus on holism, as extended to practical reasons generally. According to this view any feature might count as a practical reason; and (almost) any feature that can count as a reason in favour of (or against) some action might be practically irrelevant, or even count against (for), such action in other circumstances. This, however, would hardly be radical if we could specify the circumstances under which features count in these ways. The radical holist, however, claims that we cannot codify matters in this way. But doesn’t this leave the practical landscape implausibly lacking in structure? We canvas two remedies. First, perhaps holism is limited in scope. Second, perhaps practical reason can be structured by reference to value and benefits.

This paper defends Frank Jackson’s argument against irreducibly normative properties from attacks by Jonathan Dancy and other non-naturalist moral realists. Jackson argues that since normative properties supervene on descriptive properties, every normative property is identical to a descriptive property. The paper discusses four objections to this argument: that the disjunctive predicate on which the argument relies cannot be formulated; that necessarily coextensive predicates do not always ascribe the same property; that the argument can be refuted by appealing to Leibniz’ Law; and that irreducibly normative properties are indispensible to deliberation. The paper argues that all of these objections fail. In doing so, it also offers two new versions of the argument. It ends by discussing three reasons why Dancy and other non-naturalists may remain unmoved.

This paper argues that ideal actions are instances of ‘orthonomous’ actions: actions motivated by an intention an agent forms as a result of exercising his capacity to recognize and respond to such reasons as he has for intending to act in one way rather than another. The capacity required for orthonomous action itself decomposes into two capacities: the capacity to recognize and respond to reasons for intrinsically desiring that things be a certain way, on the one hand, and the capacity to recognize and respond to reasons for believing that a certain bodily movement available to the agent will cause things to be that way. The paper next argues that this conception of ideal action shows us what is wrong with Jonathan Dancy’s objections to buck-passing accounts of goodness. Dancy rejects buck-passing about goodness but accepts a buck-passing view of rightness. In contrast, this paper argues that buck-passing views about goodness and rightness endorse one another.

It is widely held that reasons, by their very nature, are the sort of thing it is wrong not to follow unless one has stronger justification to do otherwise. Dancy famously argues against this orthodoxy. This paper argues that he was correct. Some reasons are not in the wrong-making business: they are capable of rendering action intelligible without bringing any deontic vulnerability in their wake. The article first argues against a deontically reductive view of reasons. Even if all reasons impose deontic vulnerability, they cannot be reduced to such imposition, on pain of an overly thin view of agency; reasons also carry independent commendatory force. Having recovered the importance of commendatory force, the paper then argues that it can be instantiated without any accompanying peremptory force.

Particularists (e.g. Jonathan Dancy) threaten the status of theory formation by threatening the status of rules, principles and virtue claims. They do so by introducing into the discussion the concept of context. But they don’t fully explore the concept and so do not see that context contributes not just instability to the discussion but stability as well. This stability, found in the deep levels of context, sustains the rules, principles and virtue claims found in our ethical discourse. A better account of context than that given by the particulalrists is given by John Searle.

This chapter argues for a conception of reasons as premises of practical reasoning. A reason to act is a premise for sound reasoning to the desire or motivation to act. This view allows for reasons that turn on rational imperfection, and on factual ignorance, though not error. It draws a distinction between reasons and mere enabling conditions, though it does not vindicate Dancy’s claim that this distinction holds among the premises of sound reasoning. It explains the relationship between reasons and evidence. And it gives a natural account of the relative weight of reasons to act, which predicts the information-relativity of ‘ought’ or ‘should’.

Jonathan Dancy, Ulrike Heuer, Jonas Olson, and others have argued that there is reason to reject the buck-passing account of value (BPA) because of its implications for first-order normative ethics. Dancy argues that BPA is inconsistent with certain deontological views. Olson argues that BPA is inconsistent with an attractive way of distinguishing between consequentialism and deontology. Heuer argues that it begs the question against Williams’s internalism about reasons. This chapter argues that Dancy, Olson, and Heuer are mistaken. Others claim that certain versions of BPA are inconsistent with a consequentialist view about the reasons for pro-attitudes there are. This chapter argues that even global consequentialism should not involve a consequentialist view about the reasons for pro-attitudes that there are and because of this it is not a problem for BPA that it is inconsistent with a consequentialist view of the reasons for pro-attitudes that there are.

According to the No-Priority View (NPV), what it is to be a reason for a pro-attitude cannot be analysed in terms of value but neither can what it is to be good or of value be analysed in terms of reasons for pro-attitudes. NPV has been defended by Jonathan Dancy and W. D. Ross. This chapter argues that there are several reasons to accept the buck-passing account of value (BPA) over NPV. First, BPA explains striking correlations between reasons and value that NPV does not. Second, BPA explains why value does not give non-derivative reasons to have pro-attitudes; NPV cannot do this. Third, BPA is more qualitatively parsimonious than NPV, and, as explained in this chapter, there are strong reasons to prefer more to less qualitatively parsimonious theories. Fourth, BPA explains why similar theoretical debates arise about reasons and value; NPV cannot do this. Fifth, BPA is more informative than NPV.

According to the Buck-Passing Account (BPA), for X to be good is for there to be reasons for everyone to have pro-attitudes in response to X. Suppose that there are birds that are in a great amount of pleasure in a world where there are no past, present, or future rational agents. There are no reasons for any agents to have pro-attitudes towards the birds’ pleasure, so BPA entails that their pleasure is not valuable, but it is valuable. So, BPA produces too little value. This is a problem for BPA and fitting-attitude accounts of value that has been raised and discussed by Krister Bykvist, Jonathan Dancy, and Andrew Reisner. This chapter motivates and defends two responses to this too little value problem: 1. The trans-world reasons response, according to which the birds’ pleasure is valuable because there are reasons for beings in other worlds to have pro-attitudes towards it; 2. The counterfactual response, according to which the birds’ pleasure is valuable because there would be reasons for agents to have pro-attitudes towards it if they were around.

Utilitarianism has fared better than the competing theories. Yet there is one intuition it cannot cater for: it is wrong to kill a person, even if it is in his own best interest, where he knows everything about his bleak future and still wants to stay alive. An attempt is made to construct a common sense morality that can cater for this and the other considered intuitions. The attempt fails. The recalcitrant intuition is then reconsidered and debunked. In the final analysis, utilitarianism has proved to be the only theory in the competition that is intuitively adequate, i.e., consistent with all our considered intuitions within the field of the ethics of killing. And we may conclude from utilitarianism that it is indeed right to kill the person in his own best interest.