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This chapter focuses on the issue of how we are to understand ‘contributory reasons’, particularly as they are related to oughts. It begins by rehearsing six proposals for understanding contributory reasons in terms of an ‘overall ought’, and by rejecting them all. It is proposed that a ‘reason is something that favours action’, where favouring is a normative relation in which a reason stands to a particular way of acting. Since the contributory cannot be reduced to an overall ought (or any overall notion, such as goodness), the chapter proposes to go the other way and reduce overall oughts to the contributory. However, instead of attempting to reduce overall oughts to favouring reasons, the notion of a ‘contributory ought’ is introduced — ‘a monadic feature of an action which is consequent on, or resultant from, some other feature — the ‘ought-making’ feature, whatever it is’. How are we to understand how an overall ought is related to the contributory ought? Here is where the appeal to fittingness, a notion employed by the classical intuitionists, offers promise. In partially defending this claim, it is argued that Michael Smith's ‘Humean realism’ and Allan Gibbard's expressivism lack the resources needed for adequately understanding practical reasons and oughts.

Chapter 3 focuses on moral action and its conditions. It fulfils both a negative and a positive task. The negative task consists in contextualizing the questions of moral psychology, which have tended to dominate discussions of Kantian ethics. Part of this task involves addressing the broader contemporary debate about motivational internalism and externalism. The reason for this is to show why certain justifiable concerns of moral theorists who support internalism are best viewed in the Kantian context as relating not to psychology but to metaphysics. It is argued that the kind of motivation an agent has and the things she counts as reasons have the importance they do because of the metaphysics of free agency Kant holds. The positive task consists in developing a psychologically plausible account of motivational autonomy. This is accomplished in two stages: first by showing the motivational variety Kant allows in his moral psychology and second by developing an interpretation of motivational autonomy in terms of coincidence of normative and motivational reasons. The chapter builds on the preliminary epistemic characterization of the role of pure reason in its practical employment given in the previous chapter by focusing on Kant’s (PPR) thesis: ‘pure reason is of itself alone practical’ (cf. Critique of Practical Reason 6:56). Without the distraction of moral psychology we can appreciate the real anti-Humean import of the thesis that consists in asserting our ability as agents to set ends for ourselves.

This chapter considers two other rival accounts of normative statements. First, it considers the account of ‘Cornell moral realism’ which is based on applying the causal theory of reference to normative terms. Secondly, it considers the accounts of David Lewis, Frank Jackson, Philip Pettit, and Michael Smith, which are based on the attempt to give a ‘conceptual analysis’ of normative statements. It is argued that both of these approaches fail, largely because they cannot accommodate the sort of ‘internalism’ that was argued for in Chapter 1.

Moral rationalism provides one prominent way of securing moral objectivism. If morality derives from reason, then morality might enjoy an objective basis. In this chapter, two rationalist claims are distinguished: a conceptual claim and an empirical claim. The conceptual claim is that it is a conceptual truth that moral requirements are rational requirements; the empirical claim is that human moral judgment is produced by rational cognitive mechanisms. This chapter argues that both claims are problematic. The conceptual claim is threatened by the conceptual possibility of a rational amoralist. The empirical claim is insulated from such worries but it is undermined by evidence that psychopaths apparently do have a seriously disturbed capacity for moral judgment.The most plausible explanation of this deficit does not fit with an Empirical Rationalist account.

There are well‐known arguments in favour of the idea that explanations of actions are at bottom non‐teleological. Michael Smith's ‘direction‐of‐fit’ argument entails this, and both Davidson and Thomas Nagel give general arguments that only causal explanations actually explain. In this chapter, it is argued that all these arguments are unsuccessful.

This chapter supplies a subjectivist definition of intrinsic value in terms of what satisfies intrinsic desires in a specified sense, and of derivative value by reference to intrinsic value. Other subjectivist accounts proposed by Peter Railton, Henry Sidgwick, and Michael Smith, which appeal to better informed desires, are critically examined. According to subjectivism, all value is value for some subject, but a narrower sense of value for personal value is defined in terms of what satisfies self-regarding desires.

Chapter 5 argued that agents are not blameworthy for wrongful actions when they genuinely believe them to be best, all things considered, and are not culpable for that belief. It follows that blame requires that agents act akratically: since we are directly blameworthy only for wrongful actions which we perform despite judging we ought not to, we are directly responsible only for akratic actions. Chapter 6 argues that we are not responsible even for our akratic actions. It examines a variety of different approaches to akrasia. On some approaches, agents fail wholeheartedly to judge that they ought to act otherwise than they do, on others they are compelled to act as they do. The chapter concludes by arguing that akratic actions are lucky actions, and that this is responsibility-undermining luck.

This chapter is a response to the arguments presented in the previous one. The previous chapter’s criticisms were directed against philosophers who argue that deficiencies in the standard story of action are to be addressed through the addition of states of different sorts from beliefs and desires to the causes of bodily movements. These philosophers fail to address the question of whether their story contains the causal notions that belong in an account of human agency or not. According to Michael Smith, this argument charges the standard story with incompleteness, which is a misleading notion. It was never suggested that the story required completion, even if it was posited that the causal role of agents ceases to exist in an events-based conception of the causal order. This chapter aims to show that the standard story stops making sense once it is accepted that a person’s acting is a matter of exercising a capacity he or she possesses as agent.

This chapter focuses on twenty-first-century writers who carry on the rural southern tradition in their work. Since 2000, several young southern writers, nearly all born after 1975 and from middle-class rural and lower-class backgrounds, have begun to publish fiction. Both portraying the areas where they were born and grew up and transcending those settings to address more universal themes, they have produced a significant body of praiseworthy work. Most were born into rural families but received the benefits of post-secondary education, but all seem committed to presenting the working-class South with realism and empathy. Among these new novelists are Joe Samuel Starnes, Peter Farris, John Brandon, Wiley Cash, Skip Horack, Barb Johnson, Michael Farris Smith, and Jesmyn Ward. Clearly, novels that address southern characters in southern scenes will continue to be written, whether of the Rough South variety from writers like Johnson or from writers like Ward, Horack, Brandon, Cash, and Smith.

In this chapter I defend subjectivism from the charge that unless everyone would value similarly, when rational, such desires must be problematically arbitrary and could not provide reasons. Michael Smith maintains that the existence of normative reasons conceptually hinges on the desires of all rational agents converging. Smith then goes on to argue that it is quite plausible that such convergence would be forthcoming. I offer reasons to think that such convergence is not required for the existence of normative reasons, that we lack good reasons to think such convergence likely, and that Smith’s arguments to the contrary are unconvincing.

How does moral reasoning motivate? Michael Smith argues that it does so by rationally constraining us to have desires that motivate, but the plausibility of his argument rests on a false assumption about the relation between wide-scope and narrow-scope constraints of rationality. Michael Huemer argues that it does so by generating motivating appearances, but the plausibility of his argument rests on a false assumption about the skeptical costs of a thoroughgoing empiricism. The chapter defends an alternative view, according to which moral facts can be a priori obvious, and our a priori knowledge of them can motivate us to act.

This chapter provides an overview of the socio-economic status and cultural identity of English Catholics in British society after the Second World War, surveying the existing histories of English Catholicism and their tendency to present a picture of a ‘Catholic ghetto’ or ‘golden age’. It also examines the ways in which English Catholics contemporaneously reacted to the Second Vatican Council, and their assessments of the ‘doings in Rome’ in the early 1960s. In situating this study of English Catholicism within a broader ‘mainstream’ historiography of the post-war period, this chapter triangulates its analysis against important debates amongst twentieth-century historians today about secularisation and religious diversity, fundamental shifts in morality, the erosion of respect for authority and tradition associated with the 1960s, and shifting leisure cultures and social mobility.

Chapter Two focuses on Philip Pettit, who stands out among nearly all his analytic peers for range of research, including not merely epistemology, philosophy of language, and metaphysics, but also ethics and philosophy of mind. In particular the chapter examines Pettit’s notion of global response-dependence, which it uses to liberate Kantianism further from Immanuel Kant’s own transcendental idealism. It then shows that Kantianism can take the subjective source of empirical concepts, terms, or properties to be anthropocentric in scope. Conceptual, linguistic, and perceptual capacities can be had by subjects qua human. Next the chapter engages a debate between Pettit, and Michael Smith and Daniel Stoljar, concerning noumenalism, the thesis that reality has an intrinsic nature or aspect that remains unknowable.

In this chapter David Copp and I argue that the direction of fit metaphor is limited in providing an account of beliefs and desires. The metaphor is given its most rigorous analysis by Michael Smith; we focus on his explication. On Smith’s account, what makes a background state count as a belief or desire depends on how it reacts when exposed to an introduced state, the perception that not P. A background belief would tend to be driven out of existence by such an introduced state but a background desire would not. We argue, however, that everything hinges on how the introduced state is understood. If it is understood as already a belief, we need to presuppose that which we are trying to explicate. If it is a perception that not P, then many background beliefs will not tend to go out of existence in the face of such perceptions.