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This chapter introduces the Humean Theory of Reasons by reference to the case of Ronnie, who likes to dance, and Bradley, who can't stand dancing. Given this difference in their psychologies, Ronnie has some reason to go to the party, where there will be dancing, that Bradley doesn't have. The basic Humean idea is that all reasons are like Ronnie's. The classical argument for the Humean Theory is introduced, as well as the central philosophical significance of the Humean Theory: the challenge that it raises about the objective prescriptivity of morality. Hypotheticalism is introduced as the version of the Humean Theory that will be defended. In the final two sections, a range of preliminary distinctions and working theses are established, including about the relationship between objective and subjective reasons for action, and that between agent-neutral and agent-relational reasons.

Derek Parfit, in On What Matters, argues that all subjective accounts of normative reasons for action are false. This chapter focuses on his “Agony Argument.” The first premise of the Agony Argument is that we necessarily have current reasons to avoid our own future agony. Its second premise is that subjective accounts cannot vindicate this fact. So, the argument concludes, subjective accounts must be rejected. This chapter accepts the first premise of this argument and that it is valid. The main thesis of this chapter is that subjectivists can account for our reasons to get pleasure and avoid agony. The chapter concludes that the Agony Argument does not justify the rejection of subjective accounts. The chapter also examines Parfit's understanding of the distinction between objective and subjective theories. The chapter claims Parfit offers a surprisingly narrow understanding of subjectivism such that even if his critique were successful, this would be bad news for fewer theories than we might have thought. Finally, the chapter replies to some possible worries about the arguments of this chapter.

Considering the ways in recent television shows (e.g. 13 Reasons Why, Blackish, Grey's Anatomy, Roseanne) engaged with societal debates concerning gun control, immigration, police brutality, and more, the conclusion ends with some brief thoughts on how television (and other entertainment and communication platforms) act as storage houses and distribution mechanisms for personal and cultural sentiments. If the dominant affect of the 21st century continues to be fear, this text argues that it is more important than ever to understand and intervene in the ways in which it is circulated through media and technology.

Chapter 1 introduces the project and central questions of Reasons First. After motivating and placing into context the idea of reasons first, which says that reasons play a fundamental and explanatory role in ethics, it contrasts ethics and epistemology as normative disciplines and formulates the book’s Core Hypothesis that epistemology has been disadvantaged by insufficiently appreciating the deep parallels with ethics. The relationship between reasons and evidence is explored and the hypothesis of Evidence as Reasons is supported in contrast to Stephen Kearns and Daniel Star’s thesis of Reasons as Evidence, offering the first central line of argument in the book that reasons play a fundamental explanatory role in epistemology. And finally, two important obstacles to the thesis that reasons come first among normative concepts in epistemology, the problem of unjustified belief and the problem of sufficiency, are introduced and the structure of the remainder of the book is foreshadowed.

The chapter addresses classic Moorean challenges to relational value with a focus on worries about normativity. The author rejects the suggestion that personal value—whatever is good for one person but not for another—generates reasons that are only agent-relative—reasons for the beneficiary but not for others. She shows why, as she understands the components of a theory of value, being such as to benefit a person explains why something is of value, and for that reason such as to give reasons that are reasons for all human beings. The argument makes clear why people, who are relationally valuable in a sense she has explained, make ethical demands on one another

This chapter introduces and motivates the main thesis of the book. This is a view of rationality called Reasons Responsiveness, which holds that what it is to be rational is to correctly respond to possessed objective normative reasons. In this ‘Introduction: Reasons Responsiveness, the Reasons Program, and Knowledge-First’, the author offers a presentation of the main notions in this analysis, these being: objective normative reasons, possession, and correctly responding. It also ties Reasons Responsiveness to more general issues in metaphysical analysis. Finally, it shows how Reasons Responsiveness fits into two broader projects in normative theory, namely Reasons Fundamentalism and Knowledge-First epistemology.

Many of the values that led southern Catholic leaders to support secular desegregation also led them to desegregate Catholic institutions. In some cases, particularly in parts of the peripheral South, prelates desegregated Catholic schools, hospitals and churches ahead of secular change. In other instances, especially in the Deep South, ordinaries acted largely in tandem with secular desegregation, although occasionally more extensively, and sometimes partly or substantially in response to federal financial pressure. Some ordinaries eschewed publicity, while others publicly announced desegregation. In deciding policy, all prelates considered the extent or absence of secular desegregation and the nature of public and Catholic lay and clergy opinion in their dioceses, as well as the views of their consultors. Most prelates confined school desegregation to Catholic admissions, thereby restricting its impact because of large African American Protestant enrollment in black Catholic schools and limiting opposition to a change that brought only token desegregation.

This chapter explores the question of what the abundance of Bedouin culture in the Bible tells us about the possibility that the ancient Israelites who were depicted there as nomads were indeed that. It thus addresses two issues. First is how the biblical authors acquired their rich Bedouin-like materials: through plain observation or through transmitted traditions from a nomadic past? The chapter thus studies Pharaoh Merneptah’s citation of a tribe called Israel in the land of Canaan, in 1208 BCE, suggesting that Israelite nomads, whom the Bible does not mention, lived there before the Israelites liberated by Moses could have arrived there. The second issue is: what impelled the biblical authors to infuse these materials into a theological opus concerning the relationship between the Israelites and their god, Yahweh?

This chapter argues that we should adopt a sufficientarian view of how autonomy should be promoted. The chapter considers egalitarian and prioritarian principles for promoting autonomy and considers whether our concern with autonomy can be reduced to our concern with welfare. The chapter finds these views to be deficient. The chapter argues that we have non-instrumental reasons to secure a threshold of autonomy for each person so that their choices and decisions can be considered free and so securing enough autonomy is of special importance to justice.

Some compatibilists are attracted to a theory which accounts for freedom in terms of sensitivity to reasons. But reasons-responsiveness appears to conflict with another common compatibilist thesis: that the freedom pertinent to moral responsibility can be found in a Frankfurt example. The problem seems to be that in a Frankfurt example, an agent is not reasons-responsive insofar as, if she had reason to do otherwise, she would not do otherwise. John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, have attempted to overcome this problem by focusing upon an agent’s “mechanism” of action operative in a Frankfurt example. Unfortunately, theorizing about freedom in terms of mechanisms of action leads to several difficulties. This chapter examines the compatibilists’ prospects for salvaging a mechanism-based account of reasons-responsiveness in light of these difficulties, and it is considered whether theorists committed to a reasons-responsive view should return to an agent-based rather than a mechanism-based view.

Many prominent accounts of free will and moral responsibility make use of the idea that agents can be responsive to reasons. Call such theories "Reasons" accounts. This chapter considers the tenability of Reasons accounts in light of situationist social psychology and, to a lesser extent, the automaticity literature. The first half of the chapter argues that Reasons accounts are genuinely threatened by results in contemporary psychology. The second half argues that these threats can largely be met, but that doing so requires abandoning a suite of familiar assumptions and expectations about responsible agency and Reasons accounts in particular. The chapter goes on to advance a new account of responsible agency that accommodates a variety of worries about situationism and automaticity.

This chapter focuses on migrants’ journeys from their countries of origin to Morocco. The text analyses how phases of mobility and immobility are interdependent parts of the complex migration trajectories of my migrant research subjects. It explores the variety of obstacles that migrants encounter during travel towards Morocco, and the ways in which they continue to negotiate their social locations with respect to mobility along the way. By reviewing the variety of regulatory authorities (market, state and family) that structure their movement, I will show how aspirations and capabilities to migrate are produced and reproduced not only at the point of departure, but also along the way. Thus, rather than transiting through different places, the data shows how migrants’ journeys are best described as “fractured stays” in various places. These stays and the ways in which people travel do not leave them unchanged. Instead, it has a profound impact on themselves and their future migratory project. The migratory experience becomes a way of life which influences every other aspect of their identit

This chapter argues that despite the failure of the standard arguments for internalism, there is a version of the internalist thesis that we should accept: on this view, facts give us reasons when they are the source of a certain kind of evidence given our other ends, not when they are the source of a possible motivation. Unlike other versions of internalism, this account does not rely on the Humean Theory of Motivation or on the claim that reasons must be capable of motivating rational agents. Why accept any internalist thesis, if we don’t accept those claims? Because it appeals to the comparatively uncontroversial normative standard provided by the procedural conception of rationality, internalism affords us an Archimedean point against which we can brace ourselves in disputes about reasons. And thinking about what internalism and externalism about epistemic reasons might look like should make us skeptical about external practical reasons.

This chapter offers a methodological argument for the Humean Theory of Reasons, according to which something is a reason for someone to do something only if it is related to her desires in the right way. The argument relies on the conclusion of chapter two, that agent-relational reasons are prior to and explanatory of agent-neutral reasons. The methodological consideration offered is highly defeasible, but suggests that the case of merely agent-relational reasons, of which desire-based reasons are paradigmatic, is the best place to look, in order to understand reasons more generally.

The fifth and last chapter gathers together the threads of the previous chapters’ meditations on subjectivity—a subjectivity that may first be triggered by a sense of injustice, subjectivity that is often sharpened by powerful negative affects such as humiliation, or developed over the course of a lifetime as it navigates difficult life experiences. The oeuvre of Krishna Sobti is an apt summation of the themes of the previous chapters. Sobti’s characters too negotiate subjectivity vis a vis difficult family relationships (especially mothers and daughters), the legitimate wife vis-à-vis extramarital establishments and children, or again, the self vis-à-vis the darkness of depression. Few people round off the theme of subjectivity, affect, and meaningful moral action in an anguished and confusing world than Sobti’s protagonists, so it is fitting that the book ends with her.