Roger Crisp and Daniel Star

Roger Crisp (left) and Daniel Star (right) on normative reasons.

Reasons for action occupy an increasingly central place in recent moral philosophy. Why? Crisp and Star address that question, and provide a handy taxonomy of different kinds of reasons, before they turn to two interrelated issues. First, they discuss the prospects for an analysis of reasons. Star offers an analysis in terms of evidence: a reason to φ is evidence that one ought to φ. Then (at 42:55) they discuss the buck-passing account of goodness — the view that reasons are provided by features of an object that make the object good, but not by its goodness itself — and Crisp explains why he finds fault with that account.

Related works

by Crisp:

“Goodness and Reasons: A Response to Stratton-Lake” (2009)

“Goodness and Reasons: Accentuating the Negative” (2008)

Reasons and the Good (2006)

“Value, Reasons and the Structure of Justification: How to Avoid Passing the Buck” (2005)

by Star:

with Stephen Kearns, “Weighing Reasons” (draft)

“Two Levels of Moral Thinking” (2010)

“Moral Skepticism for Foxes” (2010)

with Stephen Kearns, “Reasons: Explanations or Evidence?” (2008)

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