A “Good” Explanation of Five Puzzles about Reasons

Abstract

What does it mean for something, like the fact that rain is forecast, to be a normative reason for an action like taking your umbrella, or attitude like believing it will rain? According to a popular view, concepts of “reasons” are all concepts of some kind of explanation. But explanations of what? On one way of developing this idea, the concept of a normative reason for an agent S to perform an action A is that of an explanation why it would be good (in some way, to some degree) for S to do A. This Reasons as Explanations of Goodness hypothesis (REG) has numerous virtues and champions. But like every theory of normative reasons it faces some significant challenges, which prompt many more philosophers to be skeptical that it can account for all normative reasons. This paper demonstrates how five different puzzles about normative reasons can be solved by paying attention to the concept of goodness, and observing how it—and consequently, talk about reasons—is sensitive to context. Rather than asking simply whether certain facts are reasons for S to do A, we need to explore how context affects whether it is correct to describe a fact as “a reason” for S to do A.