Sometimes our intentions and beliefs exhibit a structure that proves us to be irrational. Is there anything wrong with that? Should we be rational rather than irrational? This is the question that this book seeks to answer. Intuitively, the answer to this question is ‘yes’. Calling someone irrational amounts to a form of criticism. By doing so, we seem to imply that the person in question has made some kind of mistake, that her mental attitudes are in need of revision. Ordinary attributions of irrationality thus seem to presuppose that rationality is normative. This understanding is also implicit in many traditional approaches to rationality. In recent years, however, the normativity of rationality has come under attack. Many philosophers today accept the sceptical view that there may be no reason to be rational. This book defends the normativity of rationality by presenting a new solution to the problems that arise from the common assumption that we ought to be rational. The argument touches upon many other topics in the theory of normativity, such as the form and the content of rational standards or requirements, the preconditions of criticism, and the function of reasons in deliberation and advice. Over and above an extensive and careful assessment of the problems discussed in the literature, the book provides a detailed defence of a reason-response conception of rationality, a novel, evidence-relative account of reasons, and an explanation of structural irrationality in terms of these accounts.

In a number of recent philosophical debates, it has become common to distinguish between two kinds of normative reasons, often called the right kind of reasons (henceforth: RKR) and the wrong kind of reasons (henceforth: WKR). The distinction was first introduced in discussions of the so-called buck-passing account of value, which aims to analyze value properties in terms of reasons for pro-attitudes and has been argued to face the wrong kind of reasons problem. But nowadays it also gets applied in other philosophical contexts and to reasons for other responses than pro-attitudes, for example in recent debates about evidentialism and pragmatism about reasons for belief. While there seems to be wide agreement that there is a general and uniform distinction that applies to reasons for different responses, there is little agreement about the scope, relevance and nature of this distinction.Our aim in this article is to shed some light on this issue by surveying the RKR/WKR distinction as it has been drawn with respect to different responses, and by examining how it can be understood as a uniform distinction across different contexts. We start by considering reasons for pro-attitudes and emotions in the context of the buck-passing account of value ( §1). Subsequently we address the distinction that philosophers have drawn with respect to reasons for other attitudes, such as beliefs and intentions ( §2), as well as with respect to reasons for action ( §3). We discuss the similarities and differences between the ways in which philosophers have drawn the RKR/WKR distinction in these areas and offer different interpretations of the idea of a general, uniform distinction. The major upshot is that there is at least one interesting way of substantiating a general RKR/WKR distinction with respect to a broad range of attitudes as well as actions. We argue that this has important implications for the proper scope of buck-passing accounts and the status of the wrong kind of reasons problem ( §4). §1 Reasons for pro-attitudes and emotions According to an influential view that can be traced back at least to Brentano, what it is for some X to be good or valuable can be analyzed in terms of a normative relation that holds between X and certain positive or negative attitudes or emotions towards X, such as e.g.

If you ought to perform a certain act, and some other action is a necessary means for you to perform that act, then you ought to perform that other action as well -or so it seems plausible to say. This transmission principle is of both practical and theoretical significance. The aim of this paper is to defend this principle against a number of recent objections, which (as I show) are all based on core assumptions of the view called actualism.

In this paper I present an argument for the claim that you ought to do something only if you may believe that you ought to do it. More exactly, I defend the following principle about normative reasons: An agent A has decisive reason to φ only if she also has sufficient reason to believe that she has decisive reason to φ. I argue that this principle follows from the plausible assumption that it must be possible for an agent to respond correctly to her reasons. In conclusion, I discuss some implications of this argument (given that some other standard assumptions about reasons hold). One such implication is that we are always in a position to be justified in believing all truths about what we have decisive reason (or ought) to do. In this paper I present an argument for an interesting claim about normative reasons: The Principle of Decisive Reasons (PDR): Necessarily, if A has decisive reason to φ, then A has sufficient reason to believe that she herself has decisive reason to φ. This claim is interesting because it has substantial consequences for some theories about reasons and for some issues that have recently been the focus of the philosophical debate on normativity. To anticipate one of these consequences, consider the widely shared view that a person's reasons for belief are given by this person's evidence. On this assumption, PDR entails some kind of evidence requirement on the existence of decisive reasons:

Actualists hold that contrary-to-duty scenarios give rise to deontic dilemmas and provide counterexamples to the transmission principle, according to which we ought to take the necessary means to actions we ought to perform. In an earlier article, I have argued, contrary to actualism, that the notion of 'ought' that figures in conclusions of practical deliberation does not allow for deontic dilemmas and validates the transmission principle. Here I defend these claims, together with my possibilist account of contrary-to-duty scenarios, against Stephen White's recent criticism. Suppose that you ought to see your doctor and a necessary means to doing this is to take a day off work. A natural conclusion to draw is that you ought to take a day off work. This, at any rate, follows from an intuitive principle that plays an important role in a number of philosophical theories and arguments: The transmission principle: If A ought to f, and y-ing is a necessary means for A to f, then A ought to y. 1 But now suppose that if you were to take a day off work, you would not actually go to the doctor. Even though you could go to the doctor, you would in fact stay home, feel anxious and get no work done. You might now side with John Broome, who offers this example, and others who present similar such "contrary-to-duty scenarios", as I shall call them, in thinking that it is no longer plausible to assume that you ought to take the necessary means. 2 What is 1 See Kiesewetter (2015, 922) for references and examples of such theories. 2 See Broome (2013, 126). By a "contrary-to-duty" scenario, I mean to refer to a scenario in which an agent is failing, or will fail, to do what she ought to do. Even though strictly speaking not all 'oughts' amount to duties or obligations, I shall allow myself in this article to use the terms 'obligation' and 'duty' to refer to 'oughts' for the sake of convenience. The term 'contrary-to-duty scenario' draws on Chisholm (1963), who proposes a number of such cases himself. The most widely discussed contrary-to-duty scenario is presumably the example of Professor Procrastinate offered by Jackson and Pargetter (1986, 235), which is in turn inspired by Goldman the point of taking a day off if you would not in fact use it for going to the doctor (or for doing anything else you have reason to do)? Indeed, upon closer consideration you might even think that you ought to not take a day off in your circumstances. For given that you will not actually see your doctor, not taking a day off is better for you than taking a day off. However, if you deny that you ought to take the day off in this scenario, then you are thereby committed to rejecting the transmission principle. And if you maintain that you ought to not take a day off, then you are thereby committed to rejecting another principle that seems rather plausible: Joint satisfiability: If A ought to f and A ought to y, then A can [f and y]. This is because, if taking a day off is a necessary means to seeing your doctor, then you cannot both see your doctor an...