The Importance of Being Rational systematically defends a novel reasons-based account of rationality. The book’s central thesis is that what it is for one to be rational is to correctly respond to the normative reasons one possesses. The book defends novel views about what it is to possess reasons and what it is to correctly respond to reasons. It is shown that these views not only help to support the book’s main thesis, they also help to resolve several important problems that are independent of rationality. The account of possession provides novel contributions to debates about what determines what we ought to do, and the account of correctly responding to reasons provides novel contributions to debates about causal theories of reacting for reasons. After defending views about possession and correctly responding, it is shown that the account of rationality can solve two difficult problems about rationality. The first is the New Evil Demon problem. The book argues that the account has the resources to show that internal duplicates necessarily have the same rational status. The second problem concerns the ‘normativity’ of rationality. Recently it has been doubted that we ought to be rational. The ultimate conclusion of the book is that the requirements of rationality are the requirements that we ultimately ought to comply with. If this is right, then rationality is of fundamental importance to our deliberative lives.

There are parallel debates in metaethics and aesthetics about the rational merits of deferring to others about ethics and aesthetics. In both areas it is common to think that there is something amiss about deference. A popular explanation of this in aesthetics appeals to the importance of aesthetic acquaintance. This kind of explanation has not been explored much in ethics. This chapter defends a unified account of what is amiss about ethical and aesthetic deference. According to this account, deference is a non-ideal way of thinking about ethics and aesthetics because it does not allow us to possess the full range of reasons provided by the ethical and aesthetic facts. It has this feature because it does not acquaint us with ethical and aesthetic facts. It is argued further that despite this defect, there is no general obligation not to defer. The upshot is a moderate optimism about ethical and aesthetic deference.

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1 Theorists who explicitly accept objectivism include Moore (1912), Thomson (1986), and Graham (2010). Moreover, the view is assumed by a prominent tradition in normative theory that focuses on objectivist normative theories. A tacit assumption in much of this work is that what we are morally requried to do is tightly connected to what we ought to do. 2 A note about how I'm using the word 'obligation.' I am using the word such that A is obligated to ϕ just in case A ought to ϕ. There is a usage of the word that is somewhat popular amongst moral philosophers where this is not true. Obligations, on this usage, are always things that we owe to other agents (see, e.g., Wallace (2012)). I am not using the word in this way. I should say that I mostly use the word 'obligation' to make the prose more elegant. One could replace the word with constructions that just use 'ought,' but that would make this harder to read. Plus, I do think that my use of obligation is also a natural use in English.

The orthodox assumption is that belief and disbelief are fundamentally the same attitude that are differentiated by a difference in content. When it comes to some proposition p, belief involves being settled that p and disbelief involves being settled that ¬p. It is fine for us to assume this view, here. I hasten to note, though, that there is some motivation for thinking that while both involve settling, they are not essentially the same attitude. The basic idea is that belief involves a sort of positive settling, whereas disbelief involves a sort of negative settling. One motivation for going in for this is that you eliminate the requirement that one be competent with negation in order to disbelieve. On this view, disbelief is a relation to p, not ¬p.