Reasons as Evidence

Abstract

Abstract Normative reasons are strange beasts. On the one hand, we are all intimately familiar with them. We couldn’t live for long without the guidance they continually offer us when we are trying to work out what to believe and what to do. At the same time, they seem to resist being analyzed in other terms. We can say that they “count in favor of ...” (acts, beliefs, intentions, desires, emotions, etc.), and some have thought that this rather uninformative characterization is pretty much all we will ever be able to come up with when attempting to answer the question, what are reasons? (Scanlon 1998: 17; Parfit 2007).