Author Description

Thinking about Reasons is a collection of fourteen new essays on topics in ethics and the philosophy of action, inspired in one way or another by the work of Jonathan Dancy--one of his generation's most influential moral philosophers. Many of the most influential living thinkers in the area are contributors to this collection, which also contains an autobiographical afterword by Dancy himself. Topics discussed in this volume include:DT the idea that the facts that explain action are non-psychological onesDT buck passing theories of goodness and rightnessDT the idea that some moral reasons justify action without requiring itDT the particularist idea that there are no true informative moral principlesDT the idea that egoism and impartial consequentialism are self-defeatingDT the idea that moral reasons are dependent on either impersonal value, or benefits to oneself, or benefits to those with whom one has some special connection, but not on deontological constraintsDT the idea that we must distinguish between reasons and enablers, disablers, intensifiers, and attenuators of reasonsDT the idea that, although the lived ethical life is shaped by standing commitments, uncodifable judgement is at least sometimes needed to resolve what to do when these commitments conflictDT the idea that the value of a whole need not be a mathematical function of the values of the parts of that wholeDT the idea that practical reasoning is based on inferencethe idea that there cannot be irreducibly normative properties.