Reasons, Weight, and Hybrid Approaches to the Metaphysics of Practical Normativity

Abstract

In virtue of what do some considerations count in favor or against actions? Some philosophers have recently been interested in hybrid answers to this question. For instance, it might be that some facts about reasons are brute, and some are explained in terms of agents’ acts of will. Such views face a challenge: they need a story about how reasons grounded in one way combine with reasons grounded in other ways to yield overall verdicts about what to do. This paper assesses the two most prominent accounts of how that happens, and offers an alternative that captures what's most plausible about each.