reasons and the good oct 2006

[...]... Understanding wrote: The laws that men generally refer their actions to, to judge of their rectitude, or obliquity, seem to me to be these three 1 The divine law 2 The civil law 3 The law of opinion or reputation, if I may so call it By the relation they bear to the first of these, men judge whether their actions are sins, or duties; by the second, whether they be criminal, or innocent; and by the third,... ethics My view of reasons is that they are, to use Williams’s term, ‘external’ and I spend some time in defending the external view against his objections, and then realism about reasons against Humean and Kantian critiques The chapter concludes with discussions of the relation between reasons and values and a defence against the arguments of G E Moore and T M Scanlon that the concept of well-being cannot... whether they be virtues or vices.¹⁴ The divine law, Locke continues, is the only true touchstone of moral rectitude’, whereas ‘these names, virtue and vice, in the particular instances of their application, through the several nations and societies of men in the world, are constantly attributed only to such actions, as in each country and society are in reputation or discredit’ The civil law and the. .. possibility is that guilt and blame are especially closely related to fear of the anger of an internalized other and of distancing from that other (in particular the parent, who has power over the bond between herself and the child as well as the power to inflict punishment); whereas the development of shame went hand in hand with a growing awareness by individuals within the group of the importance of trusting... well be derivative reasons for doing what some actual morality or other prescribes If I am right, then the correct theory of reasons for action should be stated without using the moral concepts In the hope of offering such a theory, in the second chapter I discuss the notion of a reason for action I begin by distinguishing epistemic from practical reasons, and suggest that all practical reasons must be... any plausible account of the origin of either morality or law will carry across to the other system With these analogies between positive morality and law in mind, let me now return to the question whether there are specifically moral ultimate reasons If there are such reasons, then a full statement of them will make ineliminable use of certain moral concepts These concepts include that of being immoral... answer to which depends on the kind of arguments under discussion In the case of mathematics, what is central is the contrast between practices or beliefs which develop because that is the way things are, and those that do not The calculating rules developed as they did because 2 + 2 = 4, 7 + 5 = 12, and so on, and the rules reflect mathematical truth.²⁵ The functions of law and morality, however, are... objects that such ‘split-level’ theories are ‘schizophrenic’: Those theories misunderstand, and often do not allow for, large and important parts of human life, including such important goods as love and friendship For here, motivation and value must come together if the goods are to be actualized: if I do not act for your sake, then no matter whether what I do is for the best, I am not acting out of... non-ultimate or derivative reasons, and that this is exactly what we should expect given the analogies between the two systems outlined above There certainly are ultimate reasons for me not to kill Jack, such as that I shall by doing so decrease his well-being and that of his friends and relations But these are the same reasons that justify the law’s forbidding me to kill There is an issue here concerning... within the domain of practical reasons, between explanatory (including motivating) reasons, and normative reasons Normative reasons I define as properties of actions that count, for the agent in question, in favour of the performance of those actions by that agent I then categorize normative reasons as either grounding or justificatory, the former being those of primary interest in ethics My view of reasons .