Because There Is a Reason to Do It : How Normative Reasons Explain Action

Abstract

When agents act for normative reasons, those reasons are relevant to what these agents do: normative reasons explain the actions which are performed for them. This, at least, is what intuition and ordinary language suggest. However, it is controversial how these explanations work. Normative reasons are usually facts about the world, not about the agent’s mind. The article argues that the three main accounts of world explanations of actions, namely, the reductive, the non-factive, and the causal account, all face serious problems. Furthermore, there is the knowledge account, but it might not meet important desiderata. Therefore, this article suggests a new dispositional account of how worldly normative reasons explain actions. This dispositional account is inspired by explanations in virtue epistemology.