Reasons as Reasons for Preferences

Abstract

I argue that all reasons for actions and attitudes consist in reasons for preferences; call this view RP. According to RP, reasons for A to believe that p just consist in reasons for A to prefer their believing that p to their not believing that p, and reasons for A to have a pro-attitude or perform an action just consist in reasons for A to prefer that she has that attitude/performs that action. I argue that we have strong reason to accept RP because we can explain a correlation between reasons for preferences and other reasons only if we accept RP. I argue that no objections undermine RP and that RP has interesting implications for the reasons for attitudes there are and for reasons fundamentalism.

Suspension of Judgement: Fittingness, Reasons, and Permissivism

“…See, for instance, Hieronymi (2013) or Shah and Silverstein (2013). 33 See Harman (2004), Schroeder (2012, 2015, Cohen (2016), Roeber (2016), Snedegar (2017), Berker (2018), andBrunero (2022) for discussions of this feature of epistemic normativity.…”