Justin Snedegar, “Contrastive Reasons” (Oxford UP, 2017)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Jul 1, 2017 · 1h 6m

When we are thinking about what we ought to do, we are nearly always deciding among options. And we often talk in ways that reflect this; statement about what one ought to do are frequently explicitly statements that identify some act as the one to be performed from a broader set of alternatives. Accordingly, we recognize that a consideration which favors some act among one set of options might favor a different act among a different set of options. This has led some to think that normative reasons are fundamentally contrastive in structure. This is to say that a reason to perform some act is…