Alexander Pruss's Blog

By requesting something from someone, we create a reason for them to fulfill the request. On an individualistic view of human beings, this i...

A standard view of reasons is that reasons are propositions or facts that support an action. Thus, that I promised to visit is a reason to v...

Alice has lived a long and reasonable life. She developed a lot of good habits. Every morning, she goes on a walk. On her walk, she looks at...

It seems that: If you pursue friendship because friendship is non-instrumentally valuable, then you pursue friendship non-instrumentally. ...

In paradigm instances of parental action, my reason for action is the objective fact that I am a parent, not because of the subjective fact ...

There are many times when we refrain from pursuing an intrinsic good G . We can classify these cases into two types: we refrain despite G...

There are two ways of drawing a distinction between moral and epistemic reasons: What kind of value grounds the reasons (epistemic or mora...

You need to lay off Alice or Bob, or else the company goes broke. For private reasons, you dislike Bob and want to see him suffer. What shou...

Suppose I do an action that I know benefits Alice and harms Bob. The action may be abstractly perfectly justified, but if I didn’t take into...

People often talk of moral norms as overriding. The paradigm kind of case seems to be like this: You are N -forbidden to ϕ but morally re...

One might think that reasons for action are exhaustively and exclusively divided into the moral and the prudential. Here is a problem with t...

In my previous post I cast doubt on reducing moral reasons to goods. What about the other direction? Can we reduce goods to reasons? The ...

My usual story about how to reconcile libertarianism with the Principle of Sufficient Reason is that when we choose, we choose on the basis ...

The fact that a large animal is attacking me would give me both permission and reason to kill the animal. On the basis of cases like that, o...

Two soccer teams are facing off, with a billion fans watching on TV. Brazil has a score of 2 and Belgium has a score of 0, and there are 15 ...

Many contemporary ethicists believe that: Moral reasons are always other-regarding. Add this very plausible premise: No action that is...

We have the intuition that when someone has worked uprightly and hard for something good and thereby gained it, they deserve their possessi...

I used to be quite averse to multiplying types of normativity until I realized that in an Aristotelian framework it makes perfect sense to m...

While writing an earlier post , I came across a curious phenomenon. It is, of course, quite familiar that we have incompatible reasons that ...

Scanlon argues that intentions do not affect the permissibility of non-expressive actions because our intentions come from our reasons, and ...