Contrastive reasons

Justin Snedegar develops and defends contrastivism about reasons. This is the view that normative reasons are fundamentally reasons for or against actions or attitudes only relative to sets of alternatives. Simply put, reasons are always reasons to do one thing rather than another, instead of simply being reasons to do something, full stop. Work on reasons has become central to several areas of philosophy, but besides a couple of exceptions, this view has not been discussed. Contrastive Reasons makes the case that this is a mistake. Snedegar develops three kinds of arguments for contrastivism. First, contrastivism gives us the best account of our ordinary discourse about reasons. Second, contrastivism best makes sense of widespread ideas about what reasons are, including the idea that they favor the things they are reasons for and the idea that they involve the promotion of certain kinds of objectives. Third, contrastivism has attractive applications in different areas of normative philosophy in which reasons are important. These include debates in normative ethics about whether better than might be intransitive and debates in both epistemology and practical reasoning about the rationality of withholding or suspending belief and intention.

Cover; Contrastive Reasons; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; Acknowledgments; Preface; 1: Contrastivism and Reasons; 1.1 Reasons and Contrastivism; 1.1.1 Reasons; 1.1.2 Contrastivism; 1.2 Reasons and the Contrastivist Program; 1.2.1 Reasons and justification; 1.2.2 Reasons and 'ought'; 1.2.3 Reasons and explanation; 1.3 The Plan; 2: Reason Claims; 2.1 A Simple Argument; 2.2 A Stronger Argument; 2.2.1 The argument; 2.2.2 Response: denying exclusivity; 2.3 Contrastivism; 2.3.1 A contrastive account of reason claims; 2.3.2 A contrastive solution; 2.4 Other 'Rather than' Ascriptions

2.5 Negative Reason Existentials2.5.1 The puzzle; 2.5.2 The pragmatic solution; 2.5.3 A contrastivist solution; 2.6 Looking Forward; 3: Favoring; 3.1 Why Resist Contrastivism?; 3.2 Shallow Contrastivism; 3.2.1 A traditional theory of favoring; 3.2.2 A contrastive account of reason claims; 3.2.3 Shallow contrastivism and exclusivity; 3.3 Favoring; 3.3.1 Against non-contrastive favoring; 3.4 Contrastive Reasons and Favoring; 3.4.1 Contrastivism; 3.4.2 A problem; 3.4.3 Reasons and ought; 3.5 Looking Forward; 4: Promotion; 4.1 The Need for Constraints; 4.1.1 Intransitivity

4.1.2 Reasons for and subsets4.1.3 …