Conference Agenda
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Daily Overview |
| Session | |
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S31: Metaethics, Rationality & Decision Theory 3 Location: 23.01 3B Session Chair: Benjamin Kiesewetter | |
| Presentation 6 | |
5:15pm - 6:00pm
Reasons Holism and the Place of Thick Facts in the Explanatory Order Universität Tübingen, Germany According to holism about reasons, reasons are variant: whether a given fact is a reason for, a reason against or neither varies across situations. One argument against this view is the thick reasons argument: the argument that, since (1) thick reasons (e.g. the fact [Kim’s action is dishonest]) are invariant and since (2) they are indicative of what reasons are paradigmatically like, it follows that reasons are paradigmatically invariant. There are two strategies for defending reasons holism against this argument. The first strategy is to reject premise (1) and argue that thick reasons are variant. The second strategy is to reject premise (2) and argue that, insofar as thick reasons are invariant, they are outliers, not paradigms of reasonhood. In this paper, I first criticize these two strategies, before suggesting an alternative. Specifically, I suggest that, instead of attacking the premises of the thick reasons argument, reasons holists should reject its main presupposition: that thick facts are reasons. Thick facts, I argue, should be viewed as facts about reasons (e.g. the fact [Kim’s action is dishonest] is the fact [[Kim’s action is a believed-false statement] makes Kim’s action pro tanto wrong]). I close by responding to two objections. | |

