Some of the core fields of philosophy – including moral philosophy, value theory, and epistemology – are, at their heart, concerned with normative questions: questions about what is good or bad, right or wrong, justified or unjustified. These questions concern the content of judgements that human beings are constantly making and that structure our way of thinking, feeling, and acting. But while there is wide agreement in contemporary philosophy that normative judgements form a unified and important category of human thought, philosophers still struggle to understand what normativity actually is. One highly attractive hypothesis is that normativity can be analysed in terms of reasons – i.e. in terms of the factors that count in favour of or against actions or attitudes. The aim of REASONS F1RST is to systematically explore this Reasons-First Approach on a large scale and across various philosophical subdisciplines. Fostering multidisciplinary conversations between moral philosophy, epistemology, value theory, aesthetics, the philosophy of emotions, and related areas, the project will develop novel analyses of normative phenomena. It also seeks to address recent challenges to the Reasons-First Approach and to compare it to competing approaches. REASONS F1RST thus pursues a twofold objective: (i) to assess the merits and demerits of the Reasons-First Approach compared to alternative proposals, and (ii) to work out in detail how different normative phenomena – including values, obligations and rights, the justification of beliefs, as well as appropriateness norms for emotions – can be explained in terms of reasons.
The work programme of REASONS F1RST is carried out in four work packages (WPs): (WP1) “Reasons and Value”; (WP2) “Reasons and Ought”; (WP3) “Reasons and Knowledge”; and (WP4) “Reasons and Fittingness”. Each of these WP focuses on the relation between reasons and one other key normative category. Each of these categories stands for a field of normativity that a Reasons-First Approach has to account for in one way or another, and each has been put forward as an alternative candidate for a fundamental explanation of normativity. Moreover, each WP corresponds to one (and in one case more than one) philosophical subdiscipline. For the first three WPs, these are value theory, moral theory, and epistemology. The fourth WP touches upon aesthetics, moral psychology, the philosophy of mind, and epistemology in equal shares.
