Keywords: reasons; normativity; Joseph Raz; psychology; practical reason.
In his recent From Normativity to Responsibility Joseph Raz argues for three features of
practical reasons: that they are facts; that they are facts that can motivate agents qua being
reasons; and that they motivate agents in virtue of agents' capacity to reflect on them as
reasons (which he labels 'Reason'). The paper identifies a tension between two conceptions
of normativity that seem to co-exist in Raz's account: on the first of them, reasons
remain psychologically efficacious albeit too subjective; the other, takes reasons to be objective
normative facts which exist independently of our practical reasoning (or Reason).
I caution against a conflation between mind-dependence (psychologism) and Reasondependence
and suggest that practical reasons can remain simultaneously objective and
motivating if we understand them in a Reason-dependent fashion. In the course of the
paper a number of related questions on the nature of reasons are discussed and clarified.