XI-Internalising Practical Reasons

Practical Reasons and Moral ‘Ought’

Morality is a source of reasons for action, what philosophers call practical reasons. Kantians say that it ‘gives’ reasons to everyone. We can even think of moral requirements as amounting to particularly strong or stringent reasons, in an effort to demystify deontological views like Kant’s, with its insistence on inescapable or ‘binding’ moral requirements or ‘oughts.’1 When we say that someon...

'ought', 'can', and Practical Reasons 1

As intuitive as OIC might seem, we should acknowledge that the arguments offered in its support often do not warrant the sort of confidence many of us have in the principle. For example, friends of OIC often say that the principle is needed to explain certain linguistic behaviors. 3 Suppose Smith sees Jones sitting in a chair and Jones tells Smith that he has just been robbed. 'You ought to cal...

Pro-social cognition: helping, practical reasons, and 'theory of mind'.

There is converging evidence that over the course of the second year children become good at various fairly sophisticated forms of pro-social activities, such as helping, informing and comforting. Not only are toddlers able to do these things, they appear to do them routinely and almost reliably. A striking feature of these interventions, emphasized in the recent literature, is that they show p...

The Underlying Reasons in Practical Civil Engineering Works

Internalising modified realisability in constructive type theory

A modified realisability interpretation of infinitary logic is formalised and proved sound in constructive type theory (CTT). The logic considered subsumes first order logic. The interpretation makes it possible to extract programs with simplified types and to incorporate and reason about them in CTT. 1 Modified realisability Modified realisability interpretation is a well-known method for givi...