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 someone morally ought not to harm others, perhaps all we are saying is that he has a certain kind of reason not to, one that wins out against any opposing reasons such as those touting benefits to him of ignoring others’ concerns. Philosophers may feel the need for a deeper understanding of reasons, but interpreted essentially as facts relating acts and agents—considerations counting in favor of or against someone’s performing a certain act—moral reasons at any rate would not seem to involve any intrinsic moral properties of acts, of the sort that people used to worry about even for less extreme examples than Kant’s of a deontological approach to ethics. We need to refer to reasons in any case to understand ordinary non-moral cases of rational deliberation and action. So it is now common, for instance, to substitute for Ross’s notion of prima facie duties talk of pro tanto reasons, reasons counting in favor of or against some act as far as they go, but capable of being defeated by opposing reasons. The explanation of moral ‘ought’ in terms of practical reasons might seem to lend support, though, to contemporary Kantian arguments that practical rationality is all one needs to supply the impulse to be moral, with Nagel’s The Possibility of Altruism as a primary source.2 Even granting that an agent might be rational and yet not fully aware of the reasons bearing