Abstract

Moral skeptics challenge the objectivity of ethics. My aim, however, in Moral Skepticism and Practical Reason is not to attempt to answer this challenge, but to characterize it and speculate about how it could be answered. ;The skeptic's challenge is not sufficiently well understood. I contend that there are two distinct skeptical challenges: status skepticism and authority skepticism. Status skepticism call into question whether there are moral facts, while authority skepticism calls into question whether there are weighty moral reasons. Each poses a challenge in the sense that it reflectively undermines our moral experience and practice, but I argue that to successfully answer both challenges one must begin with authority skepticism. ;I then examine two conceptions of practical reason distinguished by Bernard Williams: internal reasons and external reasons. Williams defends internal reasons: that to have a justifying reason to $\phi$ one must have a motive that would be furthered or served by $\phi$-ing. However, I argue that this theory is deeply flawed and cannot provide a sufficiently robust conception of rationality to account for psychological reality. I then go on to sketch an alternative external theory of reason where reasons are normative considerations revealed in a process of deliberation guided by norms. ;Importantly, since the internal theory holds that an agent's reasons must be fundamentally grounded in the motives of that particular agent it fails to account for the genuine quality of moral reasons--where it is in virtue of features of others that we have moral reasons. Hence, the internal theory must resort to inadequate moral modeling. Next I consider a few attempts to develop a conception of moral reasons along the lines of the external theory and argue that they fail but that this can be traced to their invoking the internal theory at a deep level. The lesson is that to capture the genuine quality of moral reasons requires a genuine external theory of reason. Such a theory rejects the motivational model of the internal theory for a normative model on which reasons may be understood to transfer their reason-giving quality across persons.