ABSTRACT
In large part due to Davidson’s seminal contribution, motivating reasons have been considered indispensable for the explanation of intentional action. A motivating reason is an explanans of a unique kind in that it rationalizes (“renders intelligible”) an action by incorporating the consideration(s) that the agent took to speak in its favor. In contrast to their normative counterparts, motivating reasons are therefore essentially tied to a particular person’s deliberative, first-personal stance. Not only appear motivating reasons to necessarily come with relativistic and perspectival characteristics; for the longest time, the debate surmised in this chapter had not explicitly addressed this “benign relativism” because of its apparently obvious presence. Recently, this has changed. First, the relationship between motivating and normative reasons has been discussed in the complex terms of Dancy’s “normative constraint” (on motivating reasons), the (ontological) “identity thesis,” and other themes related to the phenomenon of being motivated by a good reason. Second, some of the most original recent work on motivating reasons has taken an “epistemic turn,” putting at the forefront arguments that suggest more stringent and objective “existence criteria” for motivating reasons (as distinct from other motivating factors).
