Reason and ethics

This article concerns the role of reason in ethics under three distinct capacities: As the conformity of self-reflective minds to laws, as practical reasoning, and as the domain of normative considerations that make actions and attitudes intelligible and justified. In the first part of the article, I present competing accounts of practical reason and of its requirements, surveying recent debates about dichotomies such as explanatory, normative and operative, subjective and objective, justifying and motivating reasons. In the second part, I defend Kantian constructivism as the view of normativity that best vindicates the practical and reflexive nature of reason.