Being Apart from Reasons: The Role of Reasons in Public and Private Moral Decision-Making / Edition 1

by Cláudio Jr. Michelon

Overview

Being Apart from Reasons deals with the question of how we should go about using reasons to decide what to do. More particularly, the book presents objections to the most common response given by contemporary legal and political theorists to the moral complexity of decision-making in modern societies, namely: the attempt to release public agents from their argumentative burden by insulating a particular set of reasons from the general pool of reasons and assigning the former systematic priority over all other reasons.

That strategy is apparent both in Rawls’ claim that reasons concerning the right are systematically prior to reasons concerning the good and in Raz’s claim that pre-emptive reasons are systematically prior to first-order reasons. The same strategy is also instantiated by certain arguments for the procedural value of law, such as Jeremy Waldron’s. In the book, each of those arguments for the insulation of reasons is objected to in order to defend the thesis the reasoning by public agents must always be as comprehensive as possible.

The remaining chapters object to those arguments mentioned above which aim at justifying the exclusion of certain reasons from public agents' decision-making.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781402042829
Publisher:	Springer Netherlands
Publication date:	04/11/2006
Series:	Law and Philosophy Library , #76
Edition description:	2006
Pages:	194
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.02(d)

Table of Contents

MORAL ACTION, REASON AND INCLINATION.- REASONING IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE CONTEXTS.- NEUTRALIST PUBLIC LIBERALISM AND THE INSULATION OF THE RIGHT FROM THE GOOD.- LEGAL AND NON-LEGAL REASONS IN THE COMMON GROUND OF DELIBERATION.- THE PROCEDURAL VALUE OF LAW AND THE INSULATION BETWEEN LEGAL AND MORAL REASONS FOR ACTION.- CONCLUSION.