A Reason Itself Neither Requires nor Permits: On an Alleged Distinction between Two Roles for Reasons

It has become increasingly popular to distinguish two types of weight that reasons can have: one connected in some way to the overall status of being required, the other to the overall status of being justified or permitted. The purpose of this essay is to argue that this distinction between “requiring weight” and “justifying weight” is not in good standing. Attempts to motivate such a distinction through an appeal to two parallel definitions of what it is for a reason to have each type of weight fail, because a reason’s weight cannot be defined in terms of the conditions under which an action or attitude has (or is made to have, or is pushed toward having) a given status at the overall level. And attempts to motivate such a distinction by extracting it from substantive proposals about how reasons combine in order to yield overall verdicts also fail, because, among other problems, such proposals lead to wildly implausible first-order verdicts. Although how reasons and their weights play off each other in the determination of what, all things considered, to do (or think, or feel) is potentially a very complicated affair, we lack good reason to think the weights of reasons neatly sort into two piles, one of a distinctively requiring sort, the other of a peculiarly justifying variety.