Normativity, Rationality and Reasoning: Selected Essays

John Broome

Sep 2021 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

This volume is a selection of Broome's recent papers on normativity, rationality, and reasoning. It covers a variety of topics such as the meanings of 'ought', 'reason', and 'reasons'; the fundamental structure of normativity and the metaphysical priority of ought over reasons; the ownership - or agent-relativity - of oughts and reasons; the distinction between rationality and normativity; the notion of rational motivation; what characterizes the human activity of reasoning, and what is the role of normativity within it; the nature of preferences and of reasoning with preferences; and others. These papers extend the work presented in his book Rationality Through Reasoning but there is little overlap between their content and the book's. They develop further some themes and arguments from the book, and answer some questions that the book left unanswered.

About the author

John Broome took a PhD in Economics from MIT, followed by an MA in Philosophy from Bedford College, University of London. He was a lecturer in Economics at Birkbeck College, University of London, then a Reader and later Professor of Economics at the University of Bristol. He became a Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews in 1996, and then White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, from 2000 to 2014. He is a regular visitor at the Australian National University, where he is an Honorary Professor.