Reasons for Acting

It is occasionally desirable to take an overview of quite a wide area of philosophy: what one loses in detail one gains in perspective. I follow this procedure in the present paper. Ia m concerned with the whole area where we indulge in practical deliberation, or where we attempt to justify some course of action we propose to follow or have followed. To do this I investigate the nature of a reason for acting and how such reasons can enter into an attempt to justify some act. It should be noticed that just having reasons for acting in some way does not entail that acting in that way is justifiable. In what follows, I speak first of reasons, later of justifications

Action (physics) · Deliberation · Epistemology · Law and economics · Perspective (graphical) · Political science · Sociology · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Ethics in medical practice · Law · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy