Reasons and justification

Philosophy is about what, if anything, can count as a reason in appraising beliefs, arguments, actions, and proposals to act, for valuing or disvaluing activities, situations, objects, characters, and so on. Its concern is not primarily with the adequacy of particular reasons for particular beliefs, other than philosophical beliefs, for philosophy scrutinizes the methods and procedures and the conceptual structures of all forms of inquiry, including its own, as well as those of other systematic practices, or what Wittgenstein called “forms of life.” Philosophy is thus concerned with those more general conditions which reasons must satisfy to be adequate, if particular beliefs and actions are to be appropriate to the context or the logical environment of beliefs in which any new belief or action is set. Consequently, consistency and coherence are regulatory principles governing such judgments of appropriateness.

Philosophy is also concerned, therefore, about the relations between reasons – for instance, about the ordering of reasons. Further, it asks whether appraisals can be true or in some other way correct, or at any rate defensible, or whether they should be understood, as the more naive of emotivists would have it, as simply registering approval or disapproval. If the emotivist were correct, reasoning would have only a minor part to play in our practical discourse and experience. At the level of first-order ethics, it could mount a critique of practical, instrumental calculations, and at the level of metaethics, of the logic of moral discourse.