Mark Schroeder, "Reasons First" (Oxford UP, 2021)
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What is the “reasons‑first” approach and why is it important in ethics?
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Hello, and thanks for joining us for this episode of New Books in Philosophy, which is part of the New Books Network. I'm Robert Talese. I'm professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University. I co-host the program with Carrie Figter, Malcolm Keating, and Sarah Tyson. My guest today is Mark Schroeder. Mark is professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California. Mark specializes in metaethics and practical rationality, but in addition, he also focuses on the relations between different kinds of normative inquiry. His new book, which has just been published with Oxford University Press, is in this vein. It's titled Reasons First. Now, a leading approach in ethics takes the reason as, in some sense, primary or basic.
This approach claims that a range of moral concepts are ultimately to be cashed out in terms of reasons or what we have best reason to do. For example, this approach says that what we ought to do is to be explained in terms of what our best reasons support us doing. It may also say what is valuable is to be cashed out in terms of what our best reasons tell us to value, and so on. Now, although this approach is controversial among metaethicists, it nonetheless is among the leading proposals in contemporary metaethics. However, a reasons-first approach is largely absent in the neighboring normative discipline of epistemology. This is despite the fact that Epistemology has had plenty of controversy recently about where it should start, about what is epistemically basic.
Now, in the book Reasons First, Mark imports a compelling version of the reasons-first view from metaethics into epistemology, arguing that epistemology has much to gain from adopting a reasons-first perspective. Now, as usual, there's a lot to talk about. But why don't we begin, as we normally do, with our guest. Hi, Mark.
Hi, Bob. How are
you doing? How are you today? Oh, I'm doing great. How are you?
I'm pretty good. Yeah, thanks
for having me on. No problem. It's a real pleasure to talk to you. You know, we usually start these interviews, I ask the author to say something about himself. So why don't we continue the tradition? Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Sure. So I teach at the University of Southern California. This is my 16th year here. I taught for a couple of years at University of Maryland and did my PhD before that at Princeton. But I think the most helpful place to start is with my undergraduate career. I was an undergraduate student in the late 90s from 1996 to 2000 at Carleton College in Minnesota. And my very first exposure to philosophy was exposure to a way of thinking about metaethics, where the problems of metaethics were thought of as very general.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the “reasons‑first” approach and why is it important in ethics?
0:00–10:09
2
How does Schroeder import the reasons‑first view from meta‑ethics into epistemology?
10:09–21:39
3
What are the two central obstacles (unjustified belief and sufficiency) that the book tackles?
21:39–32:17
4
How does the competition of reasons explain everyday moral deliberation (the party example)?
32:17–43:00
5
Why are reasons described as act‑oriented rather than outcome‑oriented?
43:00–54:44
6
How does the book resolve the problem of unjustified belief using reason competition?
54:44–1:03:02
7
What is the “fundamental argument” about reasons that can be acted on?
1:03:02–1:03:42
8
What impact would adopting a reasons‑first epistemology have on the future of epistemology?
1:03:42–1:03:51
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