Reasons and Passions

Jonathan Dancy has argued that agents’ reasons for their actions are facts or features of the situations rather than their psychological states. The purpose of the paper is to show that even if we grant that this is so in most of the cases, there is a class of mental states that can be reasons. Although beliefs and desires are not reasons for actions, some emotional states—like loving, liking or disliking someone—can generate reasons. The distinctive feature of these states is that their content is a particular, and not a proposition. Hence in certain situations their love or admiration can provide agents with reasons to do one particular thing rather than another.