Grounding practical normativity: going hybrid

In virtue of what is something a reason for an agent to perform some action? In other words, what makes a consideration a reason for an agent to act? This is a prima facie metaphysical or meta-normative question about the grounding of reasons for action and not a normative question about the circumstances or conditions under which, normatively speaking, one has a reason to do something. The normative question is answered by normative theory, as when one says that such-and-such feature of an action is a reason to perform that action because bringing about that feature would maximize happiness. The metaphysical question asks instead for the metaphysical determinant of something’s being a reason. When we ask for the ground of a reason’s normativity, we ask what metaphysically makes something have the action-guidingness of a reason: where does the normativity of a practical reason come from? As Christine Korsgaard puts it somewhat more poetically what is the ‘source’ of a reason’s normativity? This paper takes a synoptic approach to the question of source, and from this broad perspective explores the idea that the source of practical normativity might best be understood as a hybrid of more traditional views of source. The paper begins with a survey of three leading non-hybrid answers to the question of a practical reason’s normative ground or source (Sect. 1). It then recapitulates one or two of the supposedly most difficult problems for each, suggesting along the way a new objection to one of the leading views (Sect. 2). It ends with a sketch of an alternative, hybrid view about source—what I call ‘hybrid voluntarism’—(Sect. 3) which, as it turns out, avoids each of the main problems faced by the three leading ‘pure’ views (Sect. 4). Hybrid voluntarism grounds practical normativity in a structured relation of two sources, one of which is willing. The view that willing is a ground of normativity has not had many defenders because it is widely thought to suffer from two fatal