Reasons and Passions

Abstract

Abstract This chapter defends a Humean picture of our normative lives as expressive of the passions in our souls. This picture should be understood holistically. We cannot elevate something to normative significance merely by wanting it but it is because we have a passionate nature that we live in a space of reasons. The picture defended is constructivist but also realist in allowing for normative truth and objectivity and in its clear repudiation of scepticism. Desires remain largely in the background of our normative thought when it goes about its ordinary businesses engaging a rich substantive space of reasons and values but this rich space taken as a whole expresses the complex and interconnected array of desires that goes to shape our human normative world. This holistic version of a Humean understanding of the normative is not vulnerable to widely raised objections involving arbitrary, isolated, and disconnected desires—to turn on radios, say—not credibly supposed to carry significant normative weight, as indeed they do not.