Higher Sem in Practical Philosophy: Singa Christina Behrens "Against New Explanationism".

 Singa Christina Behrens, from University of Bielefeld, will give a self-contained talk at the higher seminar in practical philosophy. The title of her talk is

"Against New Explanationism". 

Abstract: Explanation-based accounts of normative reasons analyze the normative reasons relation in terms of explanation and some other normative notion, such as ought or value. One of the advantages of this view is that normative reasons fit neatly into a unified account of reasons, according to which all reasons explain. In this talk I focus on a novel form of explanation-based account recently developed by Broome (2018) and Fogal and Risberg (2023). What I call 'new explanationism' aims to avoid the shortcomings of standard explanation-based accounts by focussing on a contributory normative notion. Despite the progress new explantionism makes, I argue that it lacks sufficient metanormative neutrality and entails objectionable explanatory priority orderings. My argument from insufficient metanormative neutrality generalizes to all forms of explanationism. This provides indirect support for the view that the normative reasons relation is normatively fundamental. I conclude by offering an alternative account of why normative reasons are answers to why questions.

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