ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses a conception of practical reason, which takes the point of view of the agent as necessarily constitutive of action and which accounts for the motivational force of reasons for action. Hence, practical reason is not a mechanical thinking procedure, but the way of responding to a situation by an agent who brings all her appetitive and cognitive capacities to bear in understanding and assessing the situation in which she must choose what to do. That conception takes at face value our first-person experience that there are normative constraints on human action. The chapter suggests that agents can see facts as reasons for action if they see them as grounding possibilities the actualisations of which is desirable, that is, good. The upshot is that the notion of the good plays a necessary part in the explanation of human action, although humans are fallible in their recognition and pursuit of the good.
