ABSTRACT
Evaluative commitments not only provide content and shape to a life when considered third-personally. They also exert normative pressure on the agent that confronts her first-personally. This chapter examines how the normative relation to whom we are subject in virtue of our evaluative commitments can be captured. It outlines and defends an alternative explanation, according to which there is a distinct self-referentiality at work in evaluative commitments that explains our reasons for continuing with them and thus accounts for their particular normative force. If the Independence Claim is correct, we need a further explanation of why commitment-dependent reasons put us under a normative relation and change our normative landscape just because we find ourselves committed. Rational requirements are very specific kinds of relations that govern our attitudes and differ from reasons. Call this the Rational Requirements View.
