ABSTRACT
We are sometimes faced with difficult choices. When we are, we have to make up our minds, and we often do so successfully. In making up our mind we might be said to be engaging in a process of appropriating some of the reasons that figure in the situation in which we find ourselves. That is, making up one’s mind is a matter of turning some of the reasons into reasons of one’s own. I might be thinking, for example, about whether to accept a job offer, whether to turn in my son who has committed a crime and is now hiding from the police in my attic, whether to undergo psychoanalysis or—much more down to earth—whether to order a pizza or the lasagna, and what I shall be doing in making up my mind is determining which of the reasons that could motivate and/or justify my behavior are mine, that is, are the ones I should like to commit myself to by acting on them. I shall be weighing the normative force of each reason against the others, and when my mind is made up, and wholeheartedly so, I shall be able to say which reasons I am happy to identify as my own reasons.
