ABSTRACT
The present book aims to develop an account of acting for a normative reason which meets certain conditions of adequacy. The account must explain how reasons determine action via determining the minds and motivations of agents. That is, it must characterize the non-accidental relation between the action and the normative reason for which it is performed. Furthermore, it must capture the idea that agents deserve credit when they act for a normative reason, and it must account for many different intuitively plausible ways of acting for reasons. Developing this account requires to unite normative ethics, or normative theory, with action theory. Traditional causal accounts of action provide a good starting point because some of them introduce dispositions that help to deal with deviant causal chains. However, this dispositional structure will be extended beyond mental states and be applied to normative reasons understood as objective worldly facts. The dispositions will furthermore be interpreted as tracking dispositions which respond to indicators, such that the central causal conditions of causal accounts are eventually abandoned by the dispositional account of acting for a normative reason that is presented in this book.
