ABSTRACT
According to a view popular among philosophers, when someone acts for a normative reason that reason is identical with a motivating reason for which the agent acts. The main claim of the chapter is that there are no convincing general or merely conceptual arguments for identity, and no convincing arguments based merely on ordinary statements that we commonly make about our reasons. The chapter discusses an argument from similar names, an argument from co-existence (which is an inference to the best explanation), an argument from the normative notion of a motivating reason, an argument from a deliberative notion of a motivating reason, and an argument from an explanatory notion of a motivating reason. It concludes that more substantial ontological arguments would be needed to defend either the Deliberative Identity Thesis or the Explanatory Identity Thesis.
