ABSTRACT
The subjectivist about reasons should adopt at least a three-part strategy to motivate and defend subjectivism. Without at least these three parts, the view would not be tolerably convincing. This chapter outlines how the subjectivist should try to fill in each part. In the first part, the subjectivist is on offense. The view must show some areas or contexts where it has advantages over rivals and find paradigmatic cases of reasons (or well-being) that are most plausibly determined by what we value. Matters of mere taste, we will see, plausibly provide this sort of home ground for the subjectivist. In the next two parts, the subjectivist is on defense. In the second phase, she must confront non-moral cases where subjectivism seems intuitively implausible. The argument here against the subjectivist is similar to the argument in the Euthyphro. The thought is that there is a right answer in the cases being pointed to, and the correctness of that answer seems stable regardless of how we imagine the relevant attitude pointing. The subjectivist must convincingly respond to such cases and persuade us either that subjectivism can get the intuitive results or explain why the intuitions in such cases are less probative than might have been thought. Finally, in the third phase, the subjectivist must confront the case of morality. What is morally required of an agent seems paradigmatically not to be determined by that agent’s concerns yet to be normatively authoritative over her. Subjectivism about reasons cannot allow that both are the case. Yet there are, I believe, a variety of considerations that can alleviate the pressure from morality on subjective accounts.
