ABSTRACT
Now there are, in the literature on ‘motivating’ reasons, some attempts to support (1) and (2) not just by generalizing from various kinds of ‘bad’ or ill-informed cases, but through reflection on the distinctive projects associated with the pursuit of normative and explanatory questions. According to Jonathan Dancy, ‘there is, it would seem, no one sort of request for explanation that both sorts of question address’ (2000, 8). Dancy is assuming here that we may understand the normative question (Did X have a good reason to do A?) as a request for an explanation of what, if anything, made the action worth doing. His claim is that the latter kind of explanation is never relevant (or ‘requested’) when we are concerned to make X’s doing A rationally intelligible (i.e. when we pursue an ‘explanatory question’ in the more straightforward sense: Why did X do A?). Note, though, that Dancy offers no support for this claim, other than describing his distinction as ‘perfectly ordinary and unproblematic’, and ‘not particularly obscure or complicated’ (2000, 1-2).
