ABSTRACT
This chapter focusses on the relations between explanation and justification of action, and connects our experience of normative constraints on human action with two different roles that human nature plays in the constitution of human action: as a source of the cognitive and volitional capacities which are exercised in action and as a constituent of contents of deliberative processes. This connection allows an account of moral reasons (i.e., moral normativity vis a vis practical normativity), which does not assign them any fixed domain that precedes the reasoning processes through which agents acknowledge them. This is a form of moral realism, which does not presuppose the existence of a domain of moral facts independent from the presence of subjects and from the volitional and cognitive capacities of subjects. According to that realism, moral facts are complex facts concerning a fit between, on the one side, subjects and the inclinations – based on human nature – of their cognitive and volitional capacities, and, on the other side, the objects of action, which underpin pre-rational, factual forms of normativity.
