What Are Reasons and Why Do They Matter to Ethics?

Every action that a human being conducts definitely has some cause, explanation, or justification behind it. These are reasons. Such reasons might be either logically justified or unconscious. However, when people deal with ethical actions and make certain decisions about what to do in different situations, the reasons that they have behind their decisions might be multiple and rather contradictory. Thus people are often faced with certain obstacles that make them think of the reasons why they should follow this or that ethical rule while making their decisions, which puts up the main question of the entire ethics: whether there are objective reasons that would make people chose decency or all the reasons are subjective and ethics is not the matter of objective moral imperative. Hence, the issue of reasons that stand behind people’s actions and decisions in fact defines the main roots of the entire ethical laws.

While there is some dispute as to what these classifications effectively mean, it is generally accepted that there are two different kinds of reasons. These are: the normative/justificatory, which, as the title suggests, serve to justify and evaluate, and the explanatory/motivating reasons, which serve as motivation and explanation (Alvarez 2009). The very first aspect where reasons work in terms of ethics is in justifying and assessment of either one’s own or somebody else’s actions. People estimate others using universal principles of reasoning, allowing them to explain other people’s conduct. First of all, it helps them to understand others’ behavior and evaluate it on the matter of right and wrong ways of acting. Hence, people usually apply so-called explanatory reasons in order to justify different actions. Explanatory reasons make actions and attitudes understandable and logical, or, to make it simpler, they literally explain why people act this way.

Even though explanatory reasons make people’s actions intelligible, usually it is not enough to...