Normative Conflicts and the Structure of Normativity

One important lesson from John Broome’s work on normativity is that much can be accomplished by focusing closely on oughts, rather than reasons, in trying to understand the normative world. In his Rationality through Reasoning, Broome particularly emphasizes the importance of looking at final oughts. This chapter considers putative instances of mutually unsatisfiable final oughts. How these putative normative conflicts are treated, it argues, places important constraints what fundamental claims can be made about foundational structure of normativity. The constraints importantly affect what kind of reasons there can be, and how those reasons are related to their sources.