Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen

with regard to it” it seems to be clear that he thinks of judgment-sensitive attitudes in the first place.
One may then schematize his account as follows:
X is valuable. ↔ X has other natural (or evaluative) properties that provide reasons (of the
relevant kind) for certain judgment-sensitive attitudes.
Scanlon thus offers an intra-normative reduction: the evaluative is analysed in terms of the deontic.
And he can be understood as not only offering a conceptual analysis but as making a metaphysical
claim as well.
It is not the aim of this essay to examine if this intra-normative reduction is especially helpful or
reasonable, but Scanlon’s proposal shall be made as strong as possible and therefore it is necessary to
defend it against the most common objection, the Wrong Kind of Reasons Problem (WKR).
2. The Wrong Kind of Reasons Problem (WKR)
The main point of the WKR is that there may be reasons for a certain (judgment-sensitive) attitude 5
towards an object X which would not be called valuable. 6 The paradigmatic example of the debate is
the evil demon which will inflict a severe pain on me unless I prefer this saucer of mud. 7 Intuitively, a
saucer of mud is not preferable or valuable but the example suggests that I do have a reason to prefer
it, namely the threat of the evil demon. However, this reason seems to be of the wrong kind.
Scanlon seems to have anticipated this objection by sometimes using the careful formulation
“providing reasons of the relevant kind”, but he never explains what “reasons of the relevant kind” are
and so he offers no real solution to the problem.
There have been several proposals how to distinguish between the right kind of reasons and the wrong
kind of reasons, but none of them has been fully convincing. By modifying the example “the evil
demon always strikes back.”
3. A “Brentano style” Solution to the WKR 8
Danielsson and Olson introduce the distinction between two kinds of epistemic reasons for an attitude
(whether cognitive or conative): there are reasons which justify having the attitude, so called holdingreasons
and there are reasons which justify the correctness of the attitude, so called content-reasons. 9
5
The whole debate focuses on attitudes or pro-attitudes and thereby ignores Scanlons specific concept of
judgment-sensitive attitudes.
6
Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson call it the Conflation Problem. See Justin D’Arms/Daniel Jacobson:
Sentiment and Value; The Moralistic Fallacy; Sensibility Theory and Projectivism.
7
It was introduced by Roger Crisp and it has been modified several times to show that the proposed solutions all
fail.
8
The following remarks refer to Danielsson/Olson: Brentano and the Buck-Passers.
9
The term “content-reason” and especially the analogy between correctness and truth may suggest that we are
dealing with ontological reasons, which means facts that render the representational content of a belief or attitude
true or correct (truth-makers or “correctness-makers”). However, this is not how Danielsson and Olson
2