Philosophical critique demonstrates how distinguishing response and deliberative constraints preserves reasons for emotions, highlighting requirements for a general theory of normativity.
Conner Schultz (Citation2025) has claimed that there are no normative reasons for the emotions, and perhaps not even for desire and preference. I will argue, in reply, that his argument for this claim fails, for we ought to distinguish two different constraints on normative reasons: the response constraint and the deliberative constraint. An upshot of my discussion is that our take on what normative reasons are affects our take on what there can be normative reasons for—a crucial observation, if we want to find a general theory of normative reasons.
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Roberto Keller (2026) studied this question.
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