Rationality, Responding to Reasons, and the First Person

Despite many disagreements, contemporary theorists of rationality largely agree that substantive rationality is to be understood in terms of correctly responding to reasons. While recent literature focuses on questions about the relationship between substantive and structural rationality, or which kinds of normative reasons are involved in substantive rationality, comparatively little attention has been paid to the question of what it is to correctly respond to reasons. Recent dispositionalist accounts of correctly responding to reasons mark an exception to this trend. In this paper, I argue that dispositionalist accounts make a crucial mistake in eschewing an essential role for the agent’s first-personal normative outlook. As a result, they cannot make sense of the fact that rational evaluation is a form of credit or criticism. I conclude that a successful account of correctly responding to reasons must capture the agent’s first-personal normative outlook as an indispensable component of rational evaluability.