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Critical Notice
For critical comments on a former version of this critical notice and suggestions for revisions I would like to thank Fabienne Peter and J. David Velleman. I also thank Paul Boghossian for critical comments and helpful discussion. For responses to an earlier draft of the paper I would like to thank Sorin Baiasu, Ben Bramble and Christoph Hanisch. Research for this critical notice has been funded by the ERC-Advanced Research Grant 'Distortions of Normativity'.
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INTRODUCTION
Starting with his ground-breaking article 'Normative requirements' (Broome 1999), John Broome has shaped the contemporary debate about rationality in a series of influential papers.1His main objective has been to develop and defend the thesis that rationality amounts to satisfying rational requirements and to reject the view that rationality consists in responding correctly to reasons. Broome applies his requirement-based account of rationality to theoretical and practical rationality: Rational requirements, so his thesis goes, regulate the relations among our mental attitudes, beliefs as well as intentions.
The most important requirements for ordering our beliefs are Belief Consistency (the requirement not to believe that p if you believe that not-p) and Belief Closure (the requirement to believe that q if you believe that p and that if p then q). The crucial requirements for practical reasoning are Intention Coherence (the requirement not to intend to X if you intend not to X), and Instrumental Reasoning (the requirement to intend to M if you intend E and believe that your realizing E requires that you M). There is another requirement of rationality Broome considers to be particularly important, namely Enkrasia which says: Rationality requires of you that, if you believe you ought to F, you intend to F.2Enkrasia provides, according to Broome, a link between theoretical and practical rationality.
As these examples show, requirements do have a distinctive logical structure: they have the form of a conditional. Rational requirements, as Broome famously used to put it, contain a wide-scope ought; reason-based requirements, however, contain a narrow-scope ought. A wide-scope rational requirement tells you to bring your attitudes in order, for example, by avoiding inconsistency, by reaching means-end coherence, or by bringing your...