How to Have Reasons for Your Values

In philosophy, we provide arguments for our positions. So it seems that moral philosophers ought to be in the business of providing arguments for moral and ethical convictions. But I have elsewhere argued that we should not expect to be able to provide arguments of the kind that philosophers paradigmatically make for our most central, important or fundamental normative convictions. To put that another way, we cannot reason to our fundamental moral or ethical commitments. However, as I have also argued, this should not lead us to conclude that we could not have reasons for such commitments. In this paper I attempt to make some progress towards a positive characterization of what it means to have reasons for an attitude that we cannot reason to by considering how we ideally come to adopt or acquire our normative convictions. I will argue that, while we cannot be argued into fundamental normative commitments, we can be educated into them. Moreover, what distinguishes such an education from mere conditioning is sensitivity to the reasons or rational grounds for the commitments.