Let’s start with the assumptions you attribute to me:

“(i) you assume that psychological states can’t be facts and (ii) you assume that having more than one of the same thing counts as bloating our ontology.”

I assume by (i) you mean that I assume that there aren’t facts about psychological states. That is false. I don’t think psychological states are facts. I think that there are facts about psychological states, however. Moreover, I think that some of those facts obviously play a role in normative reason talk. The cases of Ronnie and Bradley show that much. Moreover, after chapter 2, I think that hypotheticalism might be on the right track. This is because it seems to do a good job explaining what the ‘person-half’ of the reason relation is. We often speak of the relational quality of normative reasons and facts. In those discussions, the fact half of the relation is always what is stressed. However, I don’t think I have ever seen an account of the person half of the relation. That is, what is it about people that puts them in these relations with certain facts? Hypotheticalism can answer this, it seems to me, by pointing to the necessary ‘desire’ state. Moreover, by stressing that the desire isn’t the reason, but merely a background condition, hypotheticalism can also stress the fact half of the relation.

All of that being said, however, I still don’t think that everything that satisfies SR should be called a normative reason. Certainly, when there is gin in the bottle, you have a reason to drink. But that is because the fact half of the relation actually obtains (and is thus a ONR). However, SR is satisfied even when the bottle is full of petrol. That means that MS’s theory holds that you have a normative reason to drink the petrol. I think that is wrong because the fact half of the relation does not obtain.

W/r/t (ii), I don’t know exactly what you mean. By what you say later on, I assume you mean the following: postulating that there is more than one kind of the same phenomenon bloats our ontology. I think this is false as well. I think it is right to say that there is form of reason in the petrol case. However, I don’t think there is a normative reason. Perhaps there are explanatory and motivating reasons, but not normative reasons.

I think that MR, SR, and OR are all metaphysical theses. Although, as I said above, I don’t think that we should say that all things that satisfy SR are really normative reasons. But we can just ignore that.

Yes, I think that your objection is cause for real alarm. I also agree that MS must have some story later on about this because the contradiction in MR is pretty apparent without such a story.

First I am going to recap what you said in order to make sure I am clear on everything. First we have the akrasia case:

(i) S believes (lets say she is justified and truly believes this as well) that R is not an objective normative reason for S to do A
(ii) S As
(iii) R is S’s motivating reason for A-ing.

So, we can turn the case into a reductio argument by putting in some of MS’s definitions.

(1) For R to be a subjective reason for S to do A is for S to believe R, and for it to be the case that R is the kind of thing, if true, to be an objective reason for S to do A.
(2) For R to be the (motivating) reason for which S did A is for the fact that R was a subjective normative reason for S to do A to constitute an explanatory reason why S did A.
Suppose the following:
(3) S believes (let’s say she is justified and truly believes this as well) that not seeing anyone or doing anything is not an objective normative reason for S to do lie in bed all day.
(4) S lies in bed all day.
(5) Not seeing anyone or doing anything is S’s motivating reason for lying in bed all day.
From (1) we can get the following:
(6) If R is a subjective reason for S to do A, then S believes R and R would be an objective normative reason for S to A if R is true.
From (2) we get the following:
(7) If R is a motivating reason for S to do A, then R is a subjective reason for S and S does A because of R.
By stipulation, (8) is true:
(8) S does not believe R is an objective reason to A (negation of 6’s consequent).
Thus,
(9) R is not a subjective reason for S.
Therefore,
(10) R is not a motivating reason for S to do A.

(10) and (5) contradict each other. We can either reject (1) or (2). (1) seems pretty solid, so we ought to reject (2), which is MR.

Next, you give three ways that MS could resist this conclusion. First, he could deny that (3) is true in this type of akrasia case. Now, you cite his negative existential argument as a possible move here, but I don’t see it. In the negative existential case, MS argues that it is fallacious make the following type of claim, “there is no reason whatsoever to phi.” That is not what (3) says, though. (3) just cites one reason to get out of bed. I don’t think the negative existential route is open to MS in denying (3). Moreover, I think that you can stipulate (3) however you want.

Second, MS could deny that (5) is true of a person in the case. The person’s motivating reason might instead be that she wants to stay in bed, or whatever. Again, this would not be a very satisfying answer because (i) you are free to stipulate what S’s motivating reason is as long as it seems possible that your stipulation could be someone’s motivating reason and (ii) your stipulation seems like it could be someone’s motivating reason.

The third route you suggest is that MS might claim that akrasia is not really possible–agents are either compulsive or reckless. I don’t know exactly what you mean by this; however, all routes that you suppose for MS in this section seem to be pretty implausible.

I think that this is a real worry. I also think that it is straight-forwardly a metaphysical worry. That is, it is about one’s judgments about what reasons one actually has and how those judgments relate to actions; viz., actions where weakness of the will is present.

i think MR is prima faciea implausible. it seems to me that this formulation will have trouble with cases of weakness of will. let me first say what i mean by weakness of will and why i think MR seems like it would have trouble with it. by weakness of will (or i guess one form of it) i have in mind a situation in which the following is true of some agent S:
(i) S believes (lets say she is justified and truly believes this as well) that R is not an objective normative reason for S to do A
(ii) S As
(iii) R is S’s motivating reason for A-ing.

as far as i can tell, this schema is straightforwardly inconsistent with MR. i think this is the case because (iii) satisfies the antecedent of MR (its not quite in this form but I think it can be re-written this way. by antecedent I mean what is in the first “for” clause) and (i) is the negation of the consequent of MR (here i mean everything starting from and to the right of the “is for the fact” part). (i) is the negation of the consequent because (i) makes it false to say that “R was the subjective normative reason for S to do A” as (i) shows that R is not the kind of thing which if true is an objective normative reason (this is the, in my terms, consequent of SR which I understand (like MR) as a bi-conditional). now, there is room left here because perhaps these formulations are not bi-conditionals though the formulations strike me as such because their use of “is for.”

now, my formulation of weakness of will is, of course, open to dispute as well. though i think it can be given (an would require, if this were worry were to be developed into an objection to schroeder’s view) independent motivation, i won’t try to do that here. instead, ill give an example in hopes that I can at least hint at why its intuitive. Imagine the case of depression. A depressed person (S) might find herself in this situation. She believes that the fact (R) that lying in bed all day will prevent her from seeing anyone or doing anything is not a reason to lie in bed all day (A). Suppose she is justified in having this belief and that this belief is true. She might nonetheless lie in bed all day due to that very fact (R). There are options about how to understand situations like this, but I think this is the natural reading. There are three (immediately obvious to me at least) ways that cases like this (that is the real world cases that this idealized case was meant to be based on) might be analyzed to make them amenable to schroeder’s view. First, Schroeder could deny that (i) is true in cases like this. I think (i) is intuitive but, one thing I should say at the outsight, is that Schroeder does have in print an argument which suggests that our intuitions about (i)-type reasons judgment (negative existential as he calls them) are unreliable. in any case, i doubt very much that anything hangs on this way of framing the objection (consider that it could be rewritten with a judgment like the fact that (R) S will be able to talk to his friends is a reason for S to go out today (A)). The second move that Schroeder could make is deny (iii) by claiming S really lies in bed all day due to some other consideration. Maybe R is the fact that she wants to stay in bed. This seems like something Schroeder might want to say. I doubt that this analysis is a good one though as we need to claim that this fact provides S with a subjective normative reason to stay in bed. And I doubt that this is right as, it seems to me, considering what it is like to feel depressed would show (similar things hold for why I think (iii) is true in the first place). The last obvious move Schroeder could make is to claim that weakness of will is not possible really agents are only compulsive or reckless. In particular, cases like the depression one I’m talking about lend themselves to the reading of compulsiveness most readily. The argument here would be to deny that (iii) is true again, but this time to say that S’s motivating reason is not R rather S’s explanatory (an not motivating) reason for A-ing is R. Here, Schroeder would have to spell out this distinction in some independently plausible way that would still lend itself to his purposes. One thought is that we can distinguish them in the way Scanlon distinguishes operative from explanatory reasons. To roughly illustrate this, we might say something like this. It might be true that the reason why the Menendez brothers killed their parents is something related to their Oedipal complexes or due to certain neurons firing, but both of these seem quite implausible as their operative reasons. Instead, it seems like these reasons, though they do explain, are not operative as these weren’t the sort of things that, to put it very crudely, were before the brothers minds when they decided to kill their parents like, say, the fact that they hated them. Another way of drawing the contrast is as a matter of freedom of the will. We might say that weakness of will and motivating reasons require that S be free. If S is not free, then they are compulsive and explanatory reasons are relevant. I think this second way of drawing the contrast between reasons is not plausible (though I think it is the common sense way of distinguishing compulsion and weakness of will which, if true would seem to indicate that the distinction between reasons and not the distinction between rational failures is primary). Regardless, I think that nothing of the intuitive force of the case is lost by stipulating that the agent is free (in whatever way normal agents who sometimes have to struggle to do what they judge they should are at least) and by stipulating that the very consideration before S’s mind was the fact that she would not see anyone or do anything all day if she were to stay in bed. In fact, I think we should say something stronger: not only is the situation possible, but it is the most natural way to understand what actually does happen to depressed people (at least those not severely depressed).

Like I’ve hinted at this is not an objection yet and would require a lot of development to get there, but I think it is a cause for concern. Of course, there are other options (perhaps I am not thinking carefully about whether this is a semantic, metaphysical, or epistemological thesis) which might solve the problem. And, of course, Schroeder has a lot left to say on the topic. But, this is one initial worry of mine. I wonder what y’all think. I probably am missing something obvious. I’d like to, time permitting, post a bit later about some other issues as well, but that is to be seen.