| Summary: | The Humean Theory of Reasons has been criticized for not being able to account for the type of reasons that morality seems to require, namely overriding reasons to act on moral demands regardless of what one happens to desire. By offering a new interpretation of Adam Smith's impartial spectator---which makes use of both a complexity in Smith's conceptualization of the relations between sympathy and approbation and a new interpretation of his use of reflective endorsement---my dissertation provides a novel and alternative account of moral reasons that is both desire-based and accommodating of an extensionally adequate version of the requirement that moral demands have reason-giving force. My account demonstrates that the standpoint of the impartial spectator can both determine what is morally appropriate and inappropriate and provide the basis for reasons for action to all moral agents, namely agents who are accountable, can adopt this standpoint, and have a certain social desire (the desire to be approvable). In particular, I provide an account of a modestly idealized, impartial standpoint that makes the objects of our approval merit that approval and our moral judgments correct. I then argue that the normative weight placed on practical reasons when deliberating from this standpoint is the correct weight, and conclude by developing this account into a modest form of Morality/Reasons Internalism.
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