Action Guidance, Accessibility, and Subjective Permission

ABSTRACT A popular idea in ethics is that subjective normative concepts play an important role in moral deliberation: They are taken to be action‐guiding . It is generally assumed that in order for these concepts to be able to guide an agent's actions, they need to be “informationally accessible” to the agent in a substantive sense. That is, access holds: access : Subjective normative notions are accessible to agents. access has been spelled out in various ways, for example, via knowledge, justified belief, and evidence. We present a novel argument against access on any precisification. Our argument is distinctive for at least two reasons. First, most discussion in the literature on action‐guidance concerns obligation. But we draw attention to subjective permission . We show that on virtually any substantive construal of “accessible,” subjective permissions are not always accessible to agents. Second, existing criticisms of access are motivated by general epistemological considerations, for example, the anti‐luminosity argument. By contrast, our argument against access is motivated by properties that are particular to normative concepts, and is neutral on more general epistemological debates.