The Deliberative Significance of Moral Obligations

Moral obligations are often seen as deliberatively significant in a way that differs from the role that ordinary reasons play in our practical deliberations about what we ought to do. R. Jay Wallace claims that his relational approach to morality is well-suited to make this feature intelligible, while other approaches fail. Against this, I argue that rationalists who trace obligations back to reasons have the means either to explain the deliberative significance of moral obligations or to reject it as illusory, and that the relational approach can be criticised as both extensionally inadequate and explanatorily unsatisfactory.