Over at PEA Soup, Douglas Portmore has posted Scanlon on the Teleological Conception of (Practical) Reasons. Very fine post. Here is a taste:
my gloss on the teleological conception of reasons is
TCR P has a reason to do x if and only if P has an object-given reason to desire that Ox obtains, where Ox is the total outcome resulting from P’s doing x.
TCR seems very plausible to me. If P has an object-given reason to desire that Ox obtains, then, given that P’s doing x is a necessary means to Ox’s obtaining, P has a reason to do x. And I can’t see why P would have any reason to do x unless P had some object-given reason to desire that Ox obtains.
