Eliot has a new article on Reasons for Non-Agents

Eliot’s paper on Reasons for Non-Agents has been accepted in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. Here’s the abstract:

According to a standard picture, normative reasons do not extend beyond the boundaries of agency. If something isn’t an agent, then there can’t be normative reasons for it to do one thing rather than another. This paper argues that the standard picture is false. There are reasons for smoke detectors to alarm when exposed to smoke, and for Venus Flytraps to close around their prey when stimulated. I argue that the collapse of the standard picture has important implications for philosophical debates about reasons, and especially serious consequences for theories that analyse normative reasons in terms of the standards of good practical reasoning.