Right Reason Accounts of the Norm of Assertion

A growing number of philosophers are defending what can be understood as Right Reason Accounts of the norm of assertion. According to these accounts, an agent’s asserting that p is epistemically permissible only if that agent asserts that p for a right (normative) reason, i.e., a reason that at least contributes to making it epistemically permissible to assert that p. In this paper, I argue that Right Reason Accounts do not allow for the possibility of asserting epistemically permissibly only for the wrong reason(s). However, it is a commonplace in all normative domains (e.g., morality, prudence, and aesthetics) that an agent can—at least sometimes—φ rightly (or permissibly) only for the wrong reason(s).