Moral obligations play a distinctive role in our practical reasoning: unlike ordinary reasons, which merely count for or against actions, they rule out certain options from the outset. In his book The Moral Nexus, R. Jay Wallace argues that the relational approach can successfully explain this feature, while other approaches fail.
In his article “The Deliberative Significance of Moral Obligations”, Lukas Naegeli takes the opposite view: rationalists who trace obligations back to normative reasons have the means either to explain the deliberative significance of moral obligations or to reject it as illusory. The relational approach, however, faces serious objections concerning both its scope and its explanatory power.
The article is freely accessible: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-025-10532-w
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