He believed that, while there can be ethical truth, it is local and historically contingent and based on reasons deriving from people's actual motives and practices, which are not timeless or universal.
In a 13-page claim form seen by MediaGuardian, lawyers for Serrano said the column falsely portrays the medical professional as "a particularly shocking example of foreign doctors working in the NHS who, for reasons deriving from their being foreign, are seriously incompetent, inadequate or otherwise unacceptable".
One line of objection holds that no reasons derive from our desires.
A different version of this picture maintains that invariant reasons derive from the virtues (Crisp 2000).
And there is some reason to think they do: not the familiar reasons stemming from communitarianism, libertarianism, and utilitarianism, but reasons deriving from care ethics.
Reasons that seem to derive from desires can arguably be more plausibly explained by pleasure, which can also serve to explain reasons that desire cannot explain: reasons deriving from pleasures that the agent does not actually desire.
A third kind of objection (Hampton 1998) insists that though it is true that some reasons derive from our desires, this is only because of more fundamental reasons which themselves do not derive from our desires.
That is, if we seem to perceive P, then unless there are compelling a priori reasons or reasons deriving from other perceptions to believe ~P, we should believe P.
For example, Christine Korsgaard (1996) maintains that reasons derive from the demands of autonomy, or being regulated by stable principles that define ones' self, which she identifies as a necessary condition for acting at all.
The idea behind this reasoning is that if we have to agree that some reasons depend on desires, then we should give serious consideration to the theory according to which all reasons do, as being simpler and more explanatory than the theory according to which some reasons derive from our desires but others do not.
