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Practical Law Legal Resources & Know-How for Professionals Thomson Reuters Thus it is widely accepted that the rational action for a given agent to take is the one whose subjective expected utility—reflecting both the utility of possible outcomes, from the agent’s point of view, and the agent’s beliefs about the probability of those outcomes—is the highest. Externalists reject this picture, contending that one can have reasons for action that are independent of one’s prior motivations. They typically agree that practical reasoning is capable of generating new motivations and actions. They agree, in other words, that if agent s has reason to do x, it must be possible for s to acquire the motivation to x through reflection on the relevant reasons. But they deny that such reasoning must in any significant way be constrained by s’s subjective motivations prior to the episode of reasoning. Normative reflection is thus taken to be independent of one’s prior motivations, and capable of