  The first of these, often referred to as internalism, holds that reasons for action must be grounded in an agent’s prior motivations (Williams 1981; cf. Finlay 2009).  According to this influential position, a given agent s can have reason to do x only if x-ing would speak to or advance some element in s’s ‘subjective motivational set’. There must be some rational connection between s’s x-ing and the subjective motivations to which s is actually already subject; otherwise the claim that s has reason to x must be rejected, as false or incoherent.  Behind this internalist position lies the idea that practical reason is practical in its issue. Internalists contend that we can make sense of the generation of new intentions through reasoning only if we assume that such reasoning is conditioned by motivational resources that are already to hand. Practical reason, on the internalist account, is the capacity to work out the implications of the commitments contained in one’s existing subjective motivational set; the upshot is that motivation is prior to practical reason, and constrains it.