 This three-part classification may seem excessively refined: is it really necessary or advantageous to distinguish motivating and explanatory reasons? After all, a motivating reason can always explain the action that it motivates, so the question of what reason motivates an agent and what reason explains her action are, one might think, fundamentally the same. If so, “motivating” and “explanatory” are surely just different labels for the same kind of reason, at least in contexts of intentional actions. And there appears to be no obvious advantage in regarding motivating and explanatory reasons as distinct kinds.