 The intricacies of these controversies suggest that it may indeed be helpful to keep apart questions of motivation and questions of explanation even when we are dealing with reason explanations of action. The advantages of drawing this distinction will be spelled out in examining debates concerning motivating reasons and the explanation of action. We shall see there that apparently competing claims about motivating reasons and the explanation of action are often best understood and resolved as claims about motivating or explanatory reasons, respectively. The following passage, in which Stephen Darwall comments on a putative disagreement between Dancy and Michael Smith, helps to illustrate the point of the distinction: