I am writing a mediocre paper on a topic you are not particularly interested in. You don’t have, it seems safe to assume, a (normative) reason to read my draft. I then ask whether you would be willing to have a look and tell me what you think. Suddenly you do have a (normative) reason to read my draft. What exactly happened here? Your having the reason to read my draft — indeed, the very fact that there is such a reason — depends, it seems, on my having asked you to read it. By my asking, I managed to make it the case that you have such a reason, or to give you the reason to read the draft. What does such reason-giving consist in? And how is it that we can do it? Is it a kind of normative magic? Especially if reasons are in an important sense objective and autonomous, how is it that by sheer acts of will we can bring them into being, change their force, and perhaps even eliminate them?1 lf, as seems likely, "reason must constrain and guide the will", how is it that we can create reasons at will, for instance by making a request? Requests do not exhaust, of course, the space of reason-giving. Something rather similar seems to be going on when, for instance, an authority issues a command, thereby giving the addressee a (perhaps special kind of) reason to act in a certain way, a reason that was not there before the command. And when I promise, one of the things I seem to be doing is give myself a reason (perhaps of a special kind) to act in a certain way, a reason that was not there before the promise.3 Now more controversially, perhaps by forming an intention I give myself a reason that was not there before to follow through on that intention. And there may be other cases as well.4 All of these seem — quite pre-theoretically to have something in common to them. (ln Section 3, I will argue that this pre-