Can practical reasons ever override epistemic reasons for belief — and if so, how should the two be weighed against each other? Existing accounts of how to weigh epistemic and practical reasons face serious problems: the combinational problem of how to combine permissive and prohibitive balancing, accusations of being ad hoc, and the inability to provide usable advice. Additionally, existing arguments for privileging one type of reason over the other are vulnerable to intuitive counterexamples. This talk will outline the problems faced in the existing literature and argue for a position that cuts through the existing debate: epistemic reasons carry genuine normative authority, but are always weaker than practical reasons. This position handles the aforementioned counterexamples and avoids the problems of existing weighing accounts. I conclude by addressing Hannon and Woodard's (2026) argument that social coordination provides a practical reason to always follow the epistemic norm, arguing that this does not hold in all cases.
