Normativity without Cartesian privilege

Abstract

A dialectical relationship between doubt and certainty characterises Cartesian epistemology: radical doubt about the outer world is quelled by the epistemic security of the inner. In viewing the phenomenal realm as a safe harbour from error, much contemporary philosophy inhabits the Cartesian worldview.1 But recent arguments from empirical psychology and armchair epistemology alike suggest that the Cartesian presumption of privileged phenomenal access should be rejected. If these arguments are sound, we are left to conclude that there is no realm to which we enjoy privileged access. For if we do not have such privileged access to our own minds, then presumably we do not have it to anything whatsoever. My question is this: what does rejecting Cartesianism imply for our relationship to the normative realm? My answer is that it implies that this relationship is more fraught than many would like to think. Without privileged access to our own minds, there are no norms that can invariably guide our actions, and no norms that are immune from blameless violation. This will come as bad news to those normative theorists who think that certain central normative notions—e.g. the ethical ought or epistemic justification— should be cashed out in terms of subjects’ mental states precisely in order to generate norms that are action-guiding and immune from blameless violation. Meanwhile Anti-Cartesianism might come as good news to those normative theorists who resist cashing out norms in terms of mental states. For Anti-Cartesnianism implies that no norms—however closely tied to the mental—can be perfectly action-guiding or totally immune from blameless violation. More generally, once we have accepted that our relationship to our own minds lacks the perfect intimacy promised by Cartesianism, we are, for better or worse, left with the view that the normative realm is suffused with ignorance and bad luck.2