Normative Facts Research Articles

Normative Bedrock: Response-Dependence, Rationality, & Reasons

In this book, Joshua Gert puts forward a distinctive and original combination of proposals for how to understand our basic normative concepts, including practical (ir)rationality, practical reasons, and (personal) harm. The broader aim of the book is to ‘demystify’ the normative by explaining how there can be irreducibly normative facts and properties in a world that is also truly described by natural science. Normative Bedrock follows on from Gert's 2004 book Brute Rationality , in which he describes the structural features of basic normative concepts. The bulk of Normative Bedrock has previously appeared in article form since 2007. This may account for the somewhat scattered way in which the different parts of his account are presented in this new book. Conscientious readers will find the index useful. According to Gert, our basic normative concepts are response dependent. Response-dependent concepts are ones the extension of which is in crucial ways dependent on how those who apply them are disposed to respond to their environment in particular circumstances. Basic response-dependent concepts are associated with a distinctive set of primitive responses, such as the visual experiences that (on Gert's view) partly fix the extension of colour concepts. The social function of these concepts, and the need for conformity in response that this entails, implies that their extension is fixed independently of the actual responses of any individual user. All response-dependent concepts are governed by a minimal norm of ‘accuracy’ that serves to isolate a set of responses as favourable for picking out the relevant property. They therefore enjoy a substantial degree of objectivity that distinguishes them, first, from concepts that fail to meet all these criteria (such as idiosyncratic expressions of subjective taste) and, secondly, from concepts that meet these criteria but for which there is some further story to be told (e.g., in terms of natural constitution or essence) about the nature of the relevant property. In Normative Bedrock , Gert develops response-dependent accounts of two normative concepts in particular, namely practical (ir)rationality and (personal) harm. He associates both concepts with a distinct set of primitive responses to the behaviour of oneself or others (a reaction of puzzlement in the case of irrationality, and reactions of aversion in the case of harm). Gert thinks that there is a necessary connection between behaviour we respond to as irrational and behaviour we respond to as harmful. This is a synthetic a priori connection that is knowable by means of armchair reflection on our basic normative dispositions and the features of the world to which they respond. Our knowledge of these connections constitutes our ‘faculty’ of normative intuition.

Constructivism in Practical Philosophy

Constructivism in Practical Philosophy

Skepticism about Naturalizing Normativity: In Defense of Ethical Nonnaturalism

There is perhaps no more widely shared con- viction in contemporary metaethics, even among those who hold otherwise divergent views, than that practical normativity must be capable of being naturalized (i.e., cap- tured fully within a metaphysically naturalist worldview). My aim is to illuminate the central reasons for skepticism about this. While certain naturalizing projects are plausi- ble for very limited purposes, it is unlikely that any can provide everything we might reasonably want from an account of goodness and badness, rightness and wrong- ness, and unqualified reasons for acting—at least if we are unwilling to accept certain deflationary or bullet-biting moves. Some naturalizing views can be shown to fail outright to capture the relevant normative facts or proper- ties, while others have more promise but can also be seen to have certain limitations and costs, failing to capture elements that some of us take to be important to an ade- quate theory of practical normativity. There are, of course, far more naturalizing moves than can be considered here, so the aim is not to establish the truth of nonnaturalism through a process of elimination. But I hope to say enough to bring out the central worries about naturalizing projects and to pose some challenges that apply more widely, with the aim of showing that ethical nonnaturalism remains an attractive and well-motivated option at least for those of us who reject both nihilism and various forms of ethical deflation.

Disagreeing about how to disagree

David Enoch’s excellent recent book, Taking Morality Seriously, provides a subtle, highly innovative, and stimulating set of arguments for ‘‘Robust Realism’’: the view that there are normative truths and facts, that such facts exist over and above any set of naturalistic facts, and that our claims about them ‘‘amount not just to an expression of any practical attitude, but to a representation of these normative truths and facts.’’ In this paper, we focus on the arguments Enoch gives to help along such a view in Chap. 2 of his book. Enoch’s arguments there are sometimes so complex and nuanced that we think the best way to convey his view is to initially present it in a very streamlined and simplified manner. Then we will introduce some of the complications that Enoch notes. After that, we will try to explain why we do not yet find Enoch’s arguments in Chap. 2 fully convincing. So, simplifying significantly, Enoch argues in Chap. 2 that it is typically normatively appropriate, when one is in a factual dispute with someone, to not compromise with that person but rather to stand one’s ground. Suppose I know the way to grandmother’s house better than you do. I am correct about how to get there and you are not, and I am also more justified in my opinion than you are. In such a case it seems that I ought not to (or am permitted not to) opt for a compromise where you decide this case and I decide the next, or where we flip a coin to decide which road we will take. But when we come to disputes concerning mere preferences, where there is no fact of the matter that we are disagreeing about, it is typically normatively

Deliberation, schmeliberation: Enoch’s indispensability argument

When you are going on holiday to the South Pole, you ought to pack your winter woollies. When you are going to see Aunt Agatha on her birthday, you might very sensibly take her some of those nice chocolates she likes. When you are visiting the lions at the safari park, it is a bad idea to get out of the car. Normative facts such as these do not strike me as very puzzling or mysterious or as offering very significant hostages to metaphysical fortune. Nothing, it might seem, could be more homely and straightforward. More extended stretches of practical reasoning appear similarly plain sailing. Tomorrow is Christmas Day and I am driving north to my family in Scotland. Because Scotland is far away I will want to stop and eat something. But because, in the UK, where I live, Christmas Day is a major holiday, nowhere will be open except a few petrol stations, and because the food you can buy in petrol stations is not very nice, it would make sense to prepare something in advance and take it with me. I have bread and there is chicken in the fridge that needs using up— it will go off before I get back. I am not a vegetarian. I like chicken. So I should make myself some chicken sandwiches. This is the sort of thing we call deliberation and of course we do it all the time. David Enoch’s Taking Morality Seriously is an admirably lucid and spirited defence of robust realism about the normative domain, the domain of reasons and values that guide and inform such thinking. The robustness distinguishes his realism from more metaphysically unassuming forms of normative realism. It holds normative truths to be irreducible to natural ones and views them as strongly mindindependent. Of course they might nonetheless be mind-dependent in the sense that

Constructivism in Practical Philosophy * By JAMES LENMAN and YONATAN SHEMMER

What is constructivism in practical philosophy? Street observes in her 2010 article that this question has no uncontroversial answer: �The most prominent characterisations of constructivism in ethics have important threads in common but none would command universal assent, even amongst self-described constructivists.�1 Many of the essays in the present volume can be described as focused on working out exactly what constructivism is, or more precisely whether there is a position in practical philosophy, usefully called constructivist, that is not a first-order view of the sort that Rawls and Scanlon might be thought to advance. Despite this focus, this is not an introductory volume, and would be suitable for those engaging in high-level research on the topic. As Lenman and Shemmer point out in their introduction, we can distinguish between local and global constructivist views. Local views give constructivist accounts only of some part of the normative domain, using materials found in other parts of that domain. Examples of local constructivist views include Rawls�s theory of political justice and Scanlon�s account of morality, or at least that bit of it concerned with what we owe to each other. Global constructivist views, on the other hand, are more ambitious: they seek to give a constructivist account of the normative domain as a whole. Prominent such global views are Korsgaard�s Kantian and Street�s Humean constructivism. Local constructivist views typically cash out the metaphor of construction in terms of a procedure: some domain of normative facts is characterized �

Meta-normative Realism, Evolution, and Our Reasons to Survive

In this article, I articulate and respond to an epistemological challenge to meta-normative realism. The challenge has it that, if realism about the normative is correct, and if evolutionary forces have significantly influenced our normative judgments, then it would be a remarkable coincidence if the content of the normative facts and our normative judgments were aligned. I criticize David Enoch's recent attempt to meet this challenge, but provide an alternative response that is structurally similar. I argue that if realism is correct, then it would be remarkable if the content of our normative judgments and the normative facts were not significantly aligned.

I—Pekka Väyrynen: Grounding and Normative Explanation

This paper concerns non-causal normative explanations such as ‘This act is wrong because/in virtue of__’ (where the blank is often filled out in non-normative terms, such as ‘it causes pain’). The familiar intuition that normative facts aren't brute or ungrounded but anchored in non-normative facts seems to be in tension with the equally familiar idea that no normative fact can be fully explained in purely non-normative terms. I ask whether the tension could be resolved by treating the explanatory relation in normative explanations as the sort of ‘grounding’ relation that receives extensive discussion in recent metaphysics. I argue that this would help only under controversial assumptions about the nature of normative facts, and perhaps not even then. I won't try to resolve the tension, but draw a distinction between two different sorts of normative explanations (one concerning ‘bearers’, the other concerning ‘sources’ of normativity) which helps to identify constraints on a resolution. One distinctive constraint on normative explanations in particular might be that they should be able to play a role in normative justification.

Social science and ‘normative facts’. What's the big deal?

Stephen Turner’s Explaining the Normative is probably a puzzling work for the average empirical social scientist. Turner devotes more than two hundred pages and considerable argumentative efforts to build a compelling case against what he calls ‘normativism’. His main thesis is that what ‘normativist’ philosophers call ‘normative facts’ are not special or transcendental in any meaningful sense, but can be fully grasped by social science standard explanations and even by naturalistic ones. I think most social scientists would agree with this thesis, and would in fact consider it as a trivial truth. However, Turner goes further to suggest that ‘normative talk’ and notions as ‘normative correctness’ are just bogus talk or simply the folk way we use to describe some of our cultural practices, but have no explanatory relevance or rational meaning. I think that far fewer social scientists would buy this second claim. In all fairness, it should be acknowledged that Turner’s book is written having in mind a philosophical audience (or perhaps a ‘social theory’ audience) rather than a socialscientific or sociological one. But since the invitation for commenting on his book comes from a sociology journal, I will try to present what in my opinion would be a very usual social-scientific look on the issues Turner is concerned about. I advance that I fully share the general spirit of Turner’s criticism of ‘normativism’, as well as his sympathy for the present naturalistic and anti-metaphysical trends in social science and philosophy. However, I would like to point to some apparent disagreements with the kind of social science I am engaged with.

Conjuring Ethics from Words

Sonya, on learning that Jasper is in hospital, wonders whether she should bring him flowers. Geoffrey the young architect wonders how he can make a name for himself and hypothesizes that if he wants to do that, he should straighten the Leaning Tower. Millicent the metaethicist wonders whether Sonya and Geoffrey are making judgments about matters of fact and, if so, whether these normative facts are anything over and above facts about the way the world is. She also wonders whether their judgments are the kinds of things that count as beliefs and whether the conditional or instrumental nature of Geoffrey’s makes it fundamentally different from Sonya’s. In the back of her mind she worries about goodness and rightness and how they enter into the analysis of these judgments. Many of Millicent’s colleagues address questions like hers principally by exploring the semantics of sentences like

The influence of descriptive social norms on consumer behavior. A fruit consumption study

Descriptive norms describe the typical or normal thing to do in a certain situation. Research has shown that descriptive norms influence health behavioural intentions, but the effects on actual behaviour are less clear. Moreover, the effects of minority norms (e.g. ‘only few people use sunscreen’) on behaviour are under researched. The current study investigates the influence of descriptive social majority and minority norms on fruit consumption using experimental designs. Students received minority or majority norm information regarding a referent group’s behaviour and reported intended (Study 1, n = 102) or actual (Study 2, n = 119) fruit intake. Strength of identification with the referent group was measured (Study 1) or manipulated (Study 2). Results showed that when identification with the referent group was high, minority norms had a strong negative effect on both intended and actual fruit intake compared to majority norms (difference of 0.60 portions daily). Moreover, compared to a no-norm control condition, minority norm participants ate 0.30 portions of fruit less daily, and majority norm participants 0.30 portions more. These results show that both majority and minority social norms influence intended and actual fruit intake. Moreover, given that minority norms are often communicated to the public, the current studies’ indication that minority norms may lead to ironic and unwanted behavioural effects suggests that these ‘normative facts’ must be communicated carefully.

What we know and what to do

This paper discusses an important puzzle about the semantics of indicative conditionals and deontic necessity modals (should, ought, etc.): the Miner Puzzle (Parfit, ms; Kolodny and MacFarlane, J Philos 107:115–143, 2010). Rejecting modus ponens for the indicative conditional, as others have proposed, seems to solve a version of the puzzle, but is actually orthogonal to the puzzle itself. In fact, I prove that the puzzle arises for a variety of sophisticated analyses of the truth-conditions of indicative conditionals. A comprehensive solution requires rethinking the relationship between relevant information (what we know) and practical rankings of possibilities and actions (what to do). I argue that (i) relevant information determines whether considerations of value may be treated as reasons for actions that realize them and against actions that don’t, (ii) incorporating this normative fact requires a revision of the standard ordering semantics for weak (but not for strong) deontic necessity modals, and (iii) an off-the-shelf semantics for weak deontic necessity modals, due to von Fintel and Iatridou, which distinguishes “basic” and “higher-order” ordering sources, and interprets weak deontic necessity modals relative to both, is well-suited to this task. The prominence of normative considerations in our proposal suggests a more general methodological lesson: formal semantic analysis of natural language modals expressing normative concepts demands that close attention be paid to the nature of the underlying normative phenomena.

The Standard-Relational Theory of ‘Ought’ and the Oughtistic Theory of Reasons

The idea that normative statements implicitly refer to standards has been around for quite some time. It is usually defended by normative antirealists, who tend to be attracted to Humean theories of reasons. But this is an awkward combination: ‘A ought to X’ entails that there are reasons for A to X, and ‘A ought to X all things considered’ entails that the balance of reasons favours X-ing. If the standards implicitly referred to are not those of the agent, then why would these entailments hold? After all, Humeanism says that ‘A has a reason to X’ is true if and only if A has some desire which is furthered by X-ing. In this paper, I develop a standard-relational theory of ‘ought’ and a non-Humean theory of reasons (oughtism). Together, they explain why ‘A ought to X’ entails not only that there are reasons for A to X, but also that the balance of reasons favours X-ing. The latter explanation depends on a theory of weight, in which the weight of a reason depends on the position of a rule (standard) in an order of priorities. The theories are truth-conditional, but do not require objective normative facts for the truth of ‘ought’ judgments and judgments about reasons.

Truth as One and Many, by Michael P. Lynch.

For someone who is inclined towards truth monism and moral realism, reading this book is like journeying through a foreign country: somewhat disconcerting, but nonetheless enjoyable. Michael Lynch’s world is a stoutly naturalistic world, in which representation is conceived in terms of causal or teleological relations. This is a world in which it is hard to fit normative facts. Thus, the reader is told that there are good reasons to think that ‘moral properties, should they exist, would not be the sort of properties with which we enter into causal contact’ (p. 161). But it is also a world in which thought is conceived of as unified, in the sense that propositions of all kinds, whether about middle-sized dry goods, mathematical objects, or morals, are truth-apt and cognitive, so that they can intermingle in reasoning. What we have, then, is the following: no moral facts in any serious sense of that term, but ordinary moral truth nonetheless. This is an interesting, but difficult, position. What it requires is a decidedly original account of truth, which Lynch dubs the functionalist theory of truth, according to which truth is both one and many.

The Nature of Normativity: Précis

This book presents a comprehensive theory about the nature of normative thought that is, the sort of thought that is concerned with what ought to be the case, or what we ought to do or think. This theory implies a kind of metanormative realism, according to which normative truths or facts are genuinely part of reality. At the same time, the theory aims to provide a substantive account of the nature of these normative facts, and of how it is possible for us to know these facts and to refer to them in language or thought. In providing this account, the theory relies on a version of the idea (which has been much discussed in recent work in the philosophy of mind) of "the normativity of the intentional". This is the idea that there is no way to explain the nature of the various sorts of mental states that have intentionality or representational content (such as beliefs, judgments, desires, decisions, and so on) without stating normative facts. It is suggested that this idea captures a kind of Platonism about the normative. (i) The first part of the book is concerned with the semantic issues: how are we to give an account of the meaning of normative statements, and of the nature of the normative judgments that such statements express? To answer these questions adequately, a theory does not need to be reductive it may use normative terms in the metalanguage in which the theory is given. But it should still be in a sense noncircular: it should not help itself to the idea of a term's meaning "ought" , or the idea of a thought's including the concept ought since that is precisely what has to be explained. In the first chapter, it is argued that normative judgments have a very special feature: they have an essential or "internal" connection to motivation and practical reasoning. Any adequate account of the meaning of normative statement and of the nature of normative judgments must somehow explain why this sort of "internalism" is true.

How do new competences appear and how they disappear: Social interaction and cognitive development

The main goal of this work is to examine how different theoretical points of view (constructivist, co-constructivist and dynamical systems theory) explain the mechanism of creating new cognitive competencies within social interactions and, on the other hand, to show that there is some evidence that partly cannot be explained by the conceptual framework of these approaches. All three approaches give complementary explanations from different but reciprocal points of view showing different aspects of social interaction that leads to greater achievement in the subsequent individual cognitive functioning. Constructivist approach focuses on the importance of normative facts that create a logical imbalance and are often produced within a situation of interaction, co-constructivist framework emphasizes the importance of thinking which is embedded in language and socio-cultural exchange, and dynamical systems theory seeks to describe interaction in the concept of bifurcation. These approaches are less capable of explaining the findings that cognitively more competent children who enter the interaction with the less competent but more confident partners achieve lower results than in pretest. Question is asked whether concepts such as normativity and discourse can be helpful in explaining this phenomenon and whether they play some sort of role in mechanisms of cognitive development. .

Normative Appeals to the Natural

Surprisingly, many ethical realists and anti‐realists, naturalists and not, all accept some version of the following normative appeal to the natural (NAN): evaluative and normative facts hold solely in virtue of natural facts, where their naturalness is part of what fits them for the job. This paper argues not that NAN is false but that NAN has no adequate non‐parochial justification (a justification that relies only on premises which can be accepted by more or less everyone who accepts NAN) to back up this consensus. I show that we cannot establish versions of NAN which are interesting in their own right (and not merely as instances of a general naturalistic ontology) by appealing to the nature of natural properties or the kind of in‐virtue‐of relation to which NAN refers, plus other plausible non‐parochial assumptions. On the way, I distinguish different types of ‘in virtue of’ claims. I conclude by arguing that the way in which assessment of meta‐ethical hypotheses is theory‐dependent predicts the failure of non‐parochial justifications of NAN.

‘A Drunken Consent is Still Consent’—Or is it? A Critical Analysis of the Law on a Drunken Consent to Sex following Bree

Does a person who is voluntarily drunk remain capable of giving valid consent to sex? The Court of Appeal in Bree held that ‘a drunken consent is still (valid) consent’, though it further recognises that the capacity to consent may evaporate well before a complainant becomes unconscious. This decision is a move in the right direction, yet this article argues that it has not gone far enough, and that s. 74 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 which governs these scenarios allows—and even requires—a more drastic interpretation: a drunken consent is not consent when the person is very drunk. Based on a distinction between factual and legal consent, the article starts by setting up the legal framework as set out in s. 74, and developed in Bree and H. It then goes on to criticise the current case law and its interpretation of s. 74 for not being restrictive enough, by examining two possible theoretical rationales, mentioned in the judgments. The first, which is based on an analogy with the law relating to intoxicated offenders, is criticised on the grounds of differences between consent and intent. The second, which is based on the general argument that this position recognises the positive aspect of sexual autonomy, is criticised for its failure to distinguish between claims of normative facts and claims of public policy and for giving too much weight to the latter considerations. From the discussion an alternative, more restrictive position, emerges in line with s. 74 of the 2003 Act, according to which a drunken consent is not consent. This position can be adopted by judges, through the provision of better guidance to juries, but failing that a reform of the law might be needed.

Sozialstaatlichkeitin Europe? A Conflict-of-Laws Approach to the Law of the EU and the Proceduralisation of Constitutionalisation

“Sozialstaatlichkeit”is a collection of essays dedicated to the author ofNegative Freiheitsrechte und gesellschaftliche Selbstorganisation? Reflections on the survival of welfarism in the postnational constellations after his analyses of globalisation and Europeanisation? Affirmative references to the Discourse Theory of Law and Habermasian notions of Proceduralisation at all levels of governance against “Proceduralisation and its use in a post-modern legal policy?” “Are you trying to deliver something like an Anti-Ladeur.” No, neither Sisyphus nor Hercules, let alone Friedrich Engels, has inspired this essay. Its argument should rather be observed in the spirit of conflict-of-laws,i.e.of a discipline which accepts as a normative fact that different academic projects may be worthwhile despite of, or even because of, the differences of their premises and of the logics of their development, which may be inspired by complementary perceptions of a commonproblématque.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Moral Realism and Moral Nonnaturalism

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Moral Realism and Moral Nonnaturalism