Some standards, such as moral and prudential standards, provide genuinely or authoritatively normative reasons for action. Other standards, such as the norms of masculinity and the mafia’s code of omerta, provide reasons but do not provide genuinely normative reasons for action. This paper first explains that there is a similar distinction amongst attitudinal standards: some attitudes (belief, desire) have standards that seem to give rise to genuine normativity; others (boredom, envy) do not. This paper gives a value-based account of (...) which attitudinal standards give rise to genuine normativity. It argues that this account has interesting implications before extending it to provide an account of which action-guiding standards are genuinely normative. It argues that this value-based account of which standards are genuinely normative is more plausible than alternatives suggested in the literature and has interesting implications for genuine normativity in law and aesthetics. (shrink)

This paper offers an analysis of the authoritatively normative concept PRACTICAL OUGHT that appeals to the constitutive norms for the activity of non-arbitrary selection. I argue that this analysis permits an attractive and substantive explanation of what the distinctive normative authority of this concept amounts to. I contrast my account with more familiar constitutivist theories, and briefly show how it answers ‘schmagency’-style objections to constitutivist explanations of normativity. Finally, I explain how the account offered here can be used to (...) help realists, error theorist, and fictionalists address central challenges to their views. (shrink)

An important challenge for non-naturalistic moral realism is that it seems hard to reconcile it with the (purported) fact of our reliability in forming correct moral beliefs. Some philosophers (including Cuneo and Shafer-Landau) have argued that we can appeal to conceptual truths about our moral concepts in order to respond to this challenge. Call this “the conceptual strategy”. The conceptual strategy faces a problem: it isn’t clear that the relevant moral concepts are “extension-revealing” in the way that the conceptual strategy (...) needs them to be. A further problem stems from the tradeoff between the “extension-revealing” and the “authority-revealing” aspects of normative concepts. To underscore the import of these issues, I discuss a version of the reliability challenge that concerns authoritative normative facts in ethics (rather than moral facts). The problems I identify for the conceptual strategy carry over to versions of it that are used in response to a range of epistemological arguments in ethics that (like the reliability challenge) are tied to Street’s “Darwinian Dilemma” argument. These problems also bear on the prospects of the conceptual strategy for explaining our (purported) reliability in other domains (e.g., in epistemology, law, and politics). (shrink)

Some rules seem more important than others. The moral rule to keep promises seems more important than the aesthetic rule not to wear brown with black or the pool rule not to scratch on the eight ball. A worrying number of metaethicists are increasingly tempted to explain this difference by appealing to something they call “authoritative normativity” – it’s because moral rules are “authoritatively normatively” that they are especially important. The authors of this chapter argue for three claims (...) concerning “authoritative normativity”: (1) that motivation for it originates in a parochial conception of “normative flavours”; (2) that arguments against alternative ways of explaining e.g., morality’s importance are overblown; and (3) that there are strong reasons against theorizing in terms of “authoritative normativity”. The overarching aim is not to show that “authoritative normativity” is incoherent or entirely unmotivated. Rather, it is to discuss some of “authoritative normativity’s” deeper commitments to correct the impression that is it largely benign or that it is entailed by familiar and popular “metanormative” positions. Authoritative normativity, it seems to us, is a solution in search of a problem. (shrink)

Normative naturalism is primarily a metaphysical doctrine: there are normative facts and properties, and these fall into the class of natural facts and properties. Many objections to naturalism rely on additional assumptions about language or thought, but often without adequate consideration of just how normative properties would have to figure in our thought and talk if naturalism were true. In the first part of the paper, I explain why naturalists needn’t think that normative properties can be represented or ascribed in (...) wholly non-normative terms. If so, certain prominent objections to normative naturalism fail. In the second part, I consider the objection that normative properties are “just too different” from (other) natural properties to themselves be natural properties. I argue that naturalists have no distinctive trouble making sense of thought and talk involving forms of “genuine” or “authoritative” normativity which can drive a non-question-begging form of the objection. (shrink)

In Choosing Normative Concepts, Eklund considers a “variance thesis” about our most fundamental (and seemingly most “authoritative”) normative concepts. This thesis raises the threat of an alarming symmetry between different sets of normative concepts. If this symmetry holds, it would be incompatible with “ardent realism” about normativity. Eklund argues that the ardent realist should appeal to the idea of “referential normativity” in response to this challenge. I argue that, even if Eklund is right in his core arguments (...) on this front, many other important challenges for ardent realism remain that also stem from the issues about possible variance in normative concepts that he considers. Following this, I introduce further issues about conceptual variance. These are issues that arise within the context of the framework that Eklund proposes the ardent realist use to confront the variance theses he considers. In particular, the issues concern what normative role as such is, as well as, relatedly, which roles associated with a concept (or predicate) get to count as part of its normative role. The upshot is that issues about conceptual variance in normative domains might be even more challenging for the ardent realist to deal with than Eklund argues. (shrink)

This is a review of Eklund's book. It discusses his suggestion that "ardent realists" use the practical profiles of normative concepts to A) explain what it is for a concept to be normative, B) fix reference, and C) provide an extensional theory of normative properties. I argue that those sympathetic to ardent realism will be happier to focus on the way in which normativity presents itself to cognition, particularly that presentation of inherent, authoritative guidance, and whether that 1) (...) explains what it is for a concept to be normative, 2) fixes reference, 3) aptly characterizes the nature of normativity in the world, and perhaps 4) explains why normative thoughts have the Eklund-style normative roles—the practical profiles of things like motivation, preference, and intention—that they have. (shrink)

What makes a norm a genuinely authoritative guide to action? For many theorists, the answer takes a foundationalist form, analogous to foundationalism in epistemology. They say that there is at least one norm that is justified in itself. On most versions, the norm is said to be incorrigibly authoritative. All other norms are justified in virtue of their connection with it. This essay argues that all such foundationalist theories of normative authority fail because they cannot give an account (...) of the privileged status of an allegedly foundational norm. (shrink)

This paper discusses varieties of normative phenomena, ranging from morality, to epistemic justification, to the rules of chess. It canvases a number of distinctions among these different normative phenomena. The most significant distinction is between formal and authoritative normativity. The prior is the normativity exhibited by any standard one can meet or fail to meet. The latter is the sort of normativity associated with phenomena like the "all-things-considered" ought. The paper ends with a brief discussion of (...) reasons for skepticism about authoritative normativity. (shrink)

Constitutivists seek to locate the metaphysical foundations of ethics in nonnormative facts about what is constitutive of agency. For most constitutivists, this involves grounding authoritative norms in the teleological structure of agency. Despite a recent surge in interest, the philosophical move at the heart of this sort of constitutivism remains underdeveloped. Some constitutivists—Foot, Thomson, and Korsgaard (at least in her recent *Self-Constitution*)—adopt a broadly Aristotelian approach. They claim that the functional nature of agency grounds normative judgments about agents in (...) much the same way that the functional natures of artifacts and bodily organs ground normative judgments about those kinds of things. I argue that the neo-Aristotelian conclusions about goodness which follow so straightforwardly from teleological premises are not genuinely normative. Functions are not by their very nature normatively significant. Other constitutivists—notably J. David Velleman and Paul Katsafanas—eschew Aristotelian talk of functions in favor of an approach based on the idea that agency has a constitutive aim. Velleman and Katsafanas both claim that aims are normatively significant. I argue that the fact that agency has a constitutive aim is merely a fact about the motives that produce and regulate actions. And so we are still left with a gap between the teleological and the normative. I conclude by suggesting that constitutivists have failed to find a way to bridge this gap not because none exists, but rather because they have been looking in the wrong place. The constitutivist project can be salvaged, but only if it is supplemented with a reductive metanormative account of reasons for action, an account that links reasons to sound or successful practical reasoning. (shrink)

An important part of the legal domain has to do with rule-governed conduct, and is expressed by the use of notions such as norm, obligation, duty, and right. These require us to acknowledge the normative dimension of law. Normativity is, accordingly, to be regarded as a central feature of law lying at the heart of any comprehensive legal-theoretical project. The essays collected in this book are meant to further our understanding of the normativity of law. More specifically, the (...) book stages a thorough discussion of legal normativity as approached from three strands of legal thought that are particularly influential and which play a key role in shaping debates on the normative dimension of law: the theory of planning agency, legal conventionalism and the constitutivist approach. While the essays presented here do not aspire to give an exhaustive picture of these debates--an aspiration that would be, by its very nature, unrealistic--they do provide the reader with some authoritative statements of some widely discussed families of views of legal normativity. In pursuing this objective, these essays also encourage a dialogue between different traditions of study of legal normativity, stimulating those who would not otherwise look outside their tradition of thought to engage with new ideas and, ultimately, to arrive at a more comprehensive account of the normativity of law.--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

This chapter discusses two different issues about the relationship between legal positivism and robust normativity (understood as the most authoritative kind of normativity to which we appeal). First, the chapter argues that, in many contexts when discussing “legal positivism” and “legal antipositivism”, the discussion should be shifted from whether legal facts are ultimately partly grounded in moral facts to whether they are ultimately partly grounded in robustly normative facts. Second, the chapter explores an important difference within the (...) kinds of arguments that legal philosophers give for the (purported) truth of legal positivism. The difference concerns whether (purportedly) robustly normative facts are appealed to as premises in those arguments or not. (A closely connected issue is whether (purportedly) normative facts that bear one or more important connections to robustly normative facts are appealed to in premises to those arguments.) The chapter argues that thinking about this dividing line helps people better situate the positivist/antipositivist dispute, better understand the space of views in legal philosophy, better evaluate those views, and avoid having merely verbal disputes. (shrink)

Authoritative school climate is a relevant and novel construct that improves the academic performance and social-emotional development of students. This study aimed to evaluate the psychometric properties of reliability and validity of the Authoritative School Climate Survey (ASCS) in a sample of Chilean adolescents. A cross-sectional study was carried out, in which 808 students from 12 schools in Chile participated (55.1% men and 44.9% women), with a mean age of 15.94 (SD= 1.32). The results obtained through exploratory and (...) confirmatory factor analyzes ratified the hypothesized structure of two correlated factors. As expected, evidence of criterion validity showed significant relationships between the measures of authoritative school climate and attitude toward institutional authority. This study provides evidence regarding the psychometric quality of the scale to assess authoritative school climate, allowing its use in the Chilean context. (shrink)

Constitutivist accounts in metaethics explain the normative standards in a domain by appealing to the constitutive features of its members. The success of these accounts turns on whether they can explain the connection between normative standards and the nature of individuals they authoritatively govern. Many such explanations presuppose that any member of a norm-governed kind must minimally satisfy the norms governing its kind. I call this the Threshold Commitment, and argue that constitutivists should reject it. First, it requires constitutivists to (...) restrict the scope of their explanatory ambitions, because it is not plausibly true of social kinds. Second, despite the frequent reliance on physical artifacts in constitutivists’ illustrations of the Threshold Commitment, it counter-intuitively entails that physical artifacts can cease to exist without being physically destroyed. Third, it misconstrues the normative force of authoritative norms on very defective kind-members because it locates this force not in the norm, but in the threat of non-existence. Fortunately, constitutivism can be decoupled from the Threshold Commitment, and I close by sketching a promising alternative account. (shrink)

It is commonly said that some standards, such as morality, are ‘normatively authoritative’ in a way that other standards, such as etiquette, are not; standards like etiquette are said to be ‘not really normative’. Skeptics deny the very possibility of normative authority, and take claims like ‘etiquette is not really normative’ to be either empty or confused. I offer a different route to defeat skeptics about authority: instead of focusing on what makes standards like morality special, we should focus (...) on what makes standards like etiquette ‘not really normative’. I defend a fictionalist theory on which etiquette is ‘not really normative’ in roughly the same way that Sherlock is ‘not really a detective’, and show that fictionalism about some normative standards helps us explain the possibility of normative authority. (shrink)

What makes an ``ought'''' claim authoritative? What makes aparticular norm genuinely reason-giving for an agent? This paper arguesthat normative authority can best be accounted for in terms of thejustification of norms. The main obstacle to such a theory, however, isa regress problem. The worry is that every attempt to offer ajustification for an ``ought'''' claim must appeal to another ``ought''''claim, ad infinitum. The paper argues that vicious regress canbe avoided in practical reasoning in the same way coherentists avoid theproblem (...) in epistemology. Norms are justified by their coherence withother norms. (shrink)

In the continuing debate about the role of the Clinical Ethics Consultant in performing clinical ethics consultations, it is often assumed that consultants should operate within ethical and legal standards. Recent scholarship has focused primarily on clarifying the consultant's role with respect to the ethical standards that serve as parameters of consulting. In the following, however, I wish to address the question of how the ethics consultant should weigh legal standards and, more broadly, how consultants might weigh authoritative directives, (...) whether legal, institutional, or professional, against other normative considerations. I argue that consultants should reject the view that authoritative directives carry exclusionary reason for actions and, further, ethicists should interpret directives as lacking any moral weight qua authoritative directive. I then identify both implications and limitations of this view with respect to the evolving role of the ethics consultant in an institutional setting, and in doing so propose the kinds of considerations the ethicist should weigh when presented with an authoritative directive. (shrink)

This paper examines the problem of normativity in contemporary legal theory, paying particular attention to the relationship between the conception of the problem and related explanations of behaviour. The first part of the paper shows how the problem of normativity, conceived of as a matter of determining how legal norms function as reasons for action, is linked to an explanation of behaviour that is posited or assumed to be capable of being guided by reasons. More importantly for the (...) purposes of the paper, the first part also shows the problem of normativity plays a certain function thanks to which a theorist can, e.g., evaluate lawmaking and adjudication practices ; scrutinise the reasonabless of norms ; critically examine the circumstances under which law is authoritative ; or make distinctions between certain kinds of phenomena that influence conduct. The second part of the paper offers the sketch of an alternative relationship between a conception of the problem of normativity and an explanation of behaviour. The general aim of the paper is to endorse an engagement with the works of others that pays attention to the relationship between problems and explanations, and to the implications of any one way of drawing that relationship for images and practices of theorising. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Naturalism, Science, and Scientism The Naturalist Vision The Appeal of a Nonreligious Way of Life Naturalist Values Naturalism and Moral Order The Place of Authoritative Norms Is Naturalism a Faith Position? Notes.

In Thinking like a Mall Steven Vogel argues that there is no authoritative nature independent of human standards to which one can appeal to correct damaging environmental practices. Human practices are the only basis for interpreting the environment and our ecologically destructive practices have made our environment into the degraded thing that it is. Revising these flawed practices requires becoming alienated from them; only then can we be responsible for them. Alienation is overcome by a democratic community who chooses (...) the practices that correct deficient ones and that we can recognise as expressions of ourselves and be at home in. This paper argues that there is a key step missing in this process, which is how we become alienated from our practices. It is only by appreciating the broader social and institutional horizon, ‘Ethical Life’, by which norms receive their authority and lose it, that we can understand alienation and the normative change necessary to correct it. (shrink)

This paper explores the normative implications of Aristotle's concept of politikē and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary debates on legitimate political authority. Section one of the paper provides historical and interpretative background on Aristotle's conception of politikē. The second section examines the central normative role that the common good plays in Aristotle's account of politikē and claims that its capacity to play this role points in the direction of a less exclusionary politics than is suggested by Book 1 of the (...) Politics. Finally, in the third section, with reference to work by Andres Rosler and David Estlund, I consider what Aristotle's account can tell us about contemporary debates on the relationship between political authority, legitimacy and expertise. (shrink)

It is a platitude that belief is subject to a standard of correctness: a belief is correct if and only if it is true. But not all standards of correctness are authoritative or binding. Some standards of correctness may be arbitrary, unjustified or outrightly wrong. Given this, one challenge to proponents of the truth norm of belief, is to answer what Korsgaard (1996) calls ‘the normative question’. Is the truth norm of belief authoritative or binding regarding what one (...) ought to or may believe? If so, what grounds its authority? The aim of this paper is to offer a novel answer to the grounding challenge on a reason-based normative framework. I develop and defend a practice-based account of the truth norm, according to which, the authority of the truth norm of belief is grounded in what I call the T-practice, a justified social practice that functions to facilitate knowledge production, maintenance, and social cooperation. (shrink)

Although philosophers may first find it odd to speak of norms in the context of perception, the argument for normativity finds support in the writings of some of the spearheads of the phenomenological tradition, amongst them Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. As Maren Wehrle argues however, a phenomenological analysis of perception’s normative claim requires that we redefine our traditional conception of norms as authoritative standards or prescriptive moral guidelines. To this end, as she points out, the origin of (...) the concept of norm in architecture can be illuminating because it refers to a measure or guideline which emerges out of “practical motivations” and serves to “facilitate cooperative and intersubjective communication.” In her view, prior to any theoretical or moral engagement with the world, certain sets of norms already play a role at an embodied, pre-reflexive level and account for our ability to orientate ourselves in the intersubjective lifeworld. My interest in the concept of norms stems from such a comprehension, and attempts to unfold and clarify some of its implications for perception in general. My goal in this paper is thus to address one of the key interpretations of perceptual norms in Merleau-Pontian scholarship and to suggest a new reading of their role in the Phenomenology of Perception (1945), through the lense of interest and temporality. (shrink)

What features does a norm have to have such that we really ought to follow it? This paper argues that norms are authoritative when they are justified in a particular sense. However, this brand of justification is not any of those with which we are currently familiar. The authority of norms is not a matter of moral, epistemic or prudential justification. It depends instead on what I call "justification simpliciter." The concept of justification simpliciter is defined and defended in (...) this paper. (shrink)

© 2013 The Editors of The Philosophical QuarterlyThe aim of this book, set out in the first chapter, is to offer an account of rational action that can accommodate both a model of rationality that is performance‐based and one that is agent‐based. On the former model, rationality is measured in terms of successful performance and amounts to fitness of the performance to the task at hand, so the performance is rational if it does the job it was supposed to do; (...) on the latter, it is a feature of the deliberative processes that determine the choice of the action by the agent, so the action is rational if it is ‘the outcome of considered deliberation’. The proposed reconciliation is effected through the notion of expert opinion, which is authoritative because it is expert, and is accepted because it is authoritative. Fisch and Benbaji seek to show that... (shrink)

Philosophers have long theorized about what makes people's lives go well, and why, and the extent to which morality and self-interest can be reconciled. However, we have spent little time on meta-prudential questions, questions about prudential discourse—thought and talk about what is good and bad for us; what contributes to well-being; and what we have prudential reason, or prudentially ought, to do. This situation is surprising given that prudence is, prima facie, a normative form of discourse and cries out for (...) further investigation of what it is like and whether it has problematic commitments. It also marks a stark contrast from moral discourse, about which there has been extensive theorizing, in meta-ethics. -/- Dear Prudence: The Nature and Normativity of Prudential Discourse has three broad aims. Firstly, Guy Fletcher explores the nature of prudential discourse. Secondly, he argues that prudential discourse is normative and authoritative, like moral discourse. Thirdly, Fletcher aims to show that prudential discourse is worthy of further, explicit, attention both due to its intrinsic interest but also for the light it sheds on the meta-normative more broadly. (shrink)

Normativism is the view that logic provides rules for correct reasoning. Some influential critics of normativism, such as Gilbert Harman, claim that logical rules provide reasoners with bad or misleading standards. Others, such as Gillian Russell, claim that logic is a descriptive subject and thus cannot, given Hume’s law, provide rules for reasoning. We think these critics are mistaken. Our aim in this paper is to defend normativism by sketching an alternative way of thinking about the normative force of logical (...) rules. On our view, logical rules are best characterized, in a broadly Rossian manner, as intellectual prima facie duties; i.e., they provide standards for evaluating reasoning and reasoners that are universal and authoritative, but not absolute. This position accommodates the inherent normativity of logic, contra Russell, while circumventing the challenges to normativism raised by Harman. (shrink)

In the process of natural language functioning, in the speech communication, new regulations and requirements are constantly emerging that become normative. In the paper, in focus are (1) the interaction of meaning and normativity, and 2) the process of norm construal through socio-linguistic practice, namely – through the concept of deference, the phenomenon of borrowing concepts, knowledge, information from other people, linguistic communities and sources of information is considered. With the help of deference, the other side of the meaningful (...) relationship is indicated and described when we rely on other people's thoughts, knowledge that we believe to be true and authoritative. This can happen both consciously (deliberately), and unconsciously (by default). The bearers of the norm we rely on can be individuals, groups and large linguistic communities. The deferential mechanism described in the paper captures the fact that the communication participants can effectively use and reason with the help of concepts, with little or no understanding of their true meaning. The tendency towards normativisation, unification of language and speech and corrections of all that does not agree with the common usage of words, meanings, norms in society is disclosed in the paper. A distinction is also parsed between how norms work in closed language communities and research expert groups capable of "structural cooperation" and functional definition of norms. Lastly, the author emphasizes that deference substantially complements the language in which we describe guidance, in relation to the real and symbolic worlds, where our view goes, what we remember and what we design; it is our habitual, conscious or unconscious, but not always correct, use of words, which is an important part of living communication between the social and linguistic communities. This is the case where, in some sense, a defect, a violation of norms, or a hindrance of speech communication becomes (may be) a creative means of distinguishing between what is and is not an extension of the term. (shrink)

According to Ronald Dworkin's mature views on jurisprudence, legal normativity depends on judges’ views about political morality. Plato's own mature views on this subject seem to take the contrary position as he claims that the law is expected to be authoritative in order to preserve a given state of affairs. Therefore, in Plato's view judges are not expected to interpret the law ubiquitously according to their own standards of political morality. In what follows, the discussion starts off by (...) offering a brief account of Dworkin's interpretivism and some of its shortcomings. We shall then move on to Plato's account of legal normativity, especially his views on the authority of law, law as preservation, and finally the politics of law in the light of the debate between conservatism and progressivism. (shrink)

This book offers a comprehensive, authoritative, and accessible introduction to journalistic transparency. Pulling from historical and theoretical perspectives, Transparency in Journalism explains the concept of transparency and its place in journalistic practice, offering a critical assessment of what transparency can and cannot offer to journalism. The author also reviews the key theoretical claims underlying transparency and how they have been researched in different parts of the world, ultimately proposing a communication model that can be used to study the concept (...) of transparency across journalism research. Other topics discussed include the use of algorithmic forms of transparency, the limitations of the transparency myth, and suggestions for future avenues for research. Transparency and Journalism is an important resource for students and scholars in the field of journalism and media studies, as well as for journalists and researchers interested in delving into an ever-relevant topic for the field. (shrink)

Jurisprudence For a Free Society is a remarkable contribution to legal theory. In its comprehensiveness & systematic elaboration, it stands among the major theories. It is also the most important jurisprudential statement to emerge in the post-war period. The pioneering work of Lasswell & McDougal on law & policy is already legendary. Most of the work produced by these scholars together & in collaboration with their students represent applications of their basic theory to a wide assortment of international & national (...) legal & policy problems. Now, for the first time, the authoritative statement of their legal philosophy appears as a single volume. In Part I the authors develop their fundamental criteria for a theory about law, including the requirements of clarifying observational standpoint, focus of inquiry & the pertinent intellectual tasks incumbent on the scholar & decisionmaker for determining & achieving common interests. Trends in theories about law, including Natural Law, the Historical School, Positivism, the Sociological Study of Law, American Legal Realism & other contemporary theories, are explored for what they might contribute to the achievement to the authors' conception of an adequate jurisprudence. In Part II, the social process as a whole & the particular value-institutional processes that comprise it are described & analyzed. Because people establish, maintain & change institutions, the dynamics of personality & personality's relation to law is delineated. Part III explores the intellectual tasks of policy thinking, from clarification of values, through description of trend, the scientific examination of conditions, projection of future developments & the invention of alternatives. Part IV examines the structure of decision in a free society, a society in which the achievement of human dignity is confirmed in both word & deed. Six appendices bring together monographs by the authors over a period of forty years which deal, in more detail, with particular matters treated in the body of the book. (shrink)

Despite its title, this is an extremely useful book: the first four of its five chapters expound the standard range of theories of practical reasoning more clearly and accurately than one might have thought possible. A measure of Schaubroeck’s authoritative handling of her material is her ability to navigate the peaks, troughs and crevasses of the myriad variations of ‘internalism’ and ‘externalism’ without inducing either vertigo or fury. Thus she patiently guides the reader through the stupefying obstacles along the (...) route of post-Bernard Williams usages of the terminology as well, it seems to me, as anyone could possibly do. Her specific focus, furthermore, on what she terms—albeit in my view somewhat misleadingly—Humean , Kantian and Platonic variations on a theme enables the reader to see very clearly just what is at stake in the tangled literature on practical reasoning and why it matters. As a guide for the perplexed, then, or for t .. (shrink)

One of the major challenges facing agricultural and food systems today is the loss of agrobiodiversity. Considering the current impasse of preventing the worldwide loss of crop diversity, this paper highlights the possibility for a radical reorientation of current legal seed frameworks that could provide more space for alternative seed systems to evolve which centre on norms that support on-farm agrobiodiversity. Understanding the underlying norms that shape seed commons are important, since norms both delimit and contribute to what ultimately will (...) constitute the seeds and who will ultimately have access to the seeds and thus to the extent to which agrobiodiversity is upheld and supported. This paper applies a commoning approach to explore the underpinning norms of a Swedish seed commons initiative and discusses the potential for furthering agrobiodiversity in the context of wider legal and authoritative discourses on seed enclosure. The paper shows how the seed commoning system is shaped and protected by a particular set of farming norms, which allows for sharing seeds among those who adhere to the norms but excludes those who will not. The paper further illustrates how farmers have been able to navigate fragile legal and economic pathways to collectively organize around landrace seeds, which function as an epistemic farming community, that maintain landraces from the past and shape new landraces for the present, adapted to diverse agro-ecological environments for low-input agriculture. The paper reveals how the ascribed norms to the seed commons in combination with the current seed laws set a certain limit to the extent to which agrobiodiversity is upheld and supported and discusses why prescriptions of “getting institutions right” for seed governance are difficult at best, when considering the shifting socio-nature of seeds. To further increase agrobiodiversity, the paper suggests future seed laws are redirected to the sustenance of a proliferation of protected seed commoning systems that can supply locally adapted plant material for diverse groups of farmers and farming systems. (shrink)

This paper examines the idea that straight talk can actually pose certain dangers for democracy by asking two interrelated questions. First, does our belief in the importance of sincerity necessarily improve political deliberation? Second, does our belief cause us to under-appreciate other important communicative resources? We will see that much hinges on our answers to these questions because they deal directly with whose voices are to be considered legitimate and authoritative in our public sphere. This paper begins from a (...) deliberative democratic standpoint: democracy is a logocentric enterprise—that is, language is at the center of democratic political projects. So it is critical that we pay attention to how we evaluate political words. Otherwise, not only can we not really understand what is going on in the public sphere, but we are also more likely to make poor judgments about what sort of speech and speakers make our democracy more robust. -/- To explore these questions, this paper examines the discourse ethics that underwrite much of deliberative democratic theory (section I). It then goes on to discuss some of the dangers that the particular ethic of sincerity poses for democratic communication. The paper argues that the emphasis on sincerity: -/- 1) too easily collapses the relation between claims to truthfulness and truth claims and contributes to an undemocratic epistemology; 2) oversimplifies human psychology, ignoring the possibility of multiple and complexly related intentions; 3) denigrates “rhetorical” forms of speech; and 4) privileges a seemingly non-rhetorical mode of communication: hyper-sincerity. (shrink)

It is plausible that there are epistemic reasons bearing on a distinctively epistemic standard of correctness for belief. It is also plausible that there are a range of practical reasons bearing on what to believe. These theses are often thought to be in tension with each other. Most significantly for our purposes, it is obscure how epistemic reasons and practical reasons might interact in the explanation of what one ought to believe. We draw an analogy with a similar distinction between (...) types of reasons for actions in the context of activities. The analogy motivates a two-level account of the structure of normativity that explains the interaction of correctness-based and other reasons. This account relies upon a distinction between normative reasons and authoritatively normative reasons. Only the latter play the reasons role in explaining what state one ought to be in. All and only practical reasons are authoritative reasons. Hence, in one important sense, all reasons for belief are practical reasons. But this account also preserves the autonomy and importance of epistemic reasons. Given the importance of having true beliefs about the world, our epistemic standard typically plays a key role in many cases in explaining what we ought to believe. In addition to reconciling (versions of) evidentialism and pragmatism, this two-level account has implications for a range of important debates in normative theory, including the interaction of right and wrong reasons for actions and other attitudes, the significance of reasons in understanding normativity and authoritative normativity, the distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘substantive’ normativity, and whether there is a unified source of authoritative normativity. (shrink)

Academic education largely concerns knowledge and skills. Where there is attention to ethics, this tends to focus on study-related misconduct such as plagiarising assignments and, more recently, methodological misconduct. The current paper argues that it is also essential to teach students about social misconduct in science, with a focus on questionable collaboration practices. First, this would increase future early career researchers’ ability to succeed and avoid academic snares. Enhancing this ability would appear to be an ethical responsibility going hand-in-hand with (...) our attempts at endowing students with skills that we know could be exploited. Second, such teaching would establish authoritative norms about collaborative practices that are and are not acceptable. This would help to adjust scientific attitudes in next generations of graduates, to the benefit of both themselves and science. Teaching on science-specific social misconduct would also naturally tie in with addressing general forms of antisocial conduct which also occur in academia, such as bullying or sexual harassment. The paper provides a framework for defining and recognizing questionable collaboration practices, and for how to provide students with the attitudes, concepts and skills necessary to protect themselves as they enter the reality of the academic arena. (shrink)

Until quite recently, the virtually unchallenged position of those scientists who studied the way people acquire their morality was cultural and ethical relativism. The central tenet of that position is this: although all societies have a morality, that is, a set of general authoritative norms and standards to which its members are expected if not compelled to conform, these norms and standards not only vary enormously from one society to another, but there is no objective way of ranking them. (...) In particular, there is no single ideal objective moral order, to which these various social moralities can be seen as less or more successful approximations, and which enables us to appraise them, on the basis of the degree of that approximation, as less or more advanced, sound, or valid. The whole of morality is thus construed as “agent-morality”: a measure of a person’s concern to conform his behavior to “objective” norms and standards; on the relativist view those dominant in the group to which he belongs. On this view, the role of moral education would be confined to assisting and making more efficient the informal processes by which the current moral norms and standards of the group become internalized in its members. Socialization is conceived as a purely one-way process: that of moulding the individual so that he will conform to the group mores. (shrink)

The public reason project recommends that basic public matters should be decided by public reasons alone, so that citizens’ plural non-public or private reasons will not endanger the unity of the society’s public reason, which is responsible for the stability of the basic structure of society. PRP employs the strategy of insulation and accords priority to public reasons over private reasons. This much is normative or prescriptive, but for PRP to be a tenable and genuinely authoritative normative scheme, it (...) should also incorporate reliable means to win citizens’ firm allegiance to its mandates, which forms the 3rd major strategy of PRP. While much effort has been devoted to investigating the first two strategies of PRP, the third is relatively neglected. But this should not be the case, as the third strategy is also a constitutive part of PRP and it has profound implications for the other two strategies. This dissertation thus sets out to make up on this, by taking John Rawls’s particular approach to PRP as an example, which exhibits the most complete picture of PRP. I ask, in a nutshell, how are PRP’s prospects? More specifically, I scrutinize the attainability of the ideal of public reason, in which citizens heartily uphold or even endorse the spirit of public reason, just as depicted in Rawls’s ideal of well-ordered pluralistic society. To reliably measure the prospects/feasibility of a certain ideal, some rigorous metric is indispensable. For this we can, very intuitively, measure the all-purpose resources for bringing about the ideal: based on comparison between the amount of resources available and the amount required/expected by the ideal, we can decide if the ideal is attainable or not. Few philosophers have thought about the prospects of their moral/social/political ideals along this line. Fortunately, Rawls provides a well-defined interface between ideal and reality in his approach to PRP, so we can still carry out the comparison. This interface is the conception of a well-ordered society, which consists primarily of the conception of the person/citizen as rational and reasonable and the conception of the society as the framework of social cooperation. As these conceptions contain elements informed both by the ideal and by reality, their inner coherence provides crucial clue for deciding the prospects of the ideal as a whole. The major part of this dissertation is devoted to the investigation of these two conceptions, respectively in the domestic and the global settings. The focus is on whether reality can meet the requirements laid down by the ideal of public reason. Specifically, with regard to the conception of the person/citizen, I examine whether a citizen can develop firm allegiance to public reason either by living a well-ordered society or by deliberating on the congruence between her private reasons and the society’s public reason. With regard to the conception of the society, I examine whether the ethos of reciprocity can be elicited and sustained by citizens’ viewing themselves as civic friends with each other and by recognizing the great value of actively participating in social/public life with others. After extending PRP into the global setting a similar investigation is carried out, focusing on the conception of the people and that of the Society of Peoples. With regard to the conception of the people, I examine whether a liberal people can develop and maintain a moral disposition that effectively uphold GPR and whether a non-liberal but decent people can be attracted to the liberal way. With regard to the conception of the Society of Peoples, I examine whether the ethos of reciprocity can be elicited and sustained by peoples’ mutual affinity and, relatedly, whether the thesis of democratic peace can be sustained within the global circumstances of justice. On all these fronts, the prospects of the ideal are severely undermined by the weakness in our moral capacity as well as by the deep connection between public reason and private reasons. As a result, the prospects of public reason are much less secure than commonly assumed. (shrink)

Metaethical constitutivists seek to ground normativity in facts about what is constitutive of agency. One strand of constitutivism locates the foundations of normativity in constitutive aims, which are standardly conceived of in teleological terms. I present three challenges that show that the teleological conception of constitutive aims is inadequate for the constitutivist project. I then sketch an alternative conception of constitutive aims in the form of a commitment-based conception. On the commitment-based conception, actions and attitudes constitutively represent their (...) objects as having certain properties, and their constitutive aims are fixed by the accuracy-conditions of these representations. Because such representations constitutively involve a commitment on the part of the agent to the object’s having the relevant property, they generate authoritative norms for the agent. I conclude that, unlike the teleological conception, the commitment-based conception promises to yield a unified constitutivism that delivers authoritative normative standards for both actions and attitudes. (shrink)

Many legal positivists have argued that legal antipositivists, due to the central explanatory role they grant authoritatively normative facts, end up saddled with deep problems in their proposed epistemology about how we learn about the law, problems which positivists (and especially "exclusive" legal positivists) can avoid. In this chapter, I put forward a version of this kind of argument. I argue that there is an explanatory challenge tied to the epistemology of law that positivist theories are, in general, better equipped (...) to deal with than antipositivist theories. This issue concerns explaining how people (including not only legal officials, such as judges, but also legal anthropologists, legal historians, and ordinary citizens etc.) are reliable in forming the correct judgments about legal content that they do in fact form. Reflection on this issue about reliability in our legal judgments lends support to positivism. It also, I argue, suggests reasons to favor exclusive legal positivism over inclusive legal positivism. (shrink)

This essay tries to develop a thoroughly critical method of evaluating religious beliefs presented to us in classic texts, illustrating this method by critical interpretation of the Dao of the Daodejing and the God of the Gospel of Mark. -/- The essay treats religious beliefs "theologically," that is, as views about what finally matters in life. In its emphasis on critical reason, it departs from the dogmatism usually associated with theology. It is also historicist and pluralist, departing from the usual (...) association of theology with a focus on absolute truths transcending all culture. -/- In the first part, I trace modern difficulties in subjecting religious faith to rational critique, to the cognitive "imperialism" of traditional religious thought -- the tendency of believers to allow their religious beliefs to govern knowledge in many other areas we now recognize as non-religious, due to the modern development of physical and cultural sciences. This tendency has misled modern thinkers into regarding religious claims about literal facts and universal truths as the epistemological basis of religious faith, and therefore the claims that should be the focus of rational critique. I offer instead a pragmatist view, which focuses on the pragmatic implications believers draw from their beliefs, and tries to correlate these implications with contextually conditioned perceptions believers might plausibly have had that might support these implications. -/- The second part of the essay proposes a very revisionist version of Plato’s "Socratic" reasoning, as one way of subjecting theological beliefs to rational critique. This model of Socratic reasoning is broadly empiricist, regarding direct perceptions of what is admirable, illustrated in unproblematic concrete narratives, as the epistemological basis for moral knowledge. Platonic "Ideas" are the result of extracting the essence of what is admirable from these concrete perceptions, and gradually refining them through sustained questioning. This account differs fundamentally from "Platonism" as it is traditionally conceived, especially in that it allows for the existence of a very great many ways of leading a great human life, exemplified today in the many different cultures we have gained an appreciative awareness of. The multiplicity of these different ways prevents any one small set of concepts from being regarded as a singularly and exclusively authoritative norm for judging all people everywhere. At the same time, this approach to moral reasoning avoids nihilist relativism by providing a procedural way of distinguishing rationally between the essence of what is admirable, and mere concrete appearances that often accompany what is admirable, but which can exist separately and so mislead people into a focus on things that do not finally matter. -/- The final part of the article applies this approach to a critical interpretation of the Dao of the Daodejing and the God of the Gospel of Mark. In the case of Dao, for example, we must attend to the way that aphorisms in the Daodejing evoke life experiences in which we ourselves can perceive specific contrasts between what is admirable and what is not. Dao in the Daodejing should then be interpreted, following suggestions given in the Daodejing itself, as a summary reference to this kind of admirability in its most pure form, conceived of in contrast to accompanying appearances. Similarly, in the case of the Gospel of Mark, we must attend to the way that episodes in Mark’s Jesus-story evoke life experiences in which we can perceive specific contrasts between what is admirable and what is not. Mark’s God is a focus for personal commitment to this kind of admirability in its most pure form, conceived of in contrast to accompanying appearances. The historicist character of this critical method is evident in the fact that in the Daodejing the particular contrasts defining what is admirable differ so radically from the particular contrasts defining what devotion to God means in the Gospel of Mark. (shrink)

The practical, normative dimension of planning is a plausible source of the ‘family resemblances’ noted by a number of legal theorists between Scott Shapiro’s Planning Theory and natural law jurisprudence. Foremost among these resemblances is Shapiro’s contention that the law, necessarily, has a moral aim. The moral aim thesis is at first glance surprising given Shapiro’s intention to defend exclusive legal positivism and unequivocal rejection of what he takes to be the core commitments of natural law theory. Shapiro’s claim, however, (...) is that although the law necessarily has a moral aim, this does not entail that it is successful in satisfying that aim. In order to assess this thesis, it is helpful to compare the Planning Theory with contemporary natural law approaches. Bringing Shapiro’s Planning Theory into dialogue with contemporary natural law theories can demonstrate some of the Planning Theory’s weaknesses as an alternative explanation of the ultimate grounds of the authoritativeness of legal norms. Some of these weaknesses, moreover, are instructive beyond the specific contours of the Planning Theory insofar as they generalise to other legal positivist approaches. In section one I consider Shapiro’s treatment of the so-called ‘Possibility Puzzle’ regarding the grounding relation between authoritative norms and legal authority. Shapiro’s denial of the capacity of earlier jurisprudential theories to resolve this puzzle overlooks what is – I suggest – a plausible solution developed by John Finnis on the basis of Joseph Raz’s theory of practical reason and norms. Section two then demonstrates why Shapiro’s attempt to combine a robust construal of the social facts thesis with a commitment to the thesis that law necessarily has a moral aim is ultimately unsuccessful. (shrink)

Constitutivists believe that we can derive universally and unconditionally authoritative norms from the conditions of agency. Thus if c is a condition of agency, then you ought to live in conformity with c no matter what your particular ends, projects, or station. Much has been said about the validity of the inference, but that’s not my topic here. I want to assume it is valid and talk about what I take to be the highest ambition of constitutivism: the prospect (...) of grounding moral requirements in the conditions of agency. If this can be done, then we can show that everyone is bound by the demands of morality, and we can do so without the customary entanglements—queer normative entities, an implausibly powerful moral sense, or divine lawgivers. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper follows the text of Leviticus 25:10 in the Hebrew Bible and in selected works of the exegetical tradition of both Rabbinic Judaism and Western Christianity, in order to provide a lens through which to assess the use of a biblical text which was instrumental during the early modern period in formulating ideas about the Republic and its use in the modern liberal state. The main argument of the paper is that over time the meaning of the text shifted (...) from the socio-economic to the salvific to the political, depending on the context in which it was read. Further, all the authors cited here approached the text as an authoritative normative text, and did not look at the text as a textual artefact. While the move to re-introduce Jewish Sources into the debate in political theory is to be welcomed, it is argued that the results would be improved by balanced reading strategies and by interaction with critical academic biblical scholarship. (shrink)

It is tempting to think that all of normativity, such as our reasons for action, what we ought to do, and the attitudes that it is fitting for us to have, derives from what is valuable. But value-first approaches to normativity have fallen out of favour as the virtues of reasons- and fittingness-first approaches to normativity have become clear. On these views, value is not explanatorily prior to reasons and fit; rather the value of things is understood (...) in terms of the pro-attitudes it is fitting to have, or that we have reasons to have, towards these things. The value-first accounts of reasons and fit that have been proposed have been direct accounts of reasons and fit. On these views, the fittingness of an attitude is explained in terms of the value of having it or the value of the object of that attitude. This chapter details and surveys these problems, explaining which are yet to be overcome, and explaining which problems direct value-first accounts can overcome. This chapter then explores the prospects of an indirect value-first account of reasons and fit. It argues that it avoids the problems that direct value-first accounts face and may be as explanatorily powerful as fittingness- and reasons-first accounts of value and normativity more generally. (shrink)

First authoritative and comprehensive study in the field of Inkblot Personality Test, this book describes the historical roots of the three major projective inkblot measures: the Rorschach, the Holtzman Inkblot Technique (HIT) and the Somatic Inkblot Series (SIS). It presents the extensive psychometric background work accompanying the normative data and diagnostic indicators along with indices for selecting executives in a business organization. The book begins with a detailed history of Hermann Rorschach and his early experiments with inkblots in the (...) diagnosis of mentally ill patients. Special attention is given to the administration and scoring of the Rorschach, with the sections detailing the systems developed by Klopfer and Exner. The HIT and SIS are also reviewed in detail, emphasizing their psychometric qualities. (shrink)

Communities of respect are communities of people sharing common practices or a (partial) way of life; they include families, clubs, religious groups, and political parties. This book develops a detailed account of such communities in terms of the rational structure of their members' reactive attitudes, arguing that they are fundamental in three interrelated ways to understanding what it is to be a person. First, it is only by being a member of a community of respect that one can be a (...) responsible agent having dignity; such an agent therefore has certain rights as well as the authority to demand that fellow members recognize her dignity and follow the norms of the community, norms compliance with which they likewise have the authority to demand from her. Second, by prescribing or proscribing both actions and values, communities of respect can shape the identities of its members in ways that others have the authority to enforce, thereby revealing an important interpersonal dimension of the identities of persons. Finally, all of this is grounded in a distinctively interpersonal form of practical rationality in virtue of which we jointly have reasons to recognize the dignity and authority of fellow members and so to comply with their authoritative demands, as well as to respect (and so comply with) the norms of the community. Hence we persons are essentially social creatures. (shrink)