Naturalism and the Normative Domain: Accounting for Normativity with the Help of 18th Century Empathy-Sentimentalism (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Social Roots of Normativity
This paper introduces the special issue: ‘The Roots of Normativity. Developmental, comparative and conceptual issues’. The contributions to this volume aim to present a picture of contemporary accounts of normativity that integrate philosophy and developmental and comparative psychology and purport to provide the reader with new insights to a classical debate about what makes us human: being governed by norms and being able to orient ourselves in the light of them. This introduction presents a broad picture of the issues that traditional discussions on normativity have focused on and advances a set of conditions of adequacy for an account of normativity. In so doing the main common themes that unify these papers are brought to the fore. In particular, all of them share the idea that human-specific norms are themselves social. Once questions concerning the evolution of normative capacities and their development are considered, however, they pose - so it is argued - specific challenges to an account of normativity. While the traditional approaches fail to face such challenges, it is the main aim of the papers in this special issue to meet them. In concluding, a brief overview of each paper is provided.
Anthropology and sociology of normativities
Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie
Human beings are normative creatures by nature. The normativity of the social in the form of morals and legal systems is the core topic of sociology, taking precedence over even the analysis of consciousness and self-consciousness, of language, work and culture. In their "eccentric positionality" (Helmuth Plessner), human beings vitally depend upon the artificial restriction of their behavioural tendencies in relation to each other through norms, or upon the production of possibilities for action in the first place. This gives rise to the secondary problems of classifying life situations under norms, the suppression of opposing behavioural inclinations, the interpretation of norms in new situations, the conflict between individual norms and entire systems of norms, the enforceability of norms, and finally the invention and discovery of new norms. In this respect, the sociology of morality and the sociology of law are key disciplines of sociology, which that are studied from different theoretical directions. For modern philosophical anthropology, too, the problem of normativity for a worldopen, unstable living being has been a prominent theme from the beginning, treated by its sociological protagonists Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen, but also by Dieter Claessens (Das Konkrete und das Abstrakte), Heinrich Popitz (Die normative Konstruktion der Gesellschaft) and Günter Dux (Historisch-genetische Theorie der Kultur). The paradigm of philosophical anthropology forms a corrective in sociology with regard to the question of normativity, for it systematically designs bridging concepts between the humanities, cultural sciences and social sciences on
The prime aim of this paper is to argue that social science’s understanding of values and reason is deficient, both with regard to its own methodology, and to understanding their place in social life in general. In particular, I wish to attack the common assumptions that values are beyond the scope of reason, and that consequently making evaluative judgements about what is good or bad, or about well-being and ill-being, is antithetical to the project of social science, and potentially dogmatic and authoritarian.
Introduction to the special issue: normativity
Journal of Critical Realism, 2019
This Editorial provides an introduction to the key aspects of the contributions by imminent critical realists, such as Margaret Archer, Doug Porpora, Andrew Sayer and others, to the special issue on Normativity. It attempts to place these contributions in terms of their relationship to the work of Roy Bhaskar. To achieve this goal, the Editorial provides the readers with an outline of Roy Bhaskar's secular - science-based - approach to discovering the values that society needs in order to develop a version of normativity that will facilitate the flourishing of all. It therefore explains how Bhaskar manages to allow facts to legitimately inform values without falling foul of the problems usually associated with such an approach, namely the tyranny of both absolutism and unreflected prejudices.
Examining Normative Sociology and Phronetic Social Science in the Light of Practical Reason
Civic Sociology, 2024
Normative sociology and phronetic social science are research programmes that aim to overcome the dead end of positivism and the obfuscating effects of cryptonormativity, promising renewed social science disciplines that engage normatively with the public. In this article, I aim to deepen our understanding of social science's (re)turn to normativity by examining how the disciplinary aims of such programmes fare against their conception of practical reason. I consider Tariq Modood's presentation of the Bristol School of Multiculturalism as a form of normative sociology and begin from its understanding of practical reason after Michael Oakeshott, before specifying Modood's recommendations, also with reference to other prominent versions of normative sociology. I then show that Bent Flyvbjerg's phronetic social science, an Aristotle-inspired programme that has received widespread attention, is a particularly useful object of comparison: it bears high proximity to the Bristol School of Multiculturalism by being contextualist, dialogical, and prising public engagement. Most importantly, it too espouses antirationalist arguments via the emphasis it places on the Aristotelian notion of phronesis (practical wisdom). I argue that Oakeshott's and Aristotle's insights on the character and growth of practical reason both clarify and problematize the disciplinary aims of normative sociology and phronetic social science. Thus, to develop and defend normative social science, it is necessary to address a host of resulting challenges, most centrally the following: phronesis as an intellectual virtue based on one's disposition, character, and experience largely eludes disciplinary-level training of the kind that social scientists and political theorists have received, exercise, or provide to students.
The Philosophical Forum, 2021
The Duhem-Quine thesis famously holds that a single hypothesis cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed in isolation, but instead only in conjunction with other background hypotheses. This article argues that this has important and underappreciated implications for metaethics. Section 1 argues that if one begins metaethics firmly wedded to a naturalistic worldview—due (e.g.) to methodological/epistemic considerations—then normativity will appear to be reducible to a set of social-psycho-semantic behaviors that I call the ‘normative stance.’ Contra Hume and Bedke (2012), I argue that the normative stance provides semantically-grounded entailments from natural truths to normative truths, reducing the latter to the former. Specifically, the normative stance explains the truth-conditions, truth-values, and truth-makers of normative propositions in terms of socially grounded cognitive-behavioral rules and other natural facts, thus explaining how there can be bona fide normative facts and properties in a wholly naturalistic world. I then show that the normative stance explains the apparent stance-independence and non-naturalness of normative reasons, intrinsic value, and categoricity of moral reasons as ‘user-illusions’ generated by people having strong psycho-social propensities—rooted in evolution and social cooperation—to take these normative stances. Section 2 then argues that while the normative stance may appear to naturalists to successfully explain normativity, it will not appeal to those who come to metaethics with different background commitments. I conclude that naturalists should take the normative stance to be a promising metaethical theory of normativity, and that whether it is a true theory of normativity is something that can only be ascertained by determining which background hypotheses—naturalistic or otherwise—we should have when doing metaethics.
Normativity I – The Dialectical Legacy
With Habermas it is important to realize that one has to differentiate between moral and non-moral (a-moral) norms, which is different from what is immoral. However, since the Renaissance reflections on human freedom were caught up in the dialectic of necessity (nature) and freedom. A brief sketch is given of the development of this dialectic within modern philosophy -as it was manifested in the thought of Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkely, Hume, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Comte, Marxism, the Baden school of neo-Kantianism (Windelband, Rickert, Weber) and existentialism (Jaspers, Merleau-Ponty). The influence of the neo-Kantian opposition of facts and values within social thought is briefly highlighted, followed by a brief characterization of the normative inclination of human beings. Then some of the problems entailed in the modern concept of freedom are analyzed in relation to the idea of autonomy. This idea is burdened by the problem that the conditions for being human have to coincide with what meets these conditions, namely the human being. In addition it is difficult to derive collective norms from the autonomy of a single individual. The alternative avenue suggested by the idea of ontic normativity will be investigated in a separate article, exploring the way towards a more integral understanding of normativity.