Normative concepts and the return to Eden

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Preston J. Werner
Keyword(s):  
Normative Concepts

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Chodat
Keyword(s):  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Focused Attention ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
Normative Concepts ◽  
Unique Experience

Literary works since the rise of high modernism have been intensely hostile to abstract generalization, and have focused attention on the unique experience and singular expression. This nominalist impulse—summed up in the cry “show, don’t tell!”—has encouraged a deep wariness toward broad normative concepts: “good,” “bad,” “courage,” “justice,” etc. More than is often recognized, however, this literary skepticism parallels the skepticism toward such concepts in the natural sciences, which accords no place to such abstract “high words” in a world of matter and calculable motions. Against this dual literary and scientific inheritance, the postwar sage offers a “weak realism” about normative concepts and a “reflective” mode of composition: a movement between the particular and the general, art and argument. Such a literary–intellectual project is risky, and opens the sage to charges of sentimentalism. Closely attending to their works, however, suggests that we should avoid entering this protest too quickly.

Normative Concepts

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matti Eklund
Keyword(s):  
Positive Answer ◽  
Thick Concepts ◽  
Normative Concepts ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Way

What is it for a concept to be normative? Some possible answers are explored and rejected, among them that a concept is normative if it ascribes a normative property. The positive answer defended is that a concept is normative if it is in the right way associated with a normative use. Among issues discussed along the way are the nature of analyticity, and there being a notion of analyticity—what I call semantic analyticity—such that a statement can be analytic in this sense while failing to be true. Considerations regarding thick concepts and slurs are brought to bear on the issues that come up.

Nietzsche’s Mountain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Parfit
Keyword(s):  
Normative Beliefs ◽  
Normative Concepts

This chapter discusses the convergence claim. This claim argues that, if everyone knew all of the relevant non-normative facts, used the same normative concepts, understood and carefully reflected on the relevant arguments, and was not affected by any distorting influence, we would nearly all have similar normative beliefs. It also discusses some counterpoints to attempts to reconcile some of Friedrich Nietzsche's claims with what most of us believe. Though Nietzsche sometimes denies that suffering is in itself bad, and even suggests that suffering may be in itself good, that was not, in most of his life, what Nietzsche believed. The chapter goes on to discuss further arguments for and against the Convergence Claim.

The Value of Rationality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Wedgwood
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Practical Reason ◽  
Bad News ◽  
Central Concept ◽  
Substantive Theory ◽  
Normative Concept ◽  
Normative Concepts

Rationality is a central concept for epistemology, ethics, and the study of practical reason. But what sort of concept is it? It is argued here that—contrary to objections that have recently been raised—rationality is a normative concept. In general, normative concepts cannot be explained in terms of the concepts expressed by ‘reasons’ or ‘ought’. Instead, normative concepts are best understood in terms of values. Thus, for a mental state or a process of reasoning to be rational is for it to be in a certain way good. Specifically, rationality is a virtue, while irrationality is a vice. What rationality requires of you at a time is whatever is necessary for your thinking at that time to be as rational as possible; this makes ‘rationally required’ equivalent to a kind of ‘ought’. Moreover, rationality is an “internalist” normative concept: what it is rational for you to think at a time depends purely on what is in your mind at that time. Nonetheless, rationality has an external goal—namely, getting things right in your thinking, or thinking correctly. The connection between rationality and correctness is probabilistic: if your thinking is irrational, that is bad news about your thinking’s degree of correctness; and the more irrational your thinking is, the worse the news is about your thinking’s degree of correctness. This account of the concept of rationality indicates how we should set about giving a substantive theory of what it is for beliefs and choices to be rational.

scholarly journals Towards Smarter and Fairer Justice? A Review of the Chinese Scholarship on Building Smart Courts and Automating Justice

2021 ◽  
pp. 186810262110214
Author(s):  
Straton Papagianneas
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Judicial Reform ◽  
Political Purpose ◽  
Normative Concepts ◽  
Legal Context ◽  
Literature Reviews ◽  
Chinese Scholars ◽  
Positive Evaluation

This article reviews how Chinese scholars debate the policy of building smart courts in the context of judicial reform. This policy entails the automation and digitisation of judicial processes. It is part of broader judicial reforms that aim to create a more accurate and consistent judiciary. The article identifies four reform concepts that guide the debate: efficiency, consistency, transparency and supervision, and judicial fairness. This review is a meta-synthesis, using practices of narrative and systematic literature reviews, focusing on evaluating and interpreting the Chinese scholarship and reform concepts. It reviews how Chinese scholars discuss the implications of judicial automation and digitisation. Additionally, it analyses the normative concepts behind the reform goals within China’s political-legal context. The analysis finds that the generally positive evaluation in the debate can be explained by an instrumentalist understanding of the reform concepts and the political purpose of courts in the Chinese political-legal context.

The Role and Nature of Freedom in Two Normative Theories of Democracy

Human Affairs ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Šimsa
Keyword(s):  
Normative Concepts ◽  
Hans Kelsen ◽  
Concepts Of Democracy

The Role and Nature of Freedom in Two Normative Theories of DemocracyThe article examines the role and the nature of freedom in two normative concepts of democracy, in the work of Hans Kelsen and of Emanuel Rádl. Both authors wrote their work on democracy between the two world wars. Kelsen formulated his concept of democracy in

Against Schmought

2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (9) ◽  
pp. 465-485
Author(s):  
Matthew Vermaire ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Normative Concepts

Matti Eklund has argued that a new problem in metanormative theory arises when we consider the possibility of "normative counterparts"—normative concepts with the same normative roles as OUGHT and RIGHT (for instance), but with different extensions. I distinguish two versions of the problem, and propose a solution: when we attend to the attitudinal commitments involved in the possession and application of some normative concepts, we find that tolerance for the possibility of normative counterparts is rationally ruled out.

Reasons First

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Schroeder
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Theory ◽  
Action Theory ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Justify Belief ◽  
Moral Worth ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
Common Currency ◽  
Normative Concepts ◽  
The World ◽  
Explanatory Priority

The last fifty years or more of ethical theory have been preoccupied by a turn to reasons. The vocabulary of reasons has become a common currency not only in ethics, but in epistemology, action theory, and many related areas. It is now common, for example, to see central theses such as evidentialism in epistemology and egalitarianism in political philosophy formulated in terms of reasons. And some have even claimed that the vocabulary of reasons is so useful precisely because reasons have analytical and explanatory priority over other normative concepts—that reasons in that sense come first. Reasons First systematically explores both the benefits and burdens of the hypothesis that reasons do indeed come first in normative theory, against the conjecture that theorizing in both ethics and epistemology can only be hampered by neglect of the other. Bringing two decades of work on reasons in both ethics and epistemology to bear, Mark Schroeder argues that some of the most important challenges to the idea that reasons could come first are themselves the source of some of the most obstinate puzzles in epistemology—about how perceptual experience could provide evidence about the world, and about what can make evidence sufficient to justify belief. And he shows that along with moral worth, one of the very best cases for the fundamental explanatory power of reasons in normative theory actually comes from knowledge.

Normative Principles are Synthetic A Priori

Episteme ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-383
Author(s):  
Paul Boghossian
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Principle ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
Justified Belief ◽  
Normative Concepts ◽  
Open Question Argument ◽  
Moral Domains ◽  
And Mathematics ◽  
Open Question

AbstractI argue for the claim that there are instances of a priori justified belief – in particular, justified belief in moral principles – that are not analytic, i.e., that cannot be explained solely by the understanding we have of their propositions. §1–2 provides the background necessary for understanding this claim: in particular, it distinguishes between two ways a proposition can be analytic, Basis and Constitutive, and provides the general form of a moral principle. §§3–5 consider whether Hume's Law, properly interpreted, can be established by Moore's Open Question Argument, and concludes that it cannot: while Moore's argument – appropriately modified – is effective against the idea that moral judgments are either (i) reductively analyzable or (ii) Constitutive-analytic, a different argument is needed to show that they are not (iii) Basis-analytic. Such an argument is supplied in §6. §§7–8 conclude by considering how these considerations bear on recent discussions of “alternative normative concepts”, on the epistemology of intuitions, and on the differences between disagreement in moral domains and in other a priori domains such as logic and mathematics.

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