Quasi-Naturalism and the Problem of Alternative Normative Concepts

The following scenario seems possible: a community uses concepts that play the same role in guiding actions and shaping social life as our normative concepts, and yet refer to something else. As Eklund (2017) argues, this apparent possibility poses a problem for any normative realist who aspires to vindicate the thought that reality itself favors our ways of valuing and acting. How can realists make good on this idea, given that anything they might say in support of the privileged status of our normative concepts can be mirrored by the imagined community? E.g., the realist might claim that using our concepts is what we ought to do if we are to describe normative facts correctly, but members of the other community can claim the same about their concepts, using their own concept of ought. A promising approach to this challenge is to try to rule out the possibility of alternative normative concepts, by arguing that any concepts that have the same normative role must share a reference as well. (Eklund calls this referential normativity.) In this paper I argue that normative quasi-naturalism, a view that combines expressivism about normative discourse with a naturalist metaphysics of normativity, supports referential normativity and solves the problem of alternative normative concepts.

If You’re Quasi-Explaining, You’re Quasi-Losing

Normative discourse frequently involves explanation. For example, we tell children that hitting is wrong because it hurts people. In a recent paper, Selim Berker argues that to account for this kind of explanation, expressivists need an account of normative grounding. Against this, I argue that expressivists should eschew grounding and stick to a more pragmatic picture of explanation, one that focuses on how we use explanatory speech acts to communicate information. This chapter proposes that the standard form of a normative explanation is a generalizing explanation, one which shows a particular moral injunction to follow from a more general injunction. An additional upshot of the resulting view is that it paves the way for a purely metaphysical solution to the problem of creeping minimalism. Quasi-real properties are those that, unlike real properties, stand outside of the metaphysical hierarchy of grounding relations.

The Postmodern Normative Anxiety of Transnational Legal Studies

This chapter seeks to establish whether a normative discourse on law’s legitimacy can be successfully reconstructed in the face of law’s increasing transnationalization. It explores the postmodern normative conundrum of transnational legal studies, highlighting the normative dilemmas of both Transnational Legal Pluralism and Transnational Legal Ordering theory. It then puts forward an alternative framing of “transnational law” and “transnational legal analysis”; this opens up new opportunities for an inquiry into law’s legitimacy through an application of Conflicts Law theory. After an overview of the merits of Conflicts Law, the chapter assesses the limits to its successful application. An inner tension exists between Conflicts Law theory’s modernist foundations and its application to increasingly complex legal and regulatory conflicts in the postmodern landscape. Against this overall backdrop, the chapter advocates a turn back to substantive, purposive forms of normativity and the rematerialization of law beyond the nation-state.

Parenthood and the concept of the biological tie

It is widely assumed that there is value in the biological tie between parent and child. An implication of this is that adoption is often considered a less desirable alternative to procreation. This paper offers a philosophical defence of adoptive parenthood as a valuable and authentic form of parenthood. While previous defences have suggested that society’s valorisation of the biological tie is unjustified, I argue herein that the conception of the biological tie that features in the normative discourse on parenthood is too narrowly genocentric. Against this genocentric conception, recent work in the philosophy of biology has emphasised the roles of joint determination, dynamic construction, and extended inheritance in development, which I suggest can substantiate a more inclusive conception of the biological tie. Accordingly, I propose that adoptive parents form a rich variety of biological ties with their children, some of which are as heritable and formative as genetic relatedness.

French from Here, is it French? The Construction of Normativity Judgements in Peripheral European Francophone Communities

This article deals with the diatopic variation of French in its relation to normative discourse, more specifically French as practised in Belgium, exemplified here by the fields of lexicon and syntax. It describes the purist discourse of the last century which is evolving towards a modification of the normative hierarchy, an emancipation from linguistic hegemony, both in the scientific world and in the representations of the speakers. It also leads to a valuable questioning of the identity of the actors responsible for the construction of normative judgements.

Authors of Law and Life

This chapter examines the biopolitical force of Augustan legislation vis-à-vis Ovid’s love poetry. Ovid, the ‘father of poems’, pits himself against the prince, the ‘Father of the Fatherland’ (pater patriae). Poet and emperor are involved in the production of normative discourse (legal or literary) that aims at generating biological or conceptual offspring. Their roles are both parallel and antithetical. Augustus’ laws aim to increase the population, while the elegiac legislator sees pregnancy as undermining attractiveness. Yet both poet and prince cast themselves as auctores, a word that can refer to a proposer of law, an author of poems, and a father. As auctores, Ovid and Augustus aspire to create a zone of indistinction between the biological and the political, between law and life. The capacity of Ovid’s art to become life parallels and contrasts with the power of Augustus’ laws to become flesh.

A power-critique of academic rankings: Beyond managers, institutions, and positivism

The bulk of research on academic rankings is policy-oriented, preoccupied with ‘best practices’, and seems incapable of transcending the normative discourse of ‘governance’. To understand, engage, and properly critique the operation of power in academic rankings, the rankings discourse needs to escape the gravity of ‘police science’ and embrace a properly political science of ranking. More specifically, the article identifies three pillars of the extant research from which a departure would be critically fruitful – positivism, managerialism, institutionalism – and then goes on to outline three aspects of rankings that a critical political analysis should explore, integrate, and develop into future research from the discourses of critical theory – arkhè, dispositif, and dialectik.

What Is Orientation in Dignitarian Thinking? Self, Other, Time and Space

Drawing upon Kant’s analysis of the role of intuitions in our orientation towards knowledge, this paper analyses four points of departure in thinking about dignity: self, other, time and space. Each reveals a core area of normative discourse – authenticity in the self, respect for the other, progress through time and authority as the government of space – along with related grounds of resistance to dignity. The paper concludes with a discussion of the methodological challenge presented by our different dignitarian intuitions, in particular the role of universality in testing and cohering our intuitions.