In this chapter, Ridge tries to identify three features of
normative thought and discourse: action-guiding, affective, and acrimonious.
This chapter, like the last, has a lot of content, and so I'll be able only to
briefly summarise some highlights.
1. Action-guiding
Ridge starts by giving three arguments against externalism
(48-9), understood as the view that there is no essential connection between
normative judgement and motivation, but instead only a contingent connection,
mediated by a desire to do what one ought to do. As he acknowledges, he here
moves quite quickly over a large debate, and I doubt that externalists will be
swayed by his arguments. (If people are interested, I can expand in comments.)
Having rejected externalism, Ridge endorses internalism. Ridge glosses this as CJI, the claim that
first-person normative judgements are necessarily capable of motivating without
the help of any independent desire (50). Ridge then addresses the possibility
of amoralists, who are not at all moved by their moral judgements. The
discussion largely focuses on work by Shaun Nichols apparently showing that
everyday speakers think that amoralists are possible. Ridge presents a series
of (compelling) arguments that suggest that Nichols' study is of relatively
limited evidential value (52-3). Ridge next presents a series of arguments that
aim to defend CJI from worries about amoralists. The third of Ridge's replies
has always seemed to me exactly right: it's unhelpful that this debate focuses
on amoralists. If amoralists think that morality is not normatively binding,
then the possibility of their existence tells us little about normative
judgements (55). We should instead focus on 'anormativists' who are not moved
by their normative judgements. Here, some kind of internalism is highly
compelling. Ridge ends this section with a further interesting argument: that
normative judgements must be capable of motivating us, otherwise we could not
be rationally required to be motivated by them (56-7).
One thing that seemed to slip in and out of the discussion
here was the question of just how bold Ridge's formulation of judgement
internalism is supposed to be. If it's merely the claim that - as stated -
normative judgements are capable of motivating us to act, then amoralists
don't threaten the view in the slightest: this formulation of judgement
internalism is perfectly consistent with the possibility that normative
judgements don't always exercise their motivational capacity. So I'm not sure
if Ridge (a) actually wants some bolder formulation of judgement internalism,
or (b) should have mentioned this easy reply. (Disclosure: I have
work-in-progress in which I defend this kind of internalism as the best way to
formulate the view, in part for this kind of reason.)
2. Affective
In this (relatively short) section, Ridge wants to argue
that there is a connection between normative judgement and affect.
Interestingly, he concedes that this connection may be a contingent feature of
human nature rather than a truth about normative judgement as such (58) - I'll
be interested to see later why he thinks this claim is still relevant for the
rest of the book. He starts with some empirical evidence that demonstrate the
connection between normative judgement and affect (58-9). Next, he considers
whether these studies support some kind of naive subjectivism, and endorses the
familiar argument that such views cannot do justice to truths about
disagreement (60-3). Perhaps the most interesting part of this discussion was
the discussion of Prinz's more sophisticated subjectivist view.
3. Acrimonious
Finally, in this section, Ridge examines the nature of
normative disagreement. First, he surveys some familiar cases of normative
disagreement (64-6). Ridge presents two reasons to think that such disagreement
is not always generated by disagreement over the non-normative facts (66). He
then wants to argue that such disagreement is not always generated by
conceptual confusion (67).
Here the chapter seems to take an unspoken change of focus:
we stop examining the extent of normative disagreement, and instead start to
examine how such apparent disagreement is possible, given that people share a
concept only if they share criteria for applying it (from 67, bottom). Of
course, we might share criteria for applying a concept but nonetheless apply it
differently to one another if, say, we disagree about the evidence, or one of
us is non-ideal in some manner. But Ridge argues that these factors don't
explain normative disagreement (68-9). Instead, Ridge argues that we should
think that competence with non-normative concepts is very different from competence
with normative concepts: the requirement that we must share criteria for
applying concepts applies only to non-normative concepts (68).
One might think that people do share criteria for applying
normative concepts, but that disagreement arises only because we are non-ideal
in some relevant manner. For example (and only an example), someone might claim
that ideal speakers would agree about the application of the predicate ‘good’,
and that we don’t only because we are non-ideal in that we have had poor moral
education (cf. Aristotle, McDowell…). Ridge doesn't seem to say too much about
this general possibility. Perhaps he doesn’t say much about this because he
thinks that those sympathetic to such a view are more likely to be
non-naturalist realists, and Ridge next presents independent arguments against
such views (70-1). This went very swiftly, though I confess (despite myself)
that I liked the way he expressed the motivation worry at the top of 71.
Since non-naturalism is often motivated by Moore's open
question argument, Ridge next turns to see how else we might respond to that
argument. So far as I can see, though we get onto this topic by a series of
connections that are individually intelligible, by this point the chapter is
quite far from where it began. I'd be interested to hear if I've missed
something about how this all hangs together.
On the open question argument, one response is some kind of
analytic reductionism that takes the relevant reduction to be non-obvious.
Normative functionalists hold such a view, but Ridge argues that their view faces
a dilemma (71-5): either the relevant platitudes that supposedly determine
reference are so modest that they fail to fix reference, or else they are so
bold that they fix reference but wrongly entail that many everyday speakers
don't have possession of the relevant concepts.
Finally, we address synthetic reductionism, and Ridge
rehearses the familiar worry that such views make disagreement across
linguistic communities impossible (75-6).
Thanks, Alex. That's a very apt summary of this chapter, I think. I don't think I've got anything substantial to add. Two comments on the comments of yours, though:
ReplyDelete1. The 'quick response' to the amoralist challenge. CJI allows for many kinds of cases in which the normative judgments which are capable of motivating us nevertheless fail to do so. So, if we understand the amoralist to be just someone who makes a normative judgment and yet isn't motivated accordingly, then the quick response seems to work. The amoralist, however, presumably should be understood as someone whose lack of motivation isn't due to irrationality (in some kind of internal incoherence sense), or to depression or some such general motivational disorder. The amoralist just doesn't care about morality. She doesn't think that morality carries any normative authority. Now, if getting her motivated to act in accordance with her moral judgment requires that she comes to care about doing so, then it seems implausible to say that her moral judgment is capable to motivate her just by itself. And so the possibility of the amoralist would seem to threaten CJI.
2. Why discuss the Open Question Argument (OQA)? I, too, found the dialectic of the chapter a bit difficult to follow here. I thought that one of the reasons for discussing the OQA was that a cognitivist might suggest that the explanation for the widespread, seemingly fundamental disagreement is that actually many of us are not entirely competent users of normative concepts. Why would someone think this? Because she accepts some form of analytic descriptivism. But the OQA suggests that that won't work - and then it would be natural to also point out that the standard cognitivist strategies for dealing with the OQA are also problematic. (This wouldn't really explain the discussion of the synthetic reductionist option toward the end, though. However, perhaps this discussion, too, could be seen as a response to a cognitivist strategy of accounting for the disagreement phenomena (through appeal to the idea of a 'disagreement in attitude'). Be that as it may, the upshot seems to be that we've been given some initial motivation to be suspicious of cognitivism and favorable toward Ridge's preferred view - which, I take it, is the main aim of this chapter.)
Hi Teemu, thanks for the helpful comments. On (1), that's helpful thanks, though I'm not quite sure that I see the problem. As I'm reading it, CJI says that moral/normative judgements can motivate, but that certain background conditions must be in place for those judgements to exercise those powers (just as matches cause fires, but only when certain background conditions - such as oxygen - are in place). Defenders of CJI might say that one such background condition is that the agent fails to have depression, another that they aren't irrational, and so on. In effect, my suggestion was that we might add to this list: that the agent cares about morality. Saying this wouldn't commit one to saying that moral/normative judgements can't themselves motivate, any more than the original view did. On this view, it remains true that such judgements can themselves motivate, but only when certain background conditions are in place. Perhaps you/Ridge will say that this position gives the game away to the externalist: but I'm not sure about that, since the view will still have interesting implications when combined with the Humean theory of motivation. Or so it seems to me.
DeleteThanks, Alex. Yeah, I would've been inclined to say that this would give the game away to the externalist. Not sure what kind of interesting implications you have in mind, but that sounds intriguing.
DeleteThanks for the great summary Alex. Just one quick "spoiler" since you mentioned this in passing. You say at one point, "Interestingly, he concedes that this connection may be a contingent feature of human nature rather than a truth about normative judgement as such (58) - I'll be interested to see later why he thinks this claim is still relevant for the rest of the book." The short version of why this is still relevant is that an essential feature of normative judgments is that they are constituted by something I call "normative perspectives" and an essential feature of these perspectives is that they are relatively stable (yes: I think essential features can be vague). The point about affect is that for creatures like us, our emotional dispositions help stabilize our normative perspectives over time by prompting attitudes of revulsion and the like to certain normative stances. I admit that other creatures or entities (Data from Star Trek, say, or God) might maintain stability for their normative perspectives in some other way, but this is how we (characteristically) do it. This gives me the materials for an argument to the best explanation for my view - it provides a very nice explanation of why normative judgment and affect are tightly but only contingently linked - to provide the needed stability. By itself not the strongest argument, I admit, but as part of a more holistic argument whereby I collect Enoch style plausibility points, it seemed worth mentioning, at least. OK, I'll bow out now as I think I've been giving in to the temptation to comment here too much already!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the helpful spoiler Mike!
DeleteHi Alex, a quick comment about this move: "ideal speakers would agree about the application of the predicate ‘good’, and... we don’t only because we are non-ideal in that we have had poor moral education."
ReplyDeleteMy question is: in this scenario is it the case that people actually do share criteria but that some of us somehow misapply those criteria because we were poorly brought up? Or is the suggestion that poor upbringing leads us to have different criteria? It seems to be the former, but I was wondering if you could flesh out the details of this suggestion.
Hi Nick, that's a good question. As you imply, it has to be the former if it's to be relevant to the claims in the text, though I readily admit that the latter might be the more intuitive possibility. It might be helpful to compare with the predicate 'red'. Ridge says that in this case, ideal speakers have 'normal' visual systems (68). Equally, we might think, regarding the concept 'good', that ideal speakers have 'normal' moral sensitivity, whatever that might require. One possibility is that such sensitivity requires a decent moral education. This way of motivating the view makes it sound as though moral awareness is analogous to perceptual awareness, and so - as I said above - it might follow that this route is really only available to robust realists of one kind or another. But this is meant to be only an illustration of the general kind of move available - I'd guess there are other ways of thinking of ideal speakers that explain our normative disagreement by appeal to the ways in which we fall short of the relevant ideal. I can't see that Ridge says much against this broad possibility. That's not to say I have a positive detailed view to hand that Ridge should have addressed, but vice versa, I'm not sure that Ridge has made his case conclusive.
DeleteI found this chapter very thought-provoking, especially the first section. I have two comments.
ReplyDelete(1) I agree that the anormativist is the important test case for judgment externalism. But Ridge more or less defines the anormativist as someone who quite generally is unmotivated by their judgments about reasons (55-6), while it seems that all that’s needed to defeat CJI is an anormativist for whom /some/ judgments about reasons do not motivate, and not as a result of a mere failure to exercise an underlying capacity. For then it would not be the case that “/simply qua their particular character and content/” (50), normative judgments are always capable of motivating agents. And on one common understanding, that’s precisely what’s going on in cases of clear-eyed akrasia.
People’s intuitions about what akrasia is and whether it’s possible differ wildly, of course. But I think that just means one can rely neither on its possibility nor its impossibility, and I’m worried Ridge does the latter.
A related worry devolves from the possibility that our concept of moral judgment may be prototypical. A pigeon matches our concept BIRD extremely well; a penguin is also a bird, but is less bird-like. Similarly, perhaps our paradigm of MORAL JUDGMENT involves someone condemning another’s vice with great passion; the amoralist’s assertions may also be moral judgments, but are less moral-judgment-like. If that’s the case, then at crucial places Ridge seems to prime us with the /paradigm/, as when he writes of “wholehearted” normative judgments in RJI and “full-blooded” normative judgments when characterizing the anormativist (55), when what’s needed to establish externalism is only moral judgments which clearly cross the /threshold/ for moral judgment and yet reliably do not motivate.
Hi Paul.
DeleteIf I understand you correctly, the idea is this:
(1) Someone might think that she ought to A (say) and yet fail to be motivated to A, where this is not due to a failure to exercise an underlying capacity.
(2) That's just akrasia (on one common understanding), and we shouldn't rule that out.
First, I wonder whether (2) is true. Isn't akratic behavior usually understood to be exactly the sort of behavior which manifests a failure to exercise the agent's capacity for self-control?
Second, I'm not sure that (1) would be a problem for Ridge, anyway: I take it that the idea of CJI is that normative judgments are judgments such that can motivate an agent just by themselves, but need not do so on every occasion. So, let's suppose that an akratic agent thinks that she ought to A but fails to be motivated accordingly. She fails to exercise some capacities of hers for self-control, and, as a result, a judgment of hers which is such that it could motivate her just by itself under some other circumstances fails to do so on this occasion. Some other agent might suffer from some compulsive disorder and not even have this kind of capacity for self-control. So, in her case the lack of motivation wouldn't really be due to her not exercising some capacity of hers. Yet she might make a normative judgment which is such that it could (or has the 'capacity' to) motivate her, just by itself, given normal circumstances (that is, given the absence of the relevant motivational disorder). It seems like Ridge could make room for these kinds of possibilities. But in these cases the normative judgment isn't doing its job properly. In the case of an anormativist, by contrast, there's no failure of self-control or any general motivational disorder involved. Rather, the normative judgment is doing its job just fine, but it doesn't have the capacity to motivate the agent just by itself. So that would need to be ruled out.
Or that's roughly how I understood CJI. Does that make any sense?
Hi Teemu,
DeleteRight, that's pretty much what I meant. With respect to your first comment: It depends on what self-control amounts to! If to be self-controlled is to be guided by your normative judgments (as a result of some underlying capacity), then akratics are not self-controlled. But you might think that self-control is a matter of sticking to your /resolutions/ and that to resolve to do something is not necessarily to make a normative judgment. In that case one could be akratic but self-controlled.
And at any rate, if akratics by definition fail to exercise some capacity of self-control, it may not be the case that the capacity in question is one attributable to them in virtue of their normative judgment. The akratic's (unexercised) capacity of self-control may be due to some /independent/ desire to do what they judge they must. But CJI requires that it's the peculiar character of the normative judgment alone which gives them this capacity. So there's still a worry here even if akratics are not self-controlled: namely, there's an (attractive) alternative explanation of akrasia which Ridge must rule out.
I'm not entirely sure I follow your second point. Take someone with a severe compulsive disorder who we'd all agree lacks a capacity for self-control in the relevant domain, so that it cannot be in virtue of any normative judgments that we can attribute to /them/ any such capacity. Can't they still make normative judgments like "I must stop X-ing, but I can't"? It seems at first that CJI must rule out that possibility. But your response is to weaken CJI: normative judgments, in virtue of their character, have the capacity to motivate /in normal circumstances/, or they always have the capacity to motivate /normal agents/ - even when a non-normal agent makes a normative judgment and has no hope of being motivated in accordance with it. That might be too weak for Ridge's purposes since even an externalist could agree to it: "Sure," they might say, "normative judgments themselves have the capacity to motivate in normal circumstances. And I think we'd all agree that anormativists are not /normal/, for whatever reason. Still, they are quite possible."
Good, let's see... First, just a few words about how I was understanding CJI. Take Smith's (Michael) view. On his view, a normative judgment can, just by itself, rationally explain forming a desire. Yet in order for this to happen, the agent also needs to be practically rational - roughly, she must have some disposition toward coherence. In case the agent's mental states do not exhibit enough in the way of coherence, there's no motivation. Yet the normative judgment is such that it is capable of motivating (that is, rationally explaining a desire) just by itself - given that the agent is practically rational. I was thinking that Ridge's view could be understood along these lines. (Of course Ridge's account of the normative judgment would be very different from that of Smith's.)
DeleteSo, the Smith/Ridge line would be that we need normative judgment plus rationality (in some internal coherence sense) in order for the normative judgment to motivate. The competing externalist line would be that we need normative judgment plus a certain desire (plus rationality). The Smith/Ridge line seems to leave plenty room for explaining the possibility of akrasia. Some competing explanations will be ruled out. But that doesn't seem too worrisome.
Indeed, the Smith/Ridge line would seem quite plausible. For now we can capture RJI. If there's no motivation in accordance with the must-judgment, that must be due to a failure of rationality. On the externalist view, this might simply be due to a lack of a certain desire, and it's not clear why this would constitute a failure of rationality in any relevant sense.
Which brings us to your second concern. It's not just that a normative judgment normally motivates. Rather, they motivate in case the agent is practically rational (enough).
(I see that you've expressed some worries concerning the argument from RJI below. I haven't had the time to give that matter any thought.)
Hm, then I think we're in agreement on the interpretation of CJI: it claims the normative judgment's /capability/ to motivate is not contingent upon what kind of agent you are, whereas RJI claims that whether you are /actually/ motivated depends on whether you are rational. (In my last post I interpreted you as saying that the capacity was contingent upon the agent's rationality. Sorry!)
DeleteI agree that this allows for one kind of akrasia, in which I judge I must X, have a capacity thereby to be motivated to X, but where the capacity is not exercised because I am less than coherent. But I was worried about a different kind of akrasia, clear-eyed akrasia, in which I am in some sense quite sound of mind and judge (perhaps after some abstracted reasoning) that I must X, yet regard it merely as a curious fact. (Indeed, I may regard it as curious too that I'm not motivated!) I appear to be coherent - I have just discovered that in this instance I don't care much about what I recognize I must in fact do! If that is possible, then it looks like in this instance the normative judgment lacks even the capacity to (motivate me given that I'm rational). To assert that it is possible is just to voice the basic externalist intuition, I suppose, but it's an intuition that I think a number of people share!
And right, there are separate questions about whether such akrasia is irrational and whether Ridge gives a better account of its irrationality. But I wonder if the answers to these questions depend a great deal on whether one accepts the externalist intuition. For if one does then clear-eyed akrasia does not seem incoherent, in which case it's not clear that it's irrational. Or if it is irrational it might be because it's constitutive of rationality that one be enkratic, in which case the externalist can account for it equally well, or because something other than coherence explains irrationality, in which case it's possible that the externalist can account for it.
(2) Ridge has a very interesting argument for CJI on p. 57. Perhaps here’s a dilemma for him:
ReplyDeleteFor any action X, is it the case that any agent is capable of at least /intending/ to X? If so, then you do not need CJI to help explain RJI. For CJI was wheeled in to explain why RJI will never have us condemning as irrational those who /cannot/ conform to it in the most natural way, by forming an intention in accordance with their normative judgment.
So suppose there are some actions which some agents are incapable of intending. Intending to X entails believing it’s possible that I X (or so it’s often thought); I do not believe it’s possible for me to fly to the center of the Sun tomorrow; I cannot come to believe this by a mere act of the will; so I cannot intend to fly to the center of the Sun tomorrow. Now the problem is that Ridge needs to rule out the possibility of me coming to judge that I /must/ fly to the center of the Sun tomorrow (perhaps because I believe that’s what God has commanded me to do). Otherwise RJI would convict me of practical irrationality even though it is not possible for me to conform to the requirement, which would be “unfair or unreasonable” (57). [Perhaps you could also conform to the requirement by dropping the normative judgment. But if that were on the table then there would be nothing for CJI to help explain in the first place.]
I think it’s costly to rule out the possibility that there are some real, binding obligations which are impossible to fulfill – or at least, if there are, to say that that we cannot judge that there are. I wonder if Ridge’s best response is say that such judgments are only normative in the inverted-commas sense. But is this plausible? I’m not sure.
Dear all,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the summary, Alex. Apologies for not getting round to comment on ch. 1, everyone.
I have no detailed analysis to add to that above, although I did appreciate the spoiler, Mike. I do have two questions buzzing round my head, provoked by what is said. (And from those, other questions may come, such as one concerning the endorsment of Elstein and Hurka's analysis of thick concepts in ch. 1). I'll address this to Mike, but anyone can comment, obviously.
(1) Mike - given that you want to argue for a sharp difference between the normative and the non-normative, I'd be interested to hear what you think about aesthetic concepts. Most of the examples you give are moral / prudential examples, which have some obvious practical bite. But what about aesthetic judgements where we seem to classify and categorize, but where there is no obvious practical bite? So, for example, I may call a sculpture jejune or a painting subtle. That may mean that at some point and in some context I am encouraging others to see it, or I may wish to purchase it (etc.), but that needn't follow at all. I may just wish to classify certain art objects in certain ways so as to understand and appreciate them better. If you, Mike, do see these evaluative judgements as being on the normative side, then is the link with motivation and agency a contingent one, dependent on circumstance, but one which is more pronounced in some domains, such as ethics, than in others, such as aesthetics?
Of course, talk of aesthetic may bring us into the territory of 'affect'. So, might it be, Mike, that the three aspects you pick out in ch. 2 are more prominent than others across different domains?
I suppose I am trying to get at what your conception of the normative is and how the normation should be defined (if at all) in relation to the evaluative. (That's a biggie, perhaps.)
(2) So, a related question - perhaps a quick and dirty one! - is: What type of concept or idea gets to be a normative one? So, for example, is ART a normative concept? (I think it is and I suspect you think it is, but would like to hear what you think.)
Hi Simon, glad to see you here! I'll let Mike (or some others) to answer these tough and interesting questions, though... (Although I can't resist unhelpfully noting that I find it attractive to think that there'd be great variation, in the relevant respects, among the judgments that we might classify as 'aesthetic' or make using the word 'art', say.)
DeleteHi Simon,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comments!
I confess I don't have very settled views on aesthetic judgment. I'm a bit tempted by a view on which they are not normative (in my stipulated sense of 'normative' in chapter 1, anyway), and in that case I'd probably go for some sort of speaker-relativism or subjectivism in accounting for them. But I'm not wedded to that at all.
If such judgments are normative (again, in my sense), then it will presumably be because their primary function to settle how to feel about the relevant object of evaluation, for certain distinctively aesthetic feelings. In that sense, yes, affect will indeed be more prominent here, and it needn't be the case that aesthetic judgments are in and of themselves directly action-guiding, as opposed to affect-guiding, to count as normative.
On your second question, for my account of what makes a concept normative, see my discussion of what makes an area of discourse count as normative - especially chapter 1, pp. 18-21, but also chapter 7, pp. 219-22. I'd then extend this to cover concepts by seeing whether the concept can be understood as primarily having the sorts of functions I lay out in that discussion. I would actually tend to think that 'art' is a descriptive concept, and that 'good art' is a normative concept, though people do sometimes talk in ways which blur this distinction, I tend to think of this as a kind of Stevensoian persuasive definition - in effect, trying to denigrate art you don't like by saying 'that isn't art'. Bad art is still art! OK - this is a bit of a digression from the book, though, where I say virtually nothing about aesthetics, and as I said before I don't have very firm views at all about aesthetic judgment, so this is all very tentative!
Simon: A more accommodating suggestion, consistent with what I said before but aimed at capturing more of what is insightful behind the idea that terms like 'is 'art' are normative. Perhaps calling something art carries with it a general conversational implicature that it is worthy of certain aesthetic responses, in which case it isn't normative in its strict and literal content, but it does have normative meaning in a broader sense. This would be similar to Caj Strandberg's theory of moral judgment, and my own theory of rationality discourse in the last chapter of the book.
ReplyDelete