Abstract
Any complete account of morality should be able to account for its characteristic normativity; we show that enactivism is able to do so while doing justice to the situated and interactive nature of morality. Moral normativity primarily arises in interpersonal interaction and is characterized by agents’ possibility of irrevocably changing each other’s autonomies, that is, the possibility of harming or expanding each other’s autonomy. We defend that moral normativity, as opposed to social and other forms of normativity, regulates and, in some cases, constitutes this very possibility. Agents are thus morally responsible for caring about their own and others’ autonomies in interaction. In our conception, moral normativity is embodied, situated, and deeply affective, and is constituted in social practices and maintained in interaction. We identify at least two necessary conditions for moral normativity to arise as a social practice. The first is our embodied constitution as living beings who are precarious and therefore vulnerable and in need of interaction with others and with the environment. The second is our sociolinguistic nature, which allows us to exponentially expand our possibilities for action and normatively distinguish among them. We finish by drawing a distinction between moral character and the moral content of interactions, which allows us to universally recognize the ethical dimensions of all human interaction while doing justice to the situated character of morals.
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Notes
We understand ethics as a normative notion that guides the morally right course of action, which concerns promoting autonomous life and its prosperity, i.e., to take care of the autonomies of the agents. Under this definition, the terms “ethic” and “moral” are interchangeable in many instances, which is in line with the usage of these terms in the enactive literature on the topic.
To be sure, here we do not mean that different levels of normativity live in separate realms and are completely independent, rather we want to emphasize that a relative independence is preserved between them, that is, the normativity that guides social interaction is not constrained to the strict confines of the metabolic normativity (see Froese and Di Paolo 2011, p. 17). Importantly, enactivism recognizes multiple and partial decouplings between the distinct layers of normativity (namely, between biological normativity, sensorimotor normativity, and social normativity).
This thought is in opposition to the nativist assumption about pre-wired and content-loaded minds.
It is a debatable question whether or not a father (or parent) who does not have contact with their children for whichever reason can be considered a father; however, for our purposes, we are only interested in emphasizing the constitutive importance of enacting and performing the patterns of activities that scaffold the distinct and various identities of human agents.
In the very characterization of participatory sense-making, De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007, p. 492) state: “If the autonomy of one of the interactors were destroyed, the process would reduce to the cognitive engagement of the remaining agent with his non-social world. The ‘other’ would simply become a tool, an object, or a problem for his individual cognition.”
In the words of van den Herik and Rietveld (2021, p. 3372), situated normativity is defined as “the ability of skilled individuals to distinguish better from worse, adequate from inadequate, appropriate from inappropriate, or correct from incorrect in the context of a particular situation. Situated normativity is not rooted in detached judgements, but consists in a situated appreciation expressed in normative behaviour. Skilled individuals are motivated by the situation by being drawn to those possibilities for action that contribute to improving grip.” Importantly, situated normativity can be experienced as a bodily affective tension.
We use the notion of “moral ought” in a pragmatic sense, i.e., one that corresponds to the ability for ethical know-how (Varela 1999). Therefore, the “is-ought” problem concerning metaethics does not arise: conceiving morals as the situated ability to interact with others with care and respect for their autonomies is evaluated in the situation according to the specific autonomies of the interactants and not with respect to a metaphysical/prescriptive ought.
The social interactions defined this way, i.e. as second-person engagements always imply the dimension of participation and, therefore, the dimension of responsibility as well.
According to Gallagher, our social life is negotiated essentially through second-person interactions, which are facilitated by a direct perceptual understanding of the expressive bodily behaviors of others, scaffolding a range of possibilities for action and response (see van Grunsven 2018, pp. 137–138).This idea constitutes much of the embodied explanations of social cognition that are opposed to traditional accounts of mental attribution, which assume that the mental states of others are hidden entities not available to the observer.
Loidolt argues: “In order for this new form of “imperative normativity” to emerge, a different kind of experience and experiential structure is needed. In the phenomenological tradition, it has often been described as the experience of a “call” (2018, p. 158).
The moral pull depicts a phenomenological pull that we experience when alterity is presented to us, i.e. another person. The specific subjective experience of the other does not occur with inanimate objects. From this derives a specific phenomenological normative level of the encounter with another agent, which does not pretend to be an ontological or metaethical ideal, but only highlights what happens to us at an experiential level in the encounter with the other; we do not perceive the other as a physical body devoid of meaning. This contributes to connecting us affectively and normatively with the other, which is crucial for interacting ethically.
For Loidolt, the interrelation of these three categories allows ethical relevance: “[…] my claim is rather that imperative normativity is instituted through a particular interrelated experiential structure to which all three cases belong: an affective encounter with something other than the (present) self, where a specific structure of the self is disclosed that it can fail at or succeed in. This makes ethical relevance possible in the first place—and thus the experience of a vocation and an ought” (Loidolt 2018, p. 159).
Concerning embodied non-conceptual mandates, we want to capture three underlying elements: (1) about mandates, in the phenomenology of the social encounter with the other, the other is who constitutes me normatively (the other as a command); in Loidolt’s words: “Only from a first-person perspective converted into the position of the addressed—that is, the second person—can the appeal of the other be understood as a command, an imperative which comes “from a height” and which constitutes me normatively” (2018, p. 161). And from there, the ethical experience emerges: “ […] the ethical experience has been revealed, essentially, as the experience of being commanded to respond, being requested to care for the vulnerability of the other, and ultimately being called to make a gift of yourself” (Métais and Villalobos 2021, p. 180). (2) The non-conceptual harks back to the enactive assumption of developing an approach to experience in non-intellectual or non-conceptual terms (Métais and Villalobos 2021 p. 171). And, (3) about embodied aspect, the enactive view essentially considers experience as embodied.
Note that in the phenomenological tradition, this “ought” occurs at the experiential level, by which this “ought” is interpreted not in prescriptive terms, nor is it a command that obliges me in the factical sense, but is just a descriptive effort to capture "[…] how the ethical or the normative can gain meaningful relevance for a subject in the first place" (Loidolt 2018, p. 161). Indeed, “Phenomenologists analyze the structure of those experiences that essentially constitute us as ethical beings and claim that normative questions can only arise in this venue” (2018, p. 159).
Due to its situational aspect, no universal specifications can be derived (see van den Herik and Rietveld 2021).
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge support by a scholarship granted by the Mexican Council for Science and Technology (Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, CONACyT). We want to thank Maximiliano Martínez Bohórquez for his support and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
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Pescador Canales, C., Mojica, L. Making us Autonomous: The Enactive Normativity of Morality. Topoi 41, 257–274 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-022-09795-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-022-09795-0