Abstract
Standing is a peculiar norm, allowing for deflecting that is rejecting offhand and without deliberation interventions such as directives. Directives are speech acts that aim to give directive-reasons, which are reason to do as the directive directs because of the directive. Standing norms, therefore, provide for deflecting directives regardless of validity (i.e., regardless of whether or not a directive succeeds in giving a directive-reason) or the normative weight of the rejected directive. The logic of the normativity of standing is, therefore, not the logic of invalidating directives or of competing with directive-reasons but of ‘exclusionary permission’. That is, standing norms provide for permission to exclude from practical deliberation directive-reasons if given without the requisite standing, regardless of their normative weight. As such, standing is a type of second-order norm. Numerous everyday practices involve the deflection of directives, such as pervasive practices of deflecting hypocritical and officious directives. Of various possible models, the one that best captures the normative structure of these practices of deflection is the standing model. Accordingly, the normativity of standing is pervasive in our everyday practices. Establishing that standing, although a neglected philosophical idea, is a significant and independent normative concept.
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Notes
To be clear, Assad may not discount the reasons Erdogan is pointing out to him—that Assad’s actions are heinous. All that Assad may ignore is Erdogan’s demands and condemnations as reasons in and of themselves.
I use (normative) ‘weight’ and ‘force’ interchangeably, as stylistically fitting.
On ‘antecedent-reasons’ and related ideas see Enoch (2014).
I pose ‘belief’ and ‘attitude’ as alternatives to signal agnosticism as to matters of the cognitivism—non cognitivism distinction. For the cognitivist perhaps what I call ‘evaluative-assertion’ is a sub-category of what Searle and Vanderveken refer to as ‘expressives’. Here I keep them distinct.
By ‘irrational’ I mean open to rational criticism. Parfit (1986, p. 119).
I take Anthony Duff’s account of the state’s standing to hold criminals accountable as charting an instance of such a divergence of validity (in this case state authority) from standing (Duff 2010).
I can’t claim allies for this view or for the view I endorse in the next section. However, some use the term ‘standing’ to explain the nature of hypocritical blaming or condemning, and some understandings of ‘standing’ are incompatible with the invalidation model. Those who I expect would endorse something along the lines of what I called the ‘alteration’ or the ‘exclusion’ models and would reject the invalidation model are Bell (2012) and Duff (2010).
See, e.g., Broome (2004).
On ‘exclusionary reasons’ and ‘exclusionary norms’ see Raz (1990, pp. 40–48 and pp. 73–76 respectively).
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Acknowledgements
Previous drafts of this paper were presented at the Workshop on Law, Ethics and the State, Tel Aviv University (February, 2014), King’s College London’s Legal Philosophy Workshop (March, 2014), the Analytic Legal Philosophy Conference (Oxford, 2014) and at the Private Law Theory Workshop at Hebrew University (April 2015). I thank the participants for the valuable discussions. I am also grateful to Stephen Darwall, Anthony Duff, David Enoch, Anna Finkelstern, Alon Harel, Miguel Herstein, Michael Ignatieff, Uri D. Leibowitz, Timothy Macklem, Joseph Raz, Irit Samet, Eloise Scotford, Re-em Segev, Assaf Sharon, Matthew N. Smith, Michal Shur-Ofri, Lorenzo Zucca and the referee for Philosophical Studies.
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Herstein, O.J. Understanding standing: permission to deflect reasons. Philos Stud 174, 3109–3132 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0849-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0849-2