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Normative concepts and the return to Eden

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Abstract

Imagine coming across an alternative community such that, while they have normative terms like 'ought' with the same action-guiding roles and relationships to each other, their normative terms come to pick out different properties. When we come across such a community, or even just imagine it, those of us who strive to be moral and rational want to ask something like the following: Further Question: Which set of concepts ought we use—theirs or ours? The problem, first raised by Eklund (Choosing normative concepts. Oxford University Press, 2017), is that on almost any metasemantic theory, Further Question cannot be stated in a way that captures the spirit of what we want to ask. This is because any way of asking the question makes use of our own normative concepts, and thus their reference is already fixed on the properties that our current normative concepts refer to. Any purported solution to this problem must meet two conditions. First, it must capture the spirit of what Further Question is intuitively attempting to ask. Second, it must reframe the inquiry in a way that makes the answer neither trivial nor ineffable. In this paper, I propose a solution to this problem by appeal to edenic representation, inspired by, but not identical to, Chalmers’ (The character of consciousness. Oxford University Press, 2010) notion of edenic content. The rough idea here is that representation is edenic to the extent that the representational vehicle mirrors, in quality and structure, the represented property. I argue that a reframing of Further Question in terms of edenic representation can capture the spirit of the question, without collapsing it into a question with a trivial or ineffable answer. Thus, the realist about normative properties can face the problem of the alternative normative community head on, without collapsing into incoherence or triviality. If correct, this solution is of further interest to any metanormative realist concerned with metasemantic questions, because it can tell us more about how the proper representation of the robustly normative would look.

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Notes

  1. Horgan and Timmons (1992).

  2. Of course, as Horgan and Timmons (1992) and Eklund (2017) both note, a closely related challenge against realism about normative concepts was raised by Hare (1952).

  3. Horgan and Timmons (1991).

  4. Boyd (1988), Sturgeon (1985) and Brink (1989).

  5. Putnam (1975).

  6. Eklund (2017), 2–3.

  7. Shafer-Landau (2003, 15).

  8. See Eklund (2017, Ch. 1) for the rough characterization I am trying to precisify. See also Street’s (2006, section 7) notion of “genuine realism” for what I take to be a similar characterization.

  9. Eklund also helps himself to this kind of talk in setting up the problem, while also acknowledging that it is a bit of a cheat (2017, 2, ch.1 fn8).

  10. It could be thought that these complications are more than just complications, but a serious problem with stating Deep Stance-Independence. Given what I say below in response to Eklund’s metasemantic challenge, I think we could, if we wanted, restate Deep Stance-Independence in terms of edenic representation (ostending the demandingness phenomenology). And I think there will be parallel restatements for other ways of responding to Eklund. But as I don’t want to help myself to my own solution here, I instead speak in terms of Deep Stance-Independence, despite its problems. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me to make this commitment clear.

  11. As it turns out, the majority of Ardent Realists are non-naturalists. But there is no incoherency in being a naturalist Ardent Realist, even a reductive naturalist Ardent Realist; neither is there any incoherency in being a non-naturalist who rejects Ardent Realism. For an instance of the former, consider a hedonist utilitarian who thinks that there is something about the nature or essence of pleasure and pain (construed as natural properties) that makes them normative in a Deep Stance-Independent way (e.g. Bramble, 2013); for an instance of the latter, consider—on at least one interpretation—Scanlon (2014).

  12. I thank Matti Eklund and Tristram McPherson for helpful discussion here with disentangling these challenges.

  13. Eklund (2017) raises the metaphysical challenge on p. 42, and the epistemic challenge (“a new kind of normative skepticism”) on pp. 12–15.

  14. As an anonymous referee pointed out, even asking these questions presupposes an answer to the third, metasemantic challenge, that Eklund raises. Without it, these questions couldn’t be sensibly and non-trivially asked. But I take it that the challenges, as well as the responses to them can proceed as if an answer to the metasemantic challenge can be given.

  15. Dasgupta (2017); see also Dasgupta (2018).

  16. McPherson and Plunkett (2021).

  17. For a response to the effect that Dasgupta’s argument is unfair to the non-naturalist, see Gratvol (ms). For some responses to Eklund that provide the materials necessary for responding to Dasgupta as well, see Leary (forthcoming), McPherson (2020). As for the Epistemic Challenge, McPherson and Plunkett (2021) themselves provide a response on behalf of the realist.

  18. Call a system of normative concepts self-affirming just in case they recommend their own usage. Notice that if OUGHT and OUGHT* are both part of self-affirming systems, then they will both recommend their own usage, and thus we will fail to make any progress on breaking the symmetry between ourselves and Alternative.

  19. This, in simpler form, is a version of McPherson’s (2021) response to Eklund.

  20. I thank an anonymous referee for pointing this out.

  21. Leary (forthcoming), McPherson (2020), McPherson and Plunkett (2021).

  22. Thanks to an anonymous referee for noting that some versions of CRS will not solve the problem, and that referential normativity is a specific version of CRS that can only undercut Alternative because of its details.

  23. See Wedgwood (2007) and Eklund (2017), Sect. 2.6 and chapter 3.

  24. Eklund (2017), Ch. 3.

  25. Schroeter and Schroeter (2003), Sinclair (2018) and Werner (2020).

  26. Peacocke (1992). A naturalist CRS may also incorporate first order platitudes related to the concept, such as on Jackson’s moral functionalism (1998). But this won’t be compatible with denying Alternative, nor with Referential Normativity, since by hypothesis the platitudes that ourselves and the Alternative community endorse will be different.

  27. Brandom (1994).

  28. For a similar kind of argument, see Werner (2020, pp.145–146).

  29. See n.29.

  30. Eklund (2017, 28–30) and Sider (2009).

  31. Lewis (1983, 1984), Fine (1994) and Sider (2012).

  32. Goodman (1955).

  33. This problem, albeit in a subtler form, appears to me to arise for Leary’s (forthcoming) response to Eklund’s challenge, at least if we see her as responding (in part) to the metasemantic challenge. I think her response is wholly adequate to address the metaphysical challenge.

  34. I won’t here attempt a precise elucidation of “fundamentality”. The rough idea—that a property is fundamental just in case it is not grounded in anything else, or a property is more fundamental than another just in case it is closer to this metaphysical bedrock—suffices for present purposes.

  35. Eklund (2017), 30.

  36. See, for example, Moore (1903), Fitzpatrick (2008), Hampton (2009), Enoch (2011), and Parfit (2011).

  37. Bedke (2020) also discusses this authoritative mode of presentation in his explication of Parfit’s “Normativity Objection”.

  38. Bedke (2019), 123.

  39. Chalmers (2010), 381.

  40. Chalmers (2010), 411.

  41. For this reason, my precisification of edenic content differs from Cutter’s (2017, 2298).

  42. Thanks to (removed for anonymity) for pressing this objection.

  43. Thanks to (removed for anonymity) for discussion here.

  44. Though see Audi (2013).

  45. See Kriegel (forthcoming) for an overview.

  46. Mandelbaum (1955).

  47. Mackie (1977), 6.

  48. Audi (2013), 40.

  49. See also Kriegel (forthcoming), pp. 3–4 for a phenomenal contrast argument attempting to illustrate the uniqueness of moral phenomenology, which is a variant of a case from Brentano (1889).

  50. Street (2006), 126. She intends these remarks to be metaethically neutral.

  51. This is not to assume some version of sentimentalism about moral experiences; it only assumes that the emotions are often and paradigmatically engaged in moral experiences.

  52. Shafer-Landau (2003), 110.

  53. Dancy (1993), 173.

  54. Enoch (2011), 72. Enoch (2011) is a good example of an ardent realist, since, while is explicitly a non-naturalist, he notes that he would be willing to accept any naturalist view that could vindicate the indispensability considerations that he raises (Enoch 2011, 10).

  55. Parfit (2011).

  56. I thank an anonymous referee for stressing the importance of this claim and encouraging me to defend it in more depth.

  57. See Siegel (2010) for discussion of phenomenal contrast arguments.

  58. Thanks to an anonymous referee for making this problem clear to me. There may, of course, be other questions about the reliable match between our conceptual network and the metaphysical relations of the normative properties, but these questions will not be unique to my account, nor do they require Eklund’s Alternative to be raised, so I set them aside in what follows.

  59. And as Eklund himself points out, it isn’t even clear that conceptual role semantics can escape the spirit of Alternative. See Eklund (2017), Sect. 3.5.

  60. There are some murky questions here about this claim’s relationship to various kinds of representationalism, according to which there is a tight connection between phenomenal character and representational content. I can’t fully address these relationships here (but see also Sect. 4), but I don’t think my claim in the text requires anything but a very weak and defeasible form of representationalism, according to which we have at least prima facie reason to think that phenomenal character and representational content are somehow connected to each other.

  61. The question does not assume this, but it doesn’t deny it either; as noted in 3.2, I am silent on Chalmers’ (2010) idea that edenic representation serves as a regulative ideal on content-fixing.

  62. I hope the reader will forgive the slight cheating I am doing here by gesturing toward the edenic representation using our normative concepts. I hope that it is clear that these are just being used to explain the solution, not as part of the statement of the solution.

  63. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing this point, as well as encouraging the above discussion of phenomenal inferentialism.

  64. Bedke (2019).

  65. See Bourget and Mendelovici (2019) for an overview.

  66. Bedke (2020) also suggests that something like this intuition may be what is behind the common non-naturalist refrain that the normative properties are “just too different” from the natural properties. As Bedke argues, it appears that the most plausible way to cash these kinds of claims out is to claim that our normative concepts somehow directly reveal to us the nature of their referents, such that we can know from conceptual competence alone that if they pick out anything, they pick out non-natural properties.

  67. Eklund (2017), 43.

  68. See Farkas (2008) for a defense.

  69. Neil Sinhababu’s (ms) “experientialist” metasemantics for goodness and badness meet this description, according to which the phenomenological nature of empathy and horror determine their referents such that moral twin earth cases cannot arise. Sinhababu also appeals to edenic content, though for the different, and much more ambitious purpose, of defending hedonism about goodness and badness.

  70. There is an interesting parallel here worth exploring, but which I don’t have space to explore here, between this response and another issue where what we want to say appears to transcend our metasemantic abilities. Putnam (1981) infamously argued that many skeptical scenarios are actually incoherent for metasemantic reasons. Assuming some version of content externalism, if we were brains in vats, none of our concepts could refer to the relevant external world properties (vats, chairs, hands), and thus the skeptical hypothesis could not be coherently formulated—VATS would refer to such-and-such-neural-stimulation, and we would clearly have knowledge of such things even as brains in vats.

    Many have found this purported refutation of skepticism lacking, but it is unclear exactly where it goes wrong. Horgan et al. (2004)—who have done some of the most influential work on phenomenal intentionality—argue that the refutation fails because it fails to take into account the fact that phenomenology constrains the eligible referents of our concepts. Once these constraints are taken into account in accordance with a moderate version of Phenomenal Intentionality, we can once again frame the skeptical scenario in a way that respects its intuitive pull. If one is convinced by Horgan et al.’s arguments, then this may provide all the more reason to say something similar in the case of Eklund, thus endorsing a version of the Ambitious Response.

  71. Of course I have a theoretical preference for the Modest Response, since I am unsympathetic to the Strong Phenomenal Intentionality Thesis. But this clearly turns on issues far to large to defend here.

  72. See, for example, Scanlon’s discussion of Korsgaard’s (1996) “normative question” (Scanlon, 2014, Ch.1).

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Acknowledgements

For detailed feedback on previous versions of this paper, I am very grateful to Matt Bedke, Aaron Elliott, David Enoch, Matti Eklund, Ben Henke, Noga Gratvol, Nick Laskowski, Bar Luzon, Adam Patterson, Byron Simmons, as well as two anonymous referees from Philosophical Studies. I am also thankful to audiences at the “What is Normativity” Frankfurt Metaethics conference and the Language, Logic, and Cognition Center at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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    Preston J. Werner

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Werner, P.J. Normative concepts and the return to Eden. Philos Stud 179, 2259–2283 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01762-6

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