Naturalism and Normativity

Mario De Caro, David Macarthur

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780231508872
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Realismo in filosofia

Normativity concerns what we ought to think or do and the evaluations we make. For example, we say that we ought to think consistently, we ought to keep our promises, or that Mozart is a better composer than Salieri. Yet what philosophical moral can we draw from the apparent absence of normativity in the scientific image of the world? For scientific naturalists, the moral is that the normative must be reduced to the nonnormative, while for nonnaturalists, the moral is that there must be a transcendent realm of norms.

Naturalism and Normativity engages with both sides of this debate. Essays explore philosophical options for understanding normativity in the space between scientific naturalism and Platonic supernaturalism. They articulate a liberal conception of philosophy that is neither reducible to the sciences nor completely independent of them—yet one that maintains the right to call itself naturalism. Contributors think in new ways about the relations among the scientific worldview, our experience of norms and values, and our movements in the space of reason. Detailed discussions include the relationship between philosophy and science, physicalism and ontological pluralism, the realm of the ordinary, objectivity and subjectivity, truth and justification, and the liberal naturalisms of Donald Davidson, John Dewey, John McDowell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

PART I

CONCEPTUAL AND HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

1

THE WIDER SIGNIFICANCE OF NATURALISM

A GENEALOGICAL ESSAY

Akeel Bilgrami

Some of the philosophical debates of our time are secular echoes, indeed secular descendants, of disputation some centuries ago that was no less intense and of measurably greater and more immediate public significance. If some of this sort of significance persists in our current debates, it is seldom on the surface. This is because of our tendency in analytic philosophy to view our metaphysical and epistemological concerns in relatively autonomous terms, unburdened by any political and cultural implication or fallout. Hence, such wider significance as might still exist can only be unearthed by paying some genealogical attention to the antecedent disputes in which the issues at stake loomed larger and more visibly in public and political life.

Though it is not by any means the only one that comes to mind, I will restrict my discussion to one example—the deep division among philosophers today over naturalism,¹ understood as the metaphysical claim that there is nothing in the world that is not countenanced by the methods of natural science.² Naturalism in this sense has evolved in recent years into a sophisticated doctrine, and with sophistication there has been a certain degree of acknowledgment that some concepts describing or expressing certain properties that are, on the face of it, nonnatural may not get a strict rendering into the conceptual vocabularies (physical, causal, functional) of the various natural sciences. Even so, naturalism posits various forms of systematic dependency relations in which these properties stand to the properties traversed by the explanatory methods of the natural sciences.³ No properties are allowed that do not stand in these dependency relations. The primary focus of the debate has been over value properties—with intentional properties of mind plausibly thought to be, for reasons that I won’t elaborate here, just a special case of value properties.⁴ In a word, the debate is over whether values are or are not reducible to (do or do not stand in systematic dependency relations with) natural properties as defined above.

This debate has a well-studied history within the confines of philosophy, and in that history the chief protagonists have been Hume and Kant and their many successors down to this day. On the Humean side, there is a conception of values in which they are considered largely to be a refinement of our desires. They are mental states we possess that, though they may be more reared in and geared to social relations and social constraints than other passions (as, for instance, in Hume’s elaboration of the notion of “sympathy” or in Adam Smith’s account of them as “moral sentiments”), they are nevertheless tendencies of our mentality. On the other side, finding all this too psychologistic and tied to human inclination, Kant had relegated morals to a “noumenal” status within “pure practical reason” whose relation to the perceptible world was rendered at least prima facie problematic. I want to steer past this canonical dispute between Humeans and Kantians and in its stead make my subject John McDowell’s conception of value because it helps to bring to the front much more specifically than either of those positions, a genealogy of the political and cultural significance of the vexed disagreement between “naturalists” (as I have defined the term) and their opponents.⁵

In the next section, I will motivate this conception of value and then, in the rest of the sections that follow, I will present the sort of genealogical analysis that displays the wider significance of the dispute about naturalism that this conception of value generates.

Let me motivate this conception of value via a dialectic that begins with a familiar distinction.

It is a relatively familiar point, sometimes attributed to Spinoza, that one cannot both intend to do something and predict that one will do it at the same time.⁶ When one predicts that one will do something, one steps outside of oneself and looks at oneself as the object of behavioral and causal and motivational tendencies. One looks at oneself as another might look at one, and so this is often called the “third-person point of view” on oneself. But when one intends to do something, one is asking “What should I do?” or “What ought I to do?”; one is being an agent not an observer of oneself, a subject rather than an object, and that is why this is sometimes known as a “first-person” perspective on oneself. Even when intentions to do something are formed without being deliberatively decisional answers to explicit questions of that form, they are distinctively within the first-person point of view by contrast with predictions of what one will do.

(A terminological aside: This vocabulary may be misleading since “first person” and “third person” can give the impression of being merely grammatical categories involving the first- and third-person pronoun, while the perspectival categories that the distinction between intention and prediction invoke are philosophical categories that do not coincide with the grammatical. Proof of this failure of coincidence can be found in examples such as when someone says, “I predict that I will…,” where the first occurrence of the first-person pronoun, “I,” is an agentive use and the second occurrence refers to oneself as an object of detached study or observation—raising hard questions, incidentally, about breezy assumptions we make about unproblematic anaphora in such cases. For this reason it may be sensible to replace the terms the “first-person” point of view and the “third-person” point of view with “the agent’s” or “the engaged” point of view and “the observer’s” or “the detached” point of view, respectively.)

With whatever terminology we describe it, the crucial point is that though one can and does have both these points of view on oneself, one cannot have both these points of view on oneself at the same time.

The distinction, as I have presented it so far, is a distinction regarding two perspectives or points of view on oneself. But there ought also to be a similar distinction that holds for perspectives we have on the world. We can have a detached perspective on it, a perspective of study as is paradigmatically found in natural science (though that is just one highly systematic form that that perspective takes), and we can have a perspective of agency on the world, one of responding to it with practical engagement rather than with detached observation and explanatory purpose.

(Here again there is scope for being misled. The point is not that we are not agents when we are observing and explaining the world in scientific terms but that we, as agents, are taking a perspective of detached observation or study on it rather than one of practical engagement. A scientist in her scientific observation and study does engage with the world and is an agent when she does so, but she does so with a perspective on the world that is detached. This point was already visible in the example I gave above when I was speaking of a third-person perspective one can take on oneself. When I say, “I predict that I will…,” the first use of the personal pronoun is an agentive one, but the fact is that, qua prediction, the angle I have taken on myself is that of detached observation rather than of agency, by contrast with when I say “I intend to…” Exactly the same point holds of one’s third-person perspective on the world. One does not cease to be an agent when one has a detached perspective on the world; one just treats the world as an object of detached study rather than as something that prompts our practical engagement.)

So, these contrasting points of view one has can apply to oneself as well as to the world. I want now to consider the latter and ask a crucial question: What must the world be like, what must the world contain, such that it moves us to such practical engagement, over and above detached observation and study? If the world prompts such engagement, it must contain elements over and above those we observe and study from a detached point of view. The obvious answer to the question is that over and above containing the facts that natural science studies it contains a special kind of fact, evaluative facts and properties, or, more simply, it contains values, and when we perceive them, they put normative demands to us and activate our practical engagement. Values, being the sort of thing they are, are not primarily the objects of detached observation; they engage with our first- rather than our third-person point of view on the world.

Thus if we extend in this way onto the world a presupposition of the fundamental distinction between intention and prediction (the presupposition of two contrasting perspectives that one can have on oneself), we get a conception of values that is neither Humean nor Kantian. We get a conception by which values are not merely something we generate with our mental tendencies and “project” onto the world (a favored metaphor among Humeans); instead, values are properties that are found in the world, a world of nature, of others who inhabit nature with us, and of a history and tradition that accumulates in the relations among these and within which value is understood as being “in the world.” So conceived, values are not dismissible either as mere inclinations, as Kant did of Hume’s psychologistic conception of values, nor (since they are perceptible properties in the world, precisely what Kant denied) are they dismissible as populating some gratuitous noumenal ontology of the pure and unencumbered will of “Practical Reason.” It is not as if sympathy and moral sentiments, much stressed by Humeans, are left out of this picture, but sympathy and moral sentiments, in this picture, are our responses to the normative demands that we apprehend in our perceptions of the evaluative properties of the world.

I have tried to motivate a view of value that places it in the world as flowing from our commonsensical commitments to agency. The motivation was presented in two stages: first, I said that if the distinction between intention and prediction presupposes a distinction between a first-person or agent’s point of view and a third-person or disengaged point of view that we can take on ourselves, then there ought to be a similar distinction of points of view that we can take upon the world; and second, if there is to be a first-person or agent’s point of view we can take on the world of the sort that we can take on ourselves, then the world must contain values that prompt such a point of view of agency to be activated in our agentive responses to them.

The notion of agency and its presuppositions, derived from the initial Spinozist distinction between intention and prediction, play a crucial role in the motivation for such a view of value. But a question might be raised: Why can’t agency consist in nothing more than the fact that we try and fulfill our desires, intentions, and so on. True, there is a first-person point of view that is activated and exercised in agency, but why can’t it simply be exercised in our efforts to satisfy our desires and fulfill our intentions? Why do I insist that agency comes into play only when our desires (and moral sentiments) are responding to the callings of something external, the evaluative properties in the world? To put it in terms of my two-stage dialectic for the motivation, the question is: It is true that the distinction between intention and prediction points to a distinction between the first- and third-person points of view on ourselves, but why am I insisting that there actually be a replication or version of this distinction in points of view we have on the world.

These are good questions and fruitful ones. Rather than the conception of agency just presented in the second stage, the idea of the world’s containing values that prompt such a point of view, they urge upon us much the more standard and much the more minimal and simple philosophical conception of practical agency, our capacity to act so as to fulfill our desires (on the basis of our beliefs about what will be a suitable available way to fulfill them). And by stressing this standard view of agency they resist the consequent of the conditional presented in the first stage, while granting the antecedent.

The questions, then, throw down the following challenge: The motivation I have presented for a conception of value that places values in the world depends on an unmotivated conception of agency as requiring an exercise of the first-person point of view conceived of as responses to normative demands from the world. According to this conception of agency, as I put it earlier, desires (including those desires that are loftier and amount to moral sentiments) are not self-standing but rather are responses to things in the world that have whatever it takes (evaluative properties) that prompt their activation. Why does this seem compulsory? Why can’t desires be thought of as self-standing? How can we motivate the denial of their self-standingness, philosophically?

To answer this, we need to look a little harder at the relationship between desires and agency. Gareth Evans once said illuminatingly that questions put to one about whether one believes something, say, whether it is raining outside, do not prompt us to scan our mental interiority, they prompt us to look outside and see whether it is raining.⁷ That is to say, one not only looks outside when one is asked, “Is it raining?” but also when one is asked, “Do you believe it is raining?”

Now, let’s ask: Is this true of questions put to one about whether one desires something? When someone asks one, “Do you desire x?” are we prompted to ponder our own minds or are we prompted to consider whether x is desirable? There may be special sorts of substitutions for x where we might ponder our own minds but for most substitutions, I think, we would consider x’s desirability. This suggests that our desires are presented to us as having desirabilities in the world as their objects.

If one thought this extension of Evans’s point wrong, if one thought that a question of that sort prompted one to step back and consider by scanning our minds what we desired (rather than to consider what was desirable), that would suggest instead that our desires were presented to us in a way such that what they were desires for was available to us only as something that we could have access to when we stepped back and pondered our own minds—in the third person. But now, if the presupposition of Spinoza’s point is right and if agency is present in the possession and exercise of the first-person rat...