Pettit :: On Three Dogmas of Normativity
- authors
- Pettit, Philip
- url
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/japp.12629
Related: normativity
Pettit's commentary on Ruth Chang's paper. The latter describes three dogmas that come up when reasoning about norms, and offers counters for each of them.
ruth chang's three defenses against the dogmas:
when something is normatively right or good, that is only relative to "ordinary substantive normative considerations"
what does this mean???
in goodness comparisions, there are gt, lt, eq, and "par"
????
we can "commit" to a good, ie what is good is "under our direct volitional control"
pettit argues that "at least two" of these are defensible on the grounds of a naturalistic account of normativity (which is apparently different from what chang uses).
said naturalistic account:
social creatures
want 2 b seen 2 b reliable
do thing called "commit" as a signal
"commit" is a move that one does by holding / pursuing a desire robustly
flip robust attraction and and commitment - and characterize robustly desirable things as things "worth committing to"
work this out??? is this modus tollens?
call common properties of desirable things "values"
will hold different sets of values in different commissive contexts
convergently or concordantly valued properties get moral status
This sounds like "discovering what is generally true about wanting and calling it a value (or a moral value if it's general enough)"; I guess the special bit is filtering it through signalling.
We can see this an answer to the question of why we see virtue ethics in the wild.
It also parallels the builder-assistant language. Both are stories about why we see some intersubjective truth in the wild, and both are in many ways the same story. In the center of the builder-assistant language is a coordination game and in the center of the norm writing is a stag-hare game.
Per this account, you could say that political conservatism is aimed at preserving values by enforcing norms.
Dietrich & List gives us a properties mechanism that in fact fits neatly into this norms-genesis story, even though it seems like they originally wrote the properties story to discuss homo reciprocalis or characterise altruistic concern as a primitive / atomic value.