I confess that when it comes to discussions of normativity and ethics in philosophy I immediately find myself baffled and suspicious. Baffled because I’ve always had a difficult time understanding why people get interested in these issues. While I can certainly understand eudaimonistic ethics and ethics geared towards happiness, it is difficult for me to escape the impression that ethics and normatively driven political philosophy are ephemera that fail to get at the real root of the issues. If my knee-jerk reaction is to think of political philosophy driven primarily by normative theories as ephemera, then this is because I get the sense that ethical debates are generally about something else. For example, take debates about freedom and autonomy in the United States. These debates present themselves as being about the preservation of “rights”, but aren’t they instead generally about economic issues? That is, far from being rarefied debates about the preservation of freedoms, it instead seems that these debates are about preserving the hegemony of certain interests. The free market is presented as something that benefits everyone, that is available to everyone, when in fact it is instead something that benefits a select group and functions to reproduce a particular social organization. Discourses about freedom thus function as a sort of rhetoric that prevents discussion of the real set of issues or what is really at stake.
If I tend to be suspicious of discourses of normativity, then this suspicion arises for similar reasons. Those who speak loudest about issues of values and moral issues so often strike me, following Nietzsche, to be those who either a) secretly desire to exercise power over others by stacking the deck in their favor, or b) to be in the grips of excessive passions that they themselves are struggling against and projecting on to others. Again and again we see moralists guilty of the very things they claim to be denouncing in the public sphere. Moreover, it is difficult to escape the impression that the so-called “values” discourse in the United States is about maintaining class privilege over other groups and maintaining the sovereignity of men over women. This is something that I have experienced throughout my life from both moralists and ethical theorists. It is difficult for me to escape the impression, then, that these discussions are smokescreens or red herrings, diverting from the real struggle being engaged. Michael Foucault, Naomi Klein, Judith Butler, Marx, and Gloria Steinem do far more to produce just change, it seems to me, through their analysis of the dynamics of power and the interests involved than do the moralists. When did moralism ever prevent a single death? When did a normative theory ever present a holocaust? When did an ethical theory ever halt a single despotic government? If anything, it seems to me, we instead always see normative discourse on the side of the despots and sadists.
I suppose that I am writing this post because, after endless debates with the defenders of Kant who seem so concerned with these issues of normativity, I still find myself thoroughly perplexed by what, precisely, it is that they’re defending. I simply don’t understand their position or why they find it convincing. What is it I’m missing? What force do they find in normativity that I do not discern? I pose this question with all honesty and from a place of genuine befuddlement. Is not the normative theorist ultimately making a causal claim or a claim about what would be the case if only people assented to these things? And isn’t that ultimately an empirically testable hypothesis? What am I missing?
Larval Subjects . 
August 11, 2009 at 3:29 am
I can’t answer for the defenders of Kant, but I can tell you why I think normativity is so important.
The extremely brief version is that normativity is prior to everything we theorize about, including ontology. Normativity is at work when we choose our methods and metaphors, and when we evaluate what resonates with us and what doesn’t.
Further, normativity is the opening by which we flies are most likely to get trapped in the bottle. Most often, this trap seems to occur because we are looking for a foundation for our systems. If the foundation is X, we can ask why X is better. If the answer is Y, we can ask why we chose Y, and so on, forever.
My personal feeling is that we don’t understand normativity, as it occurs in all living systems, very well. It is the 21st century, and we still have arguments about moral realism, moral absolutism, determinism, whether aesthetic judgements play a role in morality, what emotion’s role in morality is, etc. Most of these questions, it seems to me, are shots in the dark.
So to me, normativity is even more important than ontology. And like some of the moves that you have discussed in ontology, I believe that the study of normativity needs to be pulled loose from its foundationalist foundations, opened up to scientific methodologies as well as the more ruminative ones that we’ve favored to date, and untethered from human-centric hegemony.
After we’ve learned some things about normativity, I think we’ll be able to come up with more satisfying answers to larger political/ethical questions. And we’ll know *why* those answers are so satisfying :).
August 11, 2009 at 5:06 am
I think there is a distinction to be made here between normative theories and metanormative theories. Championing certain values–equality, feminism, the right to life, patriarchy, or whatever–counts as a normative move. In doing so, we are making claims about what we ought to think or do. In the same way, arguing about what the word ‘Christianity’ means, determining whether belief in Higgs bosons is jutified, or considering whether the White House is beautiful, would all be normative matters too. The point of these activities is often to try to settle what would be best for us to do. But when normativity comes up in philosophical discussion, it is only sometimes this sort of first-order issue that is at stake (the clearest example being ethics, where often philosophers are directly arguing about what we ought to do).
When normativity has come up in relation to discussions of speculative realism and OOP, it is usually metanormative issues which are in play. Metanormative questions concern the nature of first-order normativity. For example: Do ethical arguments presuppose facts about rightness
independent of how we think, feel or act? What is it for a belief to be justified — being formed through a reliable process, the consent of a community, conformity to the canons of scientific methodology, endorsement by an ideal observer, or something else? Does it even make sense to say we ought to act or think in a certain way? Or even ‘ Is not the normative theorist ultimately making a causal claim or a claim about what would be the case if only people assented to these things?’ (And to which I think the answer is ‘No!’, but that’s a debate for another day.) Asking these sorts of question need not peg someone as a moralist, although many people have been suspicious of the idea that normative and metanormative inquiry can go on entirely separately.
I think some of the suspicion concerning new forms of realism in continental philosophy arises from either its seeming lack of concern with these questions or its giving a nihilistic dismissal of them (e.g. Brassier — though I wish his book wasn’t so expensive so I could actually read all the details).
This is particularly pressing insofar as many people (like Asher Kay above) think that metanormative questions are prior to metaphysical ones. The thought here is that all inquiry implicitly assumes some standards which inquirers treat as demonstrating whether they are making progress. (This is, of course, not to say that they need a whole epistemology before they start: there does not have to be any ‘knowing before one knows’ as Hegel puts it.) I think the worry would be that the new realisms have not indicated how they will vindicate any such standards, even in the long run. The more eliminativist strands of SR in particular, with their sparser versions of materialism, may have trouble in doing this — in denying any robust ethical normativity, they may cut off the branch they are sitting on in respect of the theoretical norms required to articulate and assess their own position.
Previously, you’ve have set out what you’ve called a correlationist ethical approach, which joins a venerable tradition of ethical anti-realism. One question would be whether this is consistent with your ontology, where the propspects seems far rosier in light of the ontological pluralism of onticology. So, I think you’re in a more secure position than Brassier (and perhaps also Nick Srnicek) on this one.
August 11, 2009 at 7:28 am
if we ‘untether’ normativity from ‘human-centric hegemony’, I’ve a strong feeling that we might find that there’s nothing left?
August 11, 2009 at 10:09 am
I would actually agree that there is a good sense in which the philosophy of normativity is prior to ontology. Although I find Kay’s idea that there is animal normativity, and that all such normativity should be examined via broader, non-foundationalist, science-inspired methods somewhat puzzling.
I think the best point that can be made here is that there is more to normativity than ethical normativity. There is at least also rational normativity, which is prior to, and a necessary condition of, anything like ethical normativity. I would claim that it is indeed impossible to coherently deny the force of rational normativity. Regardless of the specific content of the fundamental norms of rationality (though we could suggest, for instance, the obligation to divest oneself of incompatible commitments), one must acknowledge that if one is engaged in an argument, then one is bound by norms which determine how the argument should take place, and that they are the same norms that one’s interlocutor is bound by. To put it another way, one may at time make claims like ‘well, I just use the word ‘justice” differently from you, but one cannot claim ‘I just argue differently than you do’.
This fact testifies to the binding character of certain fundamental norms that we implicitly acknowledge insofar as we engage in discourse at all. Some, myself included, think that this provides the possibility of a foundational approach in philosophy, in which deontology is indeed prior to ontology, grounded in that which none of us can deny insofar as we want to say anything at all. Whether or not such fundamental deontology can be extended beyond the theoretical into the realm of the practical and thus the ethical (as discourse ethicists like Habermas and Apel have attempted) is another matter.
There is of course still the question of how one reconciles this fundamental normativity with ontology, particularly with univocal ontology. Tom at grundlegung has already said a few things about these problems. I’m hoping to post something about this on my own blog shortly.
August 11, 2009 at 1:51 pm
[…] under Normativity Leave a Comment Tom of Grundledung writes a terrific response to my perplexity regarding issues of normativity. As Tom writes: When normativity has come up in relation to […]
August 11, 2009 at 5:24 pm
Tom: Point taken about metanormativity. What I’m seeking is a metanormative theory that gives us a field of play for normative theories.
deontologistics: I look forward to your blog post – make sure to give us a link.
Just to be clear, although I am saying “all such normativity should be examined via… science-inspired methods”, I’m *not* saying that those should be the only methods used. I would include logic amongst the “ruminative” methods. I do believe that things like logic and mathematics are largely metaphorical and don’t necessarily have any sort of primacy over other modes of thought. This is one of the reasons that I reject foundational approaches (I think origins are very important, but they don’t, in my view, constitute foundations). The other major reason is that I think foundational approaches involve us in the sorts of “infinite egress” situations that should indicate that we’re in the fly-bottle.
I don’t disagree that there might be fundamental norms. My guess is that if they exist, these will end up being more existential than rational.
2nd FADE: From my view, there is “better” and “worse” even for single-celled creatures. I don’t deny that there might be a whole lot less to say about normativity for amoebas than there is for human beings. But the basic idea of something as involved as happiness might apply to any number of higher-order creatures.
August 14, 2009 at 12:52 pm
[…] As Levi Bryant, a minor celebrity in the philosophically-inclined blogosphere, put it in a wonderful post on his Larval Subjects blog: Michael Foucault, Naomi Klein, Judith Butler, Marx, and Gloria Steinem do far more to produce just c… […]
June 24, 2010 at 8:34 am
[…] a passage I quote in the post from last year, Pete writes: I think the best point that can be made here is that there is more to normativity than ethical […]