Deference as a normative power

Much of the literature on practical authority concerns the authority of the state over its subjects—authority to which we are, as G. E. M. Anscombe says, subject “willy nilly”. Yet many of our “willy” (or voluntary) relationships also seem to involve the exercise of practical authority, and this species of authority is in some ways even more puzzling than authority willy nilly. In this paper I argue that voluntary authority relies on a form of voluntary obligation that is akin (in some respects) to the kind of obligation one undertakes in making a promise. Voluntary authority depends, that is, on the possibility of taking on certain obligations more or less at will. It is generated through an interpersonal transaction that involves a directed act of deference, on one side, paired with appropriate uptake of that deference, on the other. Deference, in the relevant sense, should be understood as a normative power that is exercised when agents transfer deliberative discretion to others, undertaking directed obligations to treat others’ directives as content-independent and peremptory reasons. Voluntary authority, thus understood, is both grounded in and constrained by the equal moral authority or autonomy of the participants, since only autonomous agents have the standing to defer in a normatively significant way.     

Practical Identities and Autonomy: Korsgaard's Reformation of Kan's Moral Philosophy

Kant has long been taxed with an inability to explain the detailed normative content of our lives by making universalizability the sole arbiter of our values. Korsgaard addresses one form of this critique by defending a Kantian theory amended by a seemingly attractive conception of practical identities. Identities are dependent on the contingent circumstances of each person's world. Hence, obligations issuing from them differ from Kantian moral obligations in not applying to all persons. Still, Korsgaard takes Kantian autonomy to mean the normativity of all obligations is rooted in universalizability. The wealth of values informing our lives is thus said to be accommodated within a Kantian framework.
After briefly explaining Korsgaard's understanding of practical identities and their role in her reformation of Kant's moral philosophy, I argue that she gives an inadequate explanation of how the obligations that arise from a person's practical identities derive their authority from the person's will. I then consider how her position might be developed to meet this objection in accordance with her allegiance to "constructivism" and I argue that the epistemic commitments of people's actual identities makes it unlikely that such a development could preserve Kantian autonomy as she interprets it.     

Morality and our self-concept

Conclusion One of the most important aspects of our lives is the conception which we have of ourselves. For the way in which we view ourselves fundamentally affects how we interact among others and, most importantly perhaps, how we think others should treat us. For instance, one will not expect others to regard one as having a high mathematical acumen if one. realizes that one's mathematical skills are very minimal. Again, one will not expect others to regard one as a talented artist if one realizes that one is not. And so on. What is more, not every person can rightly take him-or herself to be talented in this or that area. And given that this is so, what inevitably follows is that the self-esteem of some will be lower than the self-esteem of others, and rightly so. But if I have argued soundly in this essay, we have seen that there is a respect in which no person rightly thinks less of him-or herself vis à vis any other person. For each person, it has been shown, is deserving of fair treatment in virtue of the fact that he or she is a person. I have called the sense of worth which corresponds with having this conviction self-respect. Whatever a person's abilities are, whatever a person's moral character is like, he should not lose sight of the fact that he is deserving of fair treatment in any case. The social institutions of a society are fairly arranged, I have argued, when they are conducive to persons having this conviction.Little has been said on the connection between morality and our self-concept. And if anything, I have only touched the surface of what needs to be said.

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Normativity and Interpersonal Reasons

What is one who takes normativity seriously to do if normativity can neither be discovered lurking out there in the world independently of us nor can it be sufficiently grasped from a merely explanatory perspective? One option is to accept that the normative challenge cannot be met and to retreat to some form of moral skepticism. Another possibility has recently been proposed by Christine Korsgaard in The Sources of Normativity where she aims to develop an account of normativity which is grounded in autonomy. Furthermore, she argues that on her account reasons are "essentially public" and that this captures how it is that we can obligate one another. In this paper I argue that there is a serious tension between her account of normativity and the publicity of reasons-namely, that if reasons are essentially public, then it is not possible for individuals to legislate laws for themselves. However, I then argue that if we revise her conception of normativity such that it is understood to involve collective rather than individual legislation that it may then be possible to account for interpersonal reasons.     

Against Doxastic Compatibilism

William Alston has argued that the so‐called deontological conception of epistemic justification, on which epistemic justification is to be spelled out in terms of blame, responsibility, and obligations, is untenable. The basic idea of the argument is that this conception is untenable because we lack voluntary control over our beliefs and, therefore, cannot have any obligations to hold certain beliefs. If this is convincing, however, the argument threatens the very idea of doxastic responsibility. For, how can we ever be responsible for our beliefs if we lack control over them? Several philosophers have argued that the idea that we bear responsibility for our beliefs can be saved, because absence of voluntary control over our beliefs is perfectly compatible with having obligations to hold particular beliefs. With others, I call this view ‘doxastic compatibilism’. It comes in two varieties. On the first variety, doxastic obligations do not require any kind of doxastic control whatsoever. I argue that this variety of doxastic compatibilism fails because it confuses doxastic responsibility with other closely related phenomena. On the second variety, doxastic obligations do not require voluntary doxastic control, but only compatibilist doxastic control (roughly, reason‐responsiveness) and we do in fact have such control. I grant that we have such control, but also argue that having such control is insufficient for bearing doxastic responsibility. The plausibility of the examples put forward by doxastic compatibilists in support of the claim that it is sufficient for doxastic responsibility derives from the fact that in these examples, the subjects have control over factors that influence what they believe rather than control over those beliefs themselves.     

Kant and the demandingness of the virtue of beneficence

We discuss Kant's conception of beneficence against the background of the overdemandingness debate. We argue that Kant's conception of beneficence constitutes a sweet spot between overdemandingness and undemandingness. To this end, we defend four key claims that together constitute a novel interpretation of Kant's account of beneficence: (1) For the same reason that we are obligated to be beneficent to others, we are permitted to be beneficent to ourselves; (2) we can prioritise our own ends; (3) it is more virtuous to do more rather than less when it comes to helping others; and (4) indifference to others is vicious. Finally, we explain how this represents a system of duties that gives our personal ends a moral standing without unacceptably moralising them.     

Self-Knowledge of Personality: Do People Know Themselves?

The intuition that we have privileged and unrestricted access to ourselves – that we inevitably know who we are, how we feel, what we do, and what we think – is very compelling. Here, we review three types of evidence about the accuracy of self-perceptions of personality and conclude that the glass is neither full nor empty. First, studies comparing self-perceptions of personality to objective criteria suggest that self-perceptions are at least tethered to reality – people are not completely clueless about how they behave, but they are also far from perfect. Second, studies examining how well people’s self-perceptions agree with others’ perceptions of them suggest that people’s self-views are not completely out of synch with how they are seen by those who know them best, but they are also far from identical. Third, studies examining whether people know the impressions they make on others suggest that people do have some glimmer of insight into the fact that others see them differently than they see themselves but there is still a great deal people do not know about how others see them. The findings from all three approaches point to the conclusion that self-knowledge exists but leaves something to be desired. The status of people’s self-knowledge about their own personality has vast implications both for our conception of ourselves as rational agents and for the methods of psychological inquiry.     

Subjectivism about Future Reasons or The Guise of Caring *

According to Parfit one of the main weaknesses of subjectivism is its inability to account for our intuition that future reasons have present authority. Parfit is only partly right about the contours of our intuition however he does have a point: sometimes our future reasons do have authority in current deliberation. Subjectivists who grappled with his challenge have organized themselves along two battle lines: those who think that only current desires are fundamental sources of reasons and those who think that future desires are also fundamental sources of reasons. I belong to the first camp but I believe that focusing on the question of fundamentality obscures the real issue. The key to addressing Parfit's challenge is to shift our focus to a different question. We should ask ourselves what are the best policies to adopt towards our future reasons. Using resources developed by Bratman and Raz, and building on the insight that we often fail to recognize our true current concerns, I argue that we are sometimes justified in thinking of, and therefore treating, our future reasons as having present authority.     

Empathy and a Life of Moral Endeavor

Over the course of her career, Jean Harvey contributed many invaluable insights that help to make sense of both injustice and resistance. Specifically, she developed an account of what she called “civilized oppression,” which is pernicious in part because it can be difficult to perceive. One way that we ought to pursue what she calls a “life of moral endeavor” is by increasing our perceptual awareness of civilized oppression and ourselves as its agents. In this article I argue that one noxious form of civilized oppression is what Miranda Fricker calls “testimonial injustice.” I then follow Harvey in arguing that one of the methods by which we should work to avoid perpetrating testimonial injustice is by empathizing with others. This is true for two reasons. The first is that in order to manifest what Fricker calls the virtue of testimonial justice, we must have a method by which we “correct” our prejudices or implicit biases, and empathy serves as such a corrective. The second is that there are cases where the virtue of testimonial justice wouldn't in fact correct for testimonial injustice in the way that Fricker suggests, but that actively working to empathize would.     

Epistemic Generation in Memory

Does memory only preserve epistemic justification over time, or can memory also generate it? I argue that memory can generate justification based on a certain conception of mnemonic content. According to it, our memories represent themselves as originating on past perceptions of objective facts. If this conception of mnemonic content is correct, what we may believe on the basis of memory always includes something that we were not in a position to believe before we utilised that capacity. For that reason, memory can produce justification for belief through the process of remembering. This is why a subject may be justified in believing a proposition on the basis of memory even if, in the past, she was not justified in believing it through any other source. The resulting picture of memory is a picture wherein the epistemically generative role of memory turns out to be grounded on its intentionally generative role.     

Aesthetic Experience in Shaftesbury: Anthony Savile

(1) If Shaftesbury is to be seen as the doyen of modern aesthetics, his most valuable legacy to us may not so much be his viewing aesthetic response as a sui generis disinterested delight as his insistence on its turning 'wholly on [experience of] what is exterior and foreign to ourselves'. Not that we cannot experience ourselves, or what is our own, as a source of such admiration. Rather our responses, favourable or no, are improperly grounded in any essentially reflexive, or first-personal, ways of taking what engages us. The suggestion is tested against the case of Narcissus. (2) Glauser interestingly emphasizes Shaftesbury's neo-Platonic conception of a hierarchy of aesthetic experience that culminates in the joyful contemplation of God. That hierarchy must be something that is less unitary and systematic than Shaftesbury himself had supposed, even when his emphasis on the tie between aesthetic pleasure and contemplative experience is allowed to extend beyond perception and to encompass episodes of thought itself.     

What is to be done?

The overriding question in contemporary philosophy is as follows: We now have a reasonably well-established conception of the basic structure of the universe. But it is not at all easy to reconcile the basic facts we have come to know with a certain conception we have of ourselves, derived in part from our cultural inheritance but mostly from our own experience. Various aspects of this question are examined, concerning consciousness, intentionality, language, rationality, free will, society and institutions, politics, and ethics.     

Transparency and the KK Principle

An important question in epistemology is whether the KK principle is true, i.e., whether an agent who knows that p is also thereby in a position to know that she knows that p. We explain how a “transparency” account of self‐knowledge, which maintains that we learn about our attitudes towards a proposition by reflecting not on ourselves but rather on that very proposition, supports an affirmative answer. In particular, we show that such an account allows us to reconcile a version of the KK principle with an “externalist” or “reliabilist” conception of knowledge commonly thought to make that principle particularly problematic.     

Agency regarding our reasons

ABSTRACT

How much control do we have over our reasons for action? Not much, but some. We all have reasons to avoid pain and not to inflict it on others. What explains our shared reasons? On an externalist account, reasons are grounded in values. All reasons are external to agency. This ensures that reasons are universal, so it is an attractive feature of moral and prudential reasons. However, when our reasons differ this is less attractive. In some cases, it seems like something internal to the agent makes all the difference. There are many valuable things, but an agent can only come to care about a small set of those things. Consider your reasons that stem from your love of philosophy or punk rock. Here it seems we make some reasons our reasons by becoming committed to them. I call these our agential reasons. We express our agency by coming to care about some things in ways not required by rationality. Unlike, matters of taste though, these are not bare preferences we just find ourselves having. Rather these concerns are cultivated over time. We express rational agency by incorporating particular values into our lives.     

Technological Presence: Actuality and Potentiality in Subject Constitution

Technical mediation shapes our experience of the world, but it also shapes our experience of ourselves. In this paper, I argue that in order to understand the latter aspect of technical mediation, we need to expand on notions of technical mediation that focuses on actual use, and bring in possible use as well. The concept of technical mediation must therefore be grounded in a more general concept of technological presence. This concept indicates that technology harbours both actuality and potentiality, the latter denoting that technologies offer possible actions, through which we realise specific actions, and, more importantly, realise ourselves; it is through the technological presence in our lifeworld we are able to recognise our own possibilities to be in and act in the lifeworld. The technologically revealed possibilities enable the subject to be constituted in a temporal forward-directedness, so that technological potentiality becomes co-constitutive of the subjects that we are and may become.     

Demandingness and Boundaries Between Persons

ABSTRACT

Demandingness objections to consequentialism often claim that consequentialism underestimates the moral significance of the stranger/special other distinction, mistakenly extending to strangers demands it is proper for special others to make on us, and concluding that strangers may properly demand anything of us if it increases aggregate goodness. This argument relies on false assumptions about our relations with special others. Boundaries between ourselves and special others are both a common and a good-making feature of our relations with them. Hence, demandingness objections that rely on the argument in question fail. But the same observations about our relations with special others show that there are many demands special others may not properly make, and since we cannot be more guilty of unjustified partiality in insisting on boundaries between ourselves and strangers than on boundaries between ourselves and special others, there are – as demandingness objections maintain – some demands strangers may not properly make on us.     

Legitimate Political Authority and Sovereignty: Why States Cannot be the Whole Story

States are believed to be the paradigmatic instances of legitimate political authority. But is their prominence justified? The classic concept of state sovereignty predicts the danger of a fatal deadlock among conflicting authorities unless there is an ultimate authority within a given jurisdiction. This scenario is misguided because the notion of an ultimate authority is conceptually unclear. The exercise of authority is multidimensional and multiattributive, and to understand the relations among authorities we need to analyse this complexity into its different aspects. Instead of ultimate authorities we can have actors endowed with superior authority over others in one regard, but not necessarily in another. And this limited superiority is sufficient for resolving conflicts. There is no need for ultimate authorities. Having discarded the notion of sovereignty we can embrace a different conception of legitimate authority, one that is not interested in the pedigree of actors, but in their capacity to serve its subjects. If states wish to retain their central role in the domain of political authority, they will have to earn it.     

Hypocrisy,Standing to Blame and Second-Personal Authority

This paper identifies why hypocrites lack the standing to blame others for certain wrongs. By identifying problems with thinking of hypocritical blame as inappropriate and examining how the concept of standing is used in other contexts, I argue that we should think of standing to blame as a status that grants agents a normative power. Using Darwall's account of second-personal obligations, I argue that hypocrites lack the standing to blame because they lack the authority to blame. Hypocrites lack this authority because they fail to accept other people's second-personal authority to make similar demands on them.     

Pluralistic folk psychology and varieties of self-knowledge: an exploration

Turning the techniques we use to understand other people onto ourselves can provide an insight into the types of self-knowledge that may be possible for us. Adopting Pluralistic Folk Psychology, according to which we understand others not primarily by thinking about invisible beliefs and desires that cause behavior, but instead by modeling others as people - with rich characters, relationships, past histories, cultural embeddedness, personality traits, and so forth. A preliminary investigation shows that we understand ourselves at least in terms of our phenomenal states, informational states, perceptual states, traits, desires, and beliefs. I then appeal to empirical research to examine the accuracy of our sense of self-understanding in these ways, and argue that these are often non-veridical. Moreover, in our folk practices, we do not take our statements of self-understanding as infallible, but we allow others to help us see ourselves. While there is room for some improvement in our acurarcy, I conclude that our sense of self is largely a joint construct of self and others, and that looping effects play a significant role in what one’s self turns out to be. The self is a fluid thing that we are constantly creating through our actions and self-constituting thoughts, but it is a creation we do not make alone. Others help to create us, as we help to create them.