Nicholas Southwood

Vindicating the Normativity of Rationality

Sometimes, talk of “rationality” is simply shorthand for “the requirements of practical and theoretical reason.” Thus, we might say that carrying malaria tablets in the Congo is “the rational thing to do,” that anyone with the benefit of exposure to modern science is “rationally required to believe that humans evolved from apes,” that opting to visit the dentist after a hiatus of ten years is “the only rational decision,” and so on. In each case, we mean to say that these are the things that we have most reason to do, believe, and intend, whether or not our doing so squares well with other psychological attitudes we happen to have. We would not withdraw the judgments if we became aware that the individuals to whom they applied happened to have other psychological attitudes that fell foul of them—say, beliefs about the appropriateness of traveling without medicines in Africa, or beliefs that entailed that humans evolved from spotted quolls, or intentions that would be better served by giving all dentists a wide berth. But the word “rationality” is also used by a number of philosophers in a quite different way, to pick out a concept that is tied much more

Contractualism and the foundations of morality

1. Introduction 2. The Limits of Hobbesian Contractualism 3. The Limits of Kantian Contractualism 4. The Structure of Deliberative Contractualism 5. The Normativity of Deliberative Contractualism 6. Getting Morality Right 7. Grounding Morality References

What Is Special about Human Rights

Human rights occupy a privileged position within contemporary politics. They are widely taken to constitute perhaps the most fundamental standards for evaluating the conduct of states with respect to persons residing within their borders. They are enshrined in numerous international documents, national constitutions, and treaties; and those that have been incorporated into international law are monitored and enforced by numerous international and regional institutional bodies. Human rights have been invoked to justify popular revolt, secession, large-scale political reform, as well as forms of international action ranging from the imposition of conditions on foreign assistance and loans to economic sanctions (as in South Africa and Burma) and military intervention (as in Kosovo and East Timor). Michael Ignatieff has gone so far as to claim that human rights have become “the major article of faith of a secular culture that fears it believes in nothing else,” and one might add that they are articles of faith of many non-secular cultures, too.

Norms and conventions

What is the relation between norms (in the sense of ‘socially accepted rules’) and conventions? A number of philosophers have suggested that there is some kind of conceptual or constitutive relation between them. Some hold that conventions are or entail special kinds of norms (the ‘conventions-as-norms thesis’). Others hold that at least some norms are or entail special kinds of conventions (the ‘norms-as-conventions thesis’). We argue that both theses are false. Norms and conventions are crucially different conceptually and functionally in ways that make it the case that it is a serious mistake to try to assimilate them. They are crucially different conceptually in that whereas conventions are not normative and are behaviour dependent and desire dependent, norms are normative, behaviour independent, and desire independent. They are crucially different functionally in that whereas conventions principally serve the function of facilitating coordination, norms principally serve the function of making us accountable to one another.

The Authority of Social Norms

An important recent development in metaethics has been a broadening of its scope. Traditional metaethics was concerned mainly with trying to understand the normative character of moral norms. Contemporary metaethicists are now also turning their attention to a range of other normative — or putatively normative — phenomena and trying to understand the normativity of, for instance, norms of rationality (Broome, 2005; Kolodny, 2005; Schroeder, 2009c; Southwood, 2008), norms of prudence (Brink, 2003; Bykvist, 2006; Laden, 2009), epistemic norms (Chrisman, 2007; Chuard and Southwood, 2009; Jenkins, 2007), and so on.

Introduction: Practical reasoning and normativity

Practical reasoning is reasoning about what to do. It may be distinguished from theoretical reasoning, which is reasoning about what to believe. Many important philosophical questions arise about practical reasoning. One set of questions concerns the normativity of practical reasoning. There are two, ostensibly quite different, kinds of normative considerations at play within practical reasoning. First, there are principles of rationality. These govern practical reasoning in the sense that they impose limits of what counts as correct practical reasoning. Second, there are a range of considerations that bear upon what agents ought to do: reasons, values, principles of morality and prudence, and so on. The articles in this special issue are all concerned in one way or another with the task of better understanding these two kinds of normative phenomena, the relations between them and how they bear upon practical reasoning. The authors of the first three articles in the volume – Michael Bratman, Andrew Reisner and Elijah Millgram – are all concerned principally with how to understand the principles of rationality that structure our practical reasoning. Michael Bratman’s article, ‘Intention Rationality’, presents an account of the normativity of certain central principles of practical rationality, specifically, intention consistency and means–ends coherence. Bratman aims to steer a middle course between a ‘myth view’ on the one hand, that denies that these principles have any genuine normativity, and a ‘cognitivist view’ that seeks to derive their normativity from principles of theoretical rationality, on the other. He concludes that the best way to make sense of the normativity of intention consistency and means–ends coherence is to regard these principles as stemming from reasons of self-governance. Andrew Reisner’s article, ‘Unifying the Requirements of Rationality’, offers a diagnosis of the debate between those like John Broome (2007), who hold that principles of practical rationality are principally synchronic and have wide scope, and those like Niko Kolodny (2005), who hold that they are principally diachronic and have narrow scope. According to Reisner, this stems from two fundamental desiderata of a satisfactory theory of practical rationality, that it be both evaluative and action-guiding. Reisner argues that these two desiderata cannot be fulfilled at the same time. This suggests a deep schism within practical rationality; instead of a unified theory of rationality, it may be that we should accept a hybrid theory.