Our evaluative judgements (ethical, aesthetical, judgements of etiquette, etc.) are often justified by appeals to natural facts, i.e. facts that we can access with our normal sense modalities. “Giving money to the bagger was the right thing to do, since he was hungry.” “She plays very well the violin: her performances are always in tune.” “He is not very polite: he did not call to apologize for his absence at the meeting.” The view that the facts that one appeals to in these and similar cases justify by themselves the relevant judgements is called normative naturalism. Normative naturalism is opposed to conceptions according to which facts cannot play a justifying role by themselves. Rather, the facts serve to justify only in conjunction with non-natural properties that inhere in them, or because of their relations to facts or objects (such as values) that exist apart from the reality that we can access with our sense modalities, or because practical reason uses such facts to construct reasons that have normative force.
The debates between supporters of these views are at least as old as Aristotle’s naturalistic challenge to the Platonic conception of ideas. Normative naturalism, however, has taken a peculiar character in recent times, due to the wide success of scientific naturalism and the felt need to account for ethics in scientific terms. In that context, the natural facts to be appealed to in the justification of judgements are taken to be physical facts or, in any case, scientific facts, i.e. facts that the natural sciences investigate with their methods. Evolutionary ethics and the neurological study of ethical behavior are the main examples of this contemporary trend. Scientific naturalism, however, has exercised its influence also outside those areas of research, i.e. in more traditional forms of ethical naturalism. Indeed, contemporary neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism, which has bloomed in the context of virtue ethics, has developed along lines that have been largely influenced by the scientific naturalism of the analytical philosophical milieu. I would like to suggest that considering the influence of scientific naturalism and related ways of conceiving of facts can be a useful way to frame debates about the grounds of normativity within neo-Aristotelianism.
Within neo-Aristotelianism, there is an on-going debate as to whether natural facts can by themselves justify evaluative judgements. According to one party, famously represented by Philippa Foot, nature can offer normative constraints to the evaluation of human action, in the sense that knowledge of nature sets criteria for practical reason.Footnote 1 According to the other party, formed by thinkers who follow in the footsteps of Bernard Williams, nature can constitute limits to human action only in the sense that it furnishes the material of which the acting subject is made.Footnote 2 When an agent makes choices, she employs her capacities and is thereby guided by her nature, but knowledge about human nature can in no way by itself – without being made normative by the reason of the subject who makes the judgment – furnish criteria for action. Hence, normativity does not originate from our considerations about nature, but from the subject that gives those considerations a normative weight.
The arguments of the second party are forceful, but they leave an open question: how can we explain that facts seem to make a difference, when we appeal to them to justify our evaluative judgements? Why do we appeal to our knowledge of nature to evaluate, justify and decide? What features must a fact have in order to be liable to receive a normative weight by a subject? The intuition behind the position of the first party is not so easy to dismiss. It is thus that some philosophers, such as Michael Thompson, have tried to develop Foot’s arguments in a direction that considers the criticisms put forward by the second party, while granting a fundamental role to the considerations on human nature that a subject entertains while deliberating.Footnote 3
According to Thompson, we can identify living objects only because we recognize them as members of species. In order to recognize them as such, we must deploy judgements, which apply concepts of living species (e.g., “x is a dog”). Such concepts presuppose natural-historical judgements, i.e. species-relative generalizations, like “dogs (or the dog) are (or is) carnivorous.” Natural-historical judgements rest on a peculiar kind of logical necessity, which links the concept in subject position to that in predicate position. Indeed, generalizations of this kind remain true even if they have counterexamples and even if their counterexamples outnumber positive examples. The relevant necessity relation can be explained, according to Thompson, through a new logical category, which should be added to the classical Fregean categories (concept, object and second-level concept). Such necessity-relation, Thompson claims, is not a metaphysical relation linking facts or objects. On the basis of this new logical relation, according to Thompson, one can introduce a new logical rule of inference. From “the Ss are P” and “s is an S, but it is not P”, one can infer that “s is a defective S”. Thompson claims that this normativity is only a natural, sub-rational normativity, i.e. that it does not by itself give rise to normative constraints on action, before it enters the sphere of our interests and our desires.Footnote 4 Only the entertainment of the relevant knowledge by a subject can transform natural normativity in a normativity that furnishes criteria for the evaluation of action. In this way, Thompson protects himself against Williams-style objections to Foot. The interesting point is that natural normativity can offer criteria that subjects can use to reason practically, but in order to understand how that is possible we need to reflect on how natural normativity changes as we move towards more complexes life-forms, all the way to our typically human rational kind of life.
As I mentioned above, the character of the debate within neo-Aristotelianism that we are considering can be best understood in the light of the influence of scientific naturalism. What are the facts that constitute the grounds of the evaluative judgements that I gave as examples at the beginning? Are they scientific facts, i.e. facts thought of in the (allegedly) absolutely objective fashion of natural sciences? If so, they would certainly be completely independent from the thought of an agent, and their capacity to impinge on human rationality would indeed be mysterious, fueling the arguments supported by the followers of Williams. Thompson’s book can be seen, at this point, as attempting a rejoinder of the two parties confronting each other within neo-Aristotelian naturalism. He contests the assertion that the facts that ground our evaluative judgement are scientific facts, and he claims that they are instead facts that emerge from our particular ways of thinking about reality, i.e. from the forms of thought that keep together as unities the items that a scientific outlook would leave separated.Footnote 5 For example, the synchronic and diachronic biological features of an organism make a unit because we see them under a form-of life concept; or, a series of physical and physiological events constitutes an action because those events are unified by an intention. From this point of view, a fact is not a purely objective item external to our reason, but it exists through its participation in our space of reasons. Recognizing a fact commits us already to considering that fact in our reasoning processes and gives that fact the capacity to impinge on our motivations.
At this point, however, one could wonder what Thompson’s forms of thought are, i.e. whether they are just forms that our thought has independently from the reality that it cognizes, or whether they are forms that thought is forced to assume in order to be able to embrace and conceive the nature of reality. In the former case, the risk arises that natural historical judgements hold only because of the stereotypes that we have formed. In that case, though, inference forms based on natural normativity would be ungrounded: why should we judge that a dog which dos not bark is defective, rather than changing our stereotype of dogs? By contract, if the forms of thought followed forms of being, natural historical judgement could ground real valid normative rules and individuals falling under a species concept could be seen as grounds of possibilities which are meant to be realized, i.e. potentialities.Footnote 6 Naturally, nothing prima facie forces us to think that the relation between forms of thought and forms of being should be the same in all cases. Along this line of thinking, then, reasoning practically can involve also, to a considerable degree, understanding to what extent and in what cases our forms of thought are bound by forms of reality. For example, let us hypothesize that the self-knowledge that we have of our-selves through our actions and through our reflections on our-selves, i.e., the knowledge that we articulate, for example, with the concepts of folk psychology, turned out to be constrained by a structure in us. (The existence of this structure in us would not presuppose by itself the existence of a metaphysical self, separated from our body.) Then that self-knowledge would be both (i.) about our-selves (i.e., our nature), (ii.) normative, and (iii.) internally connected to our concepts and our motivational structure. This would be a case of knowledge of human nature capable of giving us normative criteria for actions.
Granted that a purely factual knowledge of our nature would be completely external to our motivations and irrelevant for our practical reasoning, the greatest challenge for neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism seems currently to be to explain how we can attain a knowledge of ourselves that can help us to ground our evaluative judgements. More precisely, the problem can be articulated as follows: what forms of knowledge of our nature do we have? Are they integrated with each other, and if so, how? When do our ways of thinking about ourselves highlight structures of our nature that are relevant for our practical thinking and for our choices? The authors who contributed to this volume where invited to address these questions. The positions expressed by the authors offer very diverse answers to these questions and sometimes query the very neo-Aristotelian premises which make the questions central. I hope that the collection can give the reader a significant outlook of the main positions discussed in current debates on neo-Aristotelian naturalism, but especially that it can help to clarify and hence to carry forward the discussion on the relevance of natural normativity for the normativity of human action.
The essays here collected are the result of a common work of research, which involved authors in different forms and with different degrees of commitment. Early versions of most of the essays where presented at workshops which Marko Fuchs and I organized in the context of the project Nature, Value and Normativity (2016–2017), at the Forschungsstelle Methoden der Normbegründun (Centre for Normativity), Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Germany. One of the workshops – on 9th and 10th March 2017 – was organized in association with the Law School of the University of Udine, Italy, which funded and hosted the event. I thank all these institutions for their financial and administrative support.
Notes
Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Julia Annas, “What Kind of Naturalism?”, in Stephen Gardiner, ed., Virtue Ethics. Old and New (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 11–29.
Michael Thompson, “Tre gradi di bontà naturale,” in Iride 41 (2003), pp. 191–197; Michael Thompson, Life and Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
Thompson, Life and Action, op. cit., p. 89.
See John Hacker-Wright, “What is Natural about Foot’s Ethical Naturalism?”, in Ratio 22 (2009), pp. 308–321.
Recent work on neo-Aristotelian metaphysics has offered insightful thoughts about the relations between forms of thought and forms of being, on how our knowledge of being is mediated by our forms of thought, and on how things are characterized by potentialities. See, for example, Simon Evnine, Making Objects and Events: A Hylomorphic Theory of Artifacts, Actions, and Organisms (Oxford and New York. Oxford University Press, 2016). W. Jaworski, Structure and the Metaphysics of Mind: How Hylomorphism Solves the Mind-Body Problem (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Barbara Vetter, Potentiality (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
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De Anna, G. Introduction: Natural Normativity and the Normativity of Human Action. J Value Inquiry 52, 239–242 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-018-9652-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-018-9652-y