Types of norms and levels of normative practices

Project management: Prof. Dr. Thomas M. Schmidt and Prof. Dr. Marcus Willaschek

This project examined the concept of normativity and in particular the question of what exactly the difference is between different types of norms (such as standards, ideal norms, instrumental or constitutive norms, moral vs. juridical norms). The aim was to examine whether the concept of normativity ultimately breaks down into several, barely interconnected concepts, or whether, despite different uses, a kind of core meaning can be found to which a theoretically informative continuum of uses can be connected. The starting point of the study was the influential norm typologies of Henrik v. Wright and Herbert Schnädelbach, whose suitability for the current discourse on normativity was critically examined. The systematic core thesis of the project states that a detailed description of practices in which we criticize one another provides decisive insights into the type of normativity of various norms – and thus also into the types of norms that can be distinguished.
The results of this project are summarized in two manuscripts. Both texts were made available as cluster working papers. The first text (O. Schütze: “Normativität. Eine begriffliche Untersuchung”) critically discusses various norm typologies and highlights their deficits. Subsequently, the significance of the concept of normativity in the context of both theoretical and practical philosophy is presented and its exact function in both areas is analyzed. This text can also be seen as a synoptic introduction to the current philosophical discussion on the concept of normativity. The specific methodological challenge here was to analyze a term which, on the one hand, is a theoretical concept that has no fixed meaning in everyday language, but which, on the other hand, currently plays a prominent role in many debates, some of which are only loosely connected, and is not usually the subject of definitional or explicatory efforts. When defining the concept of normativity, it was therefore necessary to work out and differentiate between the various ways in which it is used in philosophical contexts.

The starting point of the study was a typology of norms: it is intended to provide an impression of the range of possible characteristics of normativity and to introduce important distinctions. In the next step, the ways in which the concept of normativity is used in the context of theoretical philosophy were explicated. It emerged that two different presuppositional conceptions are at play. According to the first conception, the attribution of normativity to x means that x presupposes standards of correctness that determine the circumstances under which something is considered correct or incorrect. According to the second conception, the attribution of normativity to x means that x presupposes standards of correctness that determine under which circumstances something is considered correct or incorrect and that this distinction is linked to an action-guiding claim, i.e. that what is correct is determined as what should be done. The latter conception could then be further differentiated with recourse to the distinction already made between instrumental and categorical norms, so that the ought can be understood both in the sense of an instrumental norm and in the sense of a categorical one.

In the field of practical philosophy, there was initially broad agreement on the concept of normativity to the effect that the concept of reason belongs to its narrowest circle of explanation. However, this indication cannot be satisfactory, since the need for conceptual clarification is reactualized by the question of what we should understand by the normativity of reasons. According to Christine Korsgaard’s influential proposal in “The Sources of Normativity”, it consists in the way reasons guide us. Korsgaard then spells out this metaphor in a way that allows our thinking about normativity to become a little more vivid: By tying the notion of normativity to the ability to solve practical problems that arise from the internal perspective of agents, the object of her inquiry is concretized in the determination of the nature of these problems and their solution. The strategy for the further investigation was to adhere to this core idea, but at the same time to critically examine Korsgaard’s concrete implementation with the help of other authors. This was done with the systematic intention of showing at which points her account is not without plausible alternatives, in order to identify the adjusting screws with which we can adjust to different meanings or conceptions of normativity. This made it possible to specify more precisely how the very extensive debate about practical reasons can be related to the question of understanding normativity. In the further course of the project, these references were worked out in more detail.
The dissertation project was continued and successfully completed after the cluster period. The resulting monograph “Perspektive und Lebensform. On the Nature of Normativity, Language and Mind” will be published by Suhrkamp.

The second text (G. Reuter, “Constitutive rules – normative or not? A look at their role in practices”, 2011″) explores the question of whether and to what extent constitutive rules (such as game rules) are normative. A distinction is made between different types of constitutive rules, some of which can also be characterized as normative phenomena. This becomes apparent when one considers the role of these rules in the practices constituted by them – in particular the way in which actors criticize each other with reference to these rules without already treating themselves as obliged to follow these rules.

Marcus Willaschek’s three sub-projects on the concept of normativity also belong to this project. Firstly, following on from his own earlier work, he used Kant’s thesis of the analytical connection between law and coercion to work out the specific normativity of legal as opposed to moral rules. Secondly, also based on Kant, he argued for the thesis of “normative autonomy”, according to which only those rules are normatively binding for a subject of action that it can rationally accept as valid. And thirdly and finally, he developed a pragmatist conception of rational justification and made it fruitful in philosophical contexts. (Pragmatist in the broadest sense, because Kant’s thesis of the primacy of practical reason can also be attributed to this view). The core thesis of this approach is that it is often the unproblematic normative initial state of an action or attitude for which it is considered reasonable, justified or justifiable. Explicit justifications or reasons are only required (and only make sense) where specific doubts or objections are raised (“default-and-challenge”). If, with Joseph Raz, we define normative considerations by the fact that they give us reasons for or against something, then it becomes clear that the default-and-challenge conception of rational justification is an essential component of a theory of normativity. Willaschek has attempted to motivate this conception on the one hand on the basis of Kant’s criticism of an “absolutist” conception of reason and Kant’s thesis of the primacy of practical reason, and on the other hand in the field of epistemology and the theory of action (“freedom of will”).
The contributions of the projects described above essentially consist of clarifying the fundamental concepts (here, above all, the concept of normativity), with the help of which normative phenomena can be described as differentiatedly and comprehensively as possible. In this respect, the work carried out here provides a contribution to the conceptual foundation for the discussion of the terms used in the cluster.

In the sub-project “Normativity and Rationality”, the second focus of the project “Norm Types and Levels of Normative Practices”, the conceptual distinctions between different norm types were taken up; in a next step, they were centrally related to the concept of rationality. The intuition here was that the reference to the problems of an epistemology of religious convictions discussed in analytical philosophy offers an instructive and paradigmatic case for the overall project, because normative and epistemic dimensions of rationality are internally linked here.
As part of this sub-project, Fedja Koob has written a dissertation that deals with the common justification strategies for religious beliefs (“Religion und Vernunft. The Rationality of Religious Beliefs against the Background of Naturalism”, Hamburg, 2015). The focus of the work in the constructive area was on working through a concept of rationality that can be explained by the concept of justification. In recent years, philosophy of religion, as an attempt at a rational understanding of religion, has increasingly taken on the character of an epistemology of religious convictions. This perspective understands and treats the question of the rationality of these beliefs as a question about the criteria and conditions of their justification. In this way, epistemological questions are internally linked to questions of the normative validity of actions, statements and attitudes.

The study was based on the assessment that the growing influence of naturalistic currents in contemporary philosophy, namely in the philosophy of mind, but also in the field of rationality and epistemology, poses a fundamental challenge to the project of an epistemic justification of beliefs. The main part of this work began with an overview of the basic types of justification theory with which the demand for a rational justification of religious convictions has been met in the philosophy of religion in recent decades. Initially, the focus was on strategies of a non-cognitivist interpretation of religious belief. This offered a contrasting opportunity to present the most important cognitivist strategies of the present in a next step. These were differentiated according to a now standard classification into variants of epistemological fundamentalism and coherentism. The presentation of the fundamentalist and coherentist positions was then deepened by independent reflections on the theory of science; the position of a moderate epistemological fundamentalism was introduced and justified as a mediating instance.

The second part of the study focused on the question provoked by naturalism as to what extent this philosophical view represents a challenge to the project of an epistemic justification of religious beliefs discussed so far. In a first step, variants of a methodological naturalism were presented and discussed with reference to the work of Koppelberg and Kornblith. The even stronger challenge of an ontological naturalism was then addressed with a detailed discussion of Jaegwon Kim’s position.

An independent systematic solution to the problem was then articulated, which focuses on the holistic and integrative character of religious beliefs. The result was that the rationality of such comprehensive worldviews cannot be justified in the same way as individual beliefs that can be understood in the form of discrete assertoric propositions. With this reference to the orienting, holistic and life-world function of religious convictions, the argumentative ground has been prepared for a position that links the principles of epistemic normativity with those basic concepts of practical reason that are more familiar from moral philosophical contexts. Therefore, recourse to virtue epistemology, as advocated by Linda Zagzebski in particular, is an obvious choice. The strength of this position is seen in the fact that it can take account of the principles of universality, context sensitivity and the requirement of coherence. In this way, it was convincingly demonstrated how virtue epistemology offers a well-founded and normatively understood theory of epistemic justification, even in the face of the naturalistic challenge, which can also be appropriately related to the subject matter of religious beliefs.
In the context of this sub-project, religious beliefs served as a paradigmatic case for criteria of normativity that can mediate epistemic and practical rationality. Religious convictions are characterized by an ambivalent character in terms of rationality theory, since on the one hand they claim universal validity in principle, but do so from the perspective of a particular, narratively reproduced community of tradition. From this epistemological debate, further insights could also be gained for other contexts in which the focus is on the relationship between theoretical and practical rationality, lifeworld certainty and the general validity of norms.

Among the most important publications in the research project were Oliver Schütze: “Naturalismus und Normativität”. In: Alexander Becker/ Wolfgang Detel (eds.): ” Natural Spirit. Contributions to an undogmatic anthropology .” Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2009, 165-188; Thomas M. Schmidt/ Tobias Müller (eds.): “Ich denke also bin ich Ich? The self between neurobiology, philosophy and religion”. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2011; Marcus Willaschek, “Contextualism about Knowledge and Justification by Default”, in Grazer Philosophische Studien 74 (2007), 251-272; ibid. “Incompatibilism and the Absolutist Conception of Reason”, in Philosophisches Jahrbuch der Görres-Gesellschaft 115 (2008), 397-417; ibid. “Right and Coercion. Can Kant’s Conception of Right be Derived from his Moral Theory?”, in International Journal of Philosophical Studies 17 (2008), 49-70; ibid., “The Primacy of Pure Practical Reason and the Very Idea of a Postulate”, in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. A Critical Guide, ed. by A. Reath and J. Timmermann, Cambridge 2010, 168-196; ibid. “Autonomy, Experience, and Reflection. On a Neglected Aspect of Personal Autonomy” (with Claudia Blöser and Aron Schöpf), in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 13 (2010), 239-253, ibid. “Non-Relativist Contextualism about Free Will”, in European Journal of Philosophy 18 (2010), 567-587.

The most important events in the research project were the workshops “Problems of Reductionism”, Bad Homburg, 10.11.12.2010, “Responsibility and the Narrative Structure of Life”, lecture and workshop with J. M. Fischer (UC Riverside), 27.6.2009 and “Legislation as the Form of Practical Knowledge”, lecture and workshop with S. Engstrom, 30.6.2010.