Berkley Center

Kukla and Lance, each professors of philosophy at Georgetown University, presented and discussed their joint work on the pragmatic basis of normativity. The articles they assigned emphasized the ways in which physically embedded social practices are normatively structured, independently of any norms having been abstracted from them. These practices typically involve skillful ways of coping with physical constraints. An example is the practice, common in certain village cultures, of the communal shelling of peas. The physical configuration of the peas sets the crucial constraints around which the practice develops. Very young children lack the finger dexterity to be usefully involved. Unlike pig slaughtering, however, the activity is quiet, and so apt as an occasion for sharing gossip. Once such a practice is in place, people can be held to account by others for not acting in accordance with it. Importantly, this can be done without articulating a norm—namely, by saying something like, “No, do it like this.”

By focusing on how normatively structured, physically embodied social practices arise, Kukla and Lance seek to characterize how things look when one operates outside of the false dichotomy that either norms are somehow “out there” in the world and impose themselves on us or that we simply make them up. People can hold one another to such embodied norms and can also amend them, one piece at a time, by amending the relevant practice. General principles can be reached by abstraction, but are ontologically dependent on practices. The illusion that the “real” or ultimate norms are abstract ones independent of practices is to be resisted. 

Because the normative shape of practices changes all the time in large and small ways, innovation is not a difficulty. Whereas in some areas, central changes in normative view have only prospective effect—an example being NBA rule changes—in morality the default norm is that revisions apply broadly in space and time, and so are also retrospective in effect. Morality works this way not because this is what moral facts are like. Rather, morality works this way because it serves the ends of morality better that it do so. 

There was some discussion of whether this account is in tension in any way with the way that the seminar has been understanding moral innovation. If the “initially available” norms were thought of as the source of grounding, then there would be a tension; but if they are understood simply as those available when explicit reflection about moral principles began, perhaps not. 

Several participants questioned the “bottom-up” picture offered. Does it not often happen that articulated principles reshape human practices? Kukla and Lance conceded this, but reiterated that to be an abstract principle is to be an abstraction from some practice, whereas there is no such ontological dependence of practices on principles. This allows for a dialectical relationship between principles and practices, but the ontological asymmetry remains. 

Does this “bottom-up” picture, so understood, limit the potential radicality of moral change and moral innovation? Does a “top-down” theorist not have an easier time at least imagining what moral innovation so as to cope, say, with climate change might look like? Kukla and Lance responded that there’s a continuum, and that even quite important moral changes can come about because of changes in nature. 

A number of questions arose regarding how moral practices are here being understood. Do they involve truth-claims, or at least purport to do so? According to Kukla, it is very unclear whether moral discourse supports agent-neutral contestability. Lance pointed out that given their joint article’s emphasis on the epistemic importance of ostensions (“Look, there’s a ___!”) and the way they issue second-person calls to engagement, it’s not obvious how a principle’s agent-neutrality could be established. A major feature of their contention is that genuine epistemic practices attempt to make true claims about the world. Thus, we could imagine very sophisticated animals who have speech and who cope well with the world—their imagined case is that of “super squirrels” who gather nuts in a very sophisticated fashion—but who, since they do not make claims, do not count as engaged in any kind of epistemic practice. Epistemic practices therefore cannot be derived from what it is to “cope well” with the natural world. 

With principles being dependent on embodied practices, the question arises whether and to what extent principles immanent in practices can be made explicit—a question famously pursued by Robert Brandom. Kukla and Lance take the view that there is no bit that cannot ever be made explicit to anyone, but not all can be made explicit to all at all times, and certainly not all at once. Asked to connect this to William Blattner’s presentation of Heideggerian phenomenology in the fall semester, they indicated broad agreement with the idea that the activity of making principles explicit will change the very background it is claiming to make explicit. 

With regard to the possibilities for moral innovation, it becomes important, on this view, what moral practices are like. They lack a rule-making body such as the NBA has. Kukla prefers to think in terms of the Hegelian idea of Sittlichkeit, with its reference to many layers of socially embodied forms. It is a difficult matter to deal with, however, as ordinary usage of the term “morality” is very distant from the way philosophers think of it. Perhaps it is better to think of there being moral dimensions in all practices. 

Backing up to the idea of “normativity,” as in the idea that practices are normatively structured, Lance clarified that it is a matter, not simply of a practical concern being met, such as getting peas to eat, but of people being held by others to immanent norms. An immanent norm can be invoked without being made explicit: “Here, do it like this!” 

Does a practice still have to exist for its norms to exist? Perhaps; but for it to have meaning for an individual, that individual has to have at least been normatively engaged in human practices.