The Practice-based Approach to Normativity of Frederick L. Will

The aim of this paper is to examine Frederick Will’s conception of practical normativity as a part of his more general theory of governance. Given the scattered nature of his remarks on practical normativity and the lack of studies on this aspect of his thought, the main goal of the article is to provide a coherent account of Will’s conception of practical normativity and to show the role that sociality and practices play in it. The paper will proceed as follows. The first section locates Will’s approach in the context of contemporary approaches to normativity and highlights its main distinctive traits. The second section examines Will’s conception of rationality as practice, indicating how his broadened view of rationality takes the social dimension into account. The third section discusses Will’s idea of normativity as rational governance, while the fourth section offers a general reconstruction of Will’s conception of practical normativity and of its relationships with practices. In the fifth and sixth sections the question of the validity of normative claims is raised and Will’s conception of social objectivity is introduced. Finally, the concluding section discusses some implications of Will’s theory of governance for understanding normativity. Through this reconstruction I intend to show that Will’s theory provides a sound basis for theorizing normativity as practice along lines that remain significantly unexplored within contemporary normative theory.