The View from Within: Normativity and the Limits of Self-Criticism

Chapter 2. Comparative Irrealism and Community-Based Semantics: Kripkenstein and Beyond

CHAPTER TWO Comparative Irrealism and Community-Based Semantics Kripkenstein and Beyond Normativity through Thick and Thin Imagine a“conservative”and a“liberal”community who happen to share the same territory.1 Their relationship and proximity are “accidental”; they just happen to be neighbors, although they share different cultural heritages and are privy to different historical memories. Suppose further that the ethical outlook of the conservative community is shaped by such concepts as family honor, tradition, and modesty, which are not used at all by the liberals, whose ethical outlook is shaped, conversely, by such concepts as spontaneity, freedom, and creativity, for which the conservatives , in turn, have no use. These are thick normative concepts. Thick, in that they characterize the particularity of the normative thought and discourse of the two communities; they play major roles in the ways they narrate their histories and conceive their collective identities. They are normative, or action guiding, in the sense that they constitute facts“that supply concrete justifications for acting one way or another....They function as reasons, in the basic, normative sense of considerations that speak in favor of a given course of action.”2 35 36 Through Thick and Thin Following Williams, Scanlon, and others, normative irrealists argue for the primacy of the thick. (The reverse, however, is not always the case. Scanlon, to take the obvious example, seems to grant primacy to the thick without becoming an irrealist.) There is no one substantive property— the property of being good or valuable—that in and of itself provides reasons for action. That is to say, there is no master property that constitutes or explains the concrete value of particular actions. Rather, reasons are provided by what are regarded as the natural properties of actions and things.3 After all, there is a vast diversity of things that we take to be good, appropriate, or valuable.“Why do moral agents require special procedures for deliberating about what to do? Won’t it suffice to apply our general procedures of normative reflection to such concrete values (and dis-values) as loyalty, suffering, betrayal, need, dependence, autonomy and choice . . . ?”4 The main argument for the primacy of the thick draws on the nature of practical deliberation: what motivate us are not truths about the good or the bad but rather concrete judgments about what would hurt one’s feelings or be demeaning or cruel or helpful, and so on.5 Abstract concepts expressed by words like ‘good’, ‘right’, ‘desirable’, and ‘rational’ are thin. Generating thin concepts requires no anthropological involvement; they are designed to describe human agency and its normative aspects rather than any particular exemplification of them.6 That is, despite fierce adherence to their respective positions, members of both communities agree that, wrong as they may think their neighbors are, people behave in the light of what they think is good. Thus, everyone who understands the phrase ‘better than’ would agree that if a person rates a-like conduct better than b-like conduct in C-like circumstances , then other things being equal, he would choose a rather than b in C. Hence, people in both communities find thin concepts helpful for describing themselves and others as agents as normatively committed people who have goals and final ends. Note that‘good,’‘right’, and‘rational’function not only as thin predicates in the above sense roughly depicted but also as placeholders, as tools for shortening long stories composed of thick judgments. To say that something is good is merely shorthand for saying that certain of its substantive properties constitute concrete considerations that speak in its favor. As placeholders, such predicates also serve to express decisions between conflicting thick considerations. If immodest behavior becomes necessary for defending one’s honor, a member of the conservative community might rate it appropriate, obligatory, or good.“Appropriate” and “good” function here as shorthand for the ranking and prioritizing of first-order obligations by which such conflicts are adjudicated.When they function as placeholders, thin predicates stand for different properties in communities that employ different thick concepts. They play the same semantic role in all communities qua their role as placeholders rather than by virtue of their extensions. Here, however, we shall be interested in their role as thin concepts rather than as placeholders. To emphasize again: in addition to the different roles they play within different normative outlooks, they also have...