Do We Have Normative Powers?

Ruth Chang (Oxford)

Abstract

‘Normative powers’ are capacities to create normative reasons by our willing or ‘say so’. They are significant because, if we have them and exercise them, then sometimes the reasons we have are ‘up to us’. But such powers seem mysterious. How can we, by willing, create reasons?

In this paper, I examine whether normative powers can be adequately explained normatively, by appeal to norms of a practice, normative principles, human interests, or values. Can normative explanations of normative powers explain how an exercise of the will can afford us special freedom in determining our reasons? I argue that normative approaches to answering this question prove to be inadequate. To vindicate the thought that normative powers can make our reasons ‘up to us’, we need an altogether different approach to understanding them, one that is located not in the normative but in the metaphysical. I end the paper by sketching, a metaphysical explanation of normative powers. This metaphysical defense of normative powers provides a window into a different, more agential way of thinking about rational agency.

Biography

Ruth Chang is Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University and Professorial Fellow at University College, Oxford, coming to Oxford after working as a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University for nearly twenty years. She took her BA at Dartmouth College, JD at Harvard Law School, and DPhil at Balliol, Oxford. She has held visiting positions at the UCLA philosophy department and the University of Chicago Law School. She is author of Making Comparisons Count and Come Prendere Decisioni Difficili?, editor of Incommensurability, Incomparability, and Practical Reason, and co-editor with Kurt Sylvan of The Philosophy of Practical Reason (forthcoming). She is currently working with Amia Srinivasan on an edited volume, New Conversations in Philosophy, Politics, and Law, which will be published by OUP. Her research concerns the nature of normativity, value, agency, rationality and their connections. Some of her work has reached the public sphere through a TED talk she gave in 2016. She has given philosophically-minded talks to many general audiences globally, and her work has been the subject of interviews by various media outlets in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Germany, Taiwan, Australia, Italy, Israel, Brazil, New Zealand, and Austria. She has been a consultant or lecturer for institutions ranging from video gaming to pharmaceuticals to the CIA and World Bank. 

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