Normativity Workshop: Millar

In his paper, "The Explanatory Role of Normative Considerations", Millar argued for the existence of normative commitments that are incurred simply by engaging in practices, holding beliefs or having intentions. Generally speaking, and ignoring various of the details, these commitments take the disjunctive form of requirements to either believe the consequences of one's belief/take the necessary means to one's end/carry out the practice-based duties of one's role or revise one's belief/drop one's intention/opt out of the practice, respectively. These commitments, he claimed, are independent from personal evaluative stances. This means that, in order to explain why someone acts as they do, we can simply refer to their commitments - we do not need to be in possession of further knowledge concerning their evaluative sensibilities. The result it that there is nothing odd about thinking that a person's reason for believing that they have incurred one of these commitments is simply that they have done so. This, arguably, contrasts with the moral case in which it appears to be necessary, in predicting and explaining another's action, to take account of their particular moral stance. Insofar as the proposal concerning the explanatory role of commitments within the realm of practices, beliefs and intentions is concerned, this is not a naturalistic view as it accords an essential role for normative considerations.

A couple of nice examples came up in discussion that help to put pressure on this picture. First, for the case of belief, (apparently influenced by Niko Kolodny) consider someone who believes that all redheads are untrustworthy, but who also believes that their neighbor, who is a redhead, is trustworthy. Now, the picture above has it that they must give up on one or the other of these beliefs. But now suppose the first cannot be given up for some psychological reason, then it follows that the latter should be given up. But, given that the latter is true, wouldn't this person be better of continuing to believe it even at the expense of his or her own rationality?

Second, for the case of practices, consider someone engaged in fox-hunting. It does not appear that one can predict and explain their behaviour solely on the basis of their practice-based commitments, i.e. independently of their personal evaluative stance. For, some apparent fox-hunters are saboteurs. So, to predict what they will do one does need to rely on some assumption about what their moral stance is.

A second point with respect of the claim concerning practices is that so long as one is engaged in a practice, there is generally be the standing desire to continue taking part. But if this is acknowledged, then is it open for the naturalist to maintain that practice-based commitments are simply a species of the commitments involved in means-end reasoning, which might then be explained on other grounds. For, one is committed to carry out one's practice-based duties only in order to get what one desires (one's continuation within the practice).