The Sources of Normativity

The Sources of Normativity
Name	The Sources of Normativity
Fields	Philosophy, Ethics, Meta-ethics
Notable people	Immanuel Kant, David Hume, G. E. Moore, John Rawls, Philippa Foot, W. D. Ross, J. L. Austin

Contents

The Sources of Normativity explores the origins, justification, and grounding of norms that guide belief and action. It surveys debates across Immanuel Kant, David Hume, G. E. Moore, John Rawls, Philippa Foot, W. D. Ross, and J. L. Austin and connects philosophical accounts to social, evolutionary, and cognitive perspectives. Scholars draw on traditions associated with Aristotle, Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottlob Frege, and Bertrand Russell.

Overview and Definitions

The term normativity is defined in relation to accounts by Immanuel Kant, David Hume, and G. E. Moore and appears in debates involving Thomas Nagel, Christine Korsgaard, Onora O'Neill, T. M. Scanlon, and Derek Parfit. Normative claims contrast with descriptive inquiries pursued by Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and Niels Bohr while engaging methodological concerns raised by Karl Popper, Willard Van Orman Quine, Hilary Putnam, and Saul Kripke.

Classical deontological accounts trace to Immanuel Kant, with modern defenders including Christine Korsgaard and critics such as John Rawls and Robert Nozick; consequentialist theories derive from Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and contemporary proponents like Peter Singer and Richard Brandt; virtue ethics follows Aristotle and recent advocates like Philippa Foot, Martha Nussbaum, and Alasdair MacIntyre. Meta-ethical naturalists converse with positions advanced by G. E. Moore (open question), W. D. Ross (prima facie duties), and J. L. Austin (speech act theory), interacting with linguistic analysis promoted by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottlob Frege, and Bertrand Russell.

Social accounts locate normativity in practices and institutions studied by Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, John Searle, Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault. Contractualist and contractual theories appeal to models from Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Rawls, and T. M. Scanlon; communitarian critiques reference Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Sandel. Institutional analyses draw on examples such as the United Nations, European Union, World Trade Organization, International Criminal Court, and national constitutions like the United States Constitution and the Magna Carta.

Evolutionary explanations link normativity to work by Charles Darwin, William D. Hamilton, Robert Trivers, Richard Dawkins, and E. O. Wilson and to models developed by John Maynard Smith and George C. Williams. Game-theoretic and biological perspectives engage John Nash, Thomas Schelling, Robert Axelrod, and Herbert Simon. Naturalistic philosophers such as Frank Jackson and David Lewis debate reductionist strategies against anti-reductionists like G. E. Moore and Thomas Nagel; cognitive ethologists such as Frans de Waal and Diana Reiss provide empirical context.

Cognitive accounts draw on research by Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker, Elizabeth Spelke, Paul Bloom, and Elizabeth Loftus to link moral judgment to psychological mechanisms. Developmental perspectives invoke Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, Carol Gilligan, Mary Ainsworth, and Jerome Kagan. Neuroscientific studies involve findings from labs associated with Antonio Damasio, Joseph LeDoux, Michael Gazzaniga, V. S. Ramachandran, and Read Montague and raise issues about the neurobiological substrates described in work by Eric Kandel.

Critiques engage arguments by Friedrich Nietzsche on the genealogy of morals, skepticism by David Hume and G. E. Moore, and the is-ought gap highlighted by Hume and debated by Philippa Foot and Christine Korsgaard. Debates over moral relativism feature figures like Ruth Benedict and Gilbert Harman; moral realism and anti-realism involve Mackie (J. L. Mackie), Allan Gibbard, Thomas Nagel, and Derek Parfit. Disputes about normativity's normativity include interventions from Hilary Putnam, John McDowell, Bernard Williams, and Cora Diamond.