Macquarie Seminar Tue4sday August 24. 11.00-1.00 W6A Rm 107 Ruth Chang (Rutgers) Do we Have Normative Powers? Can rational agents create reasons for action? That is, can we, simply through an act of will, endow a consideration with the normativity of a practical reason? For an overwhelming majority of philosophers, the answer to this question will be an emphatic – indeed, incredulous – no. How can we magically create reasons for ourselves simply by willing something? For other philosophers, the answer to our question will be an emphatic – typically theory-driven – yes. To gloss a familiar Kantian story: By willing actions whose maxims pass tests derived from laws that govern an autonomous will, we make those actions rational. We put our wills behind one principle of action rather than another, thereby conferring normativity on action according to that principle. Through the exercise of our normative powers, we create practical normativity. In this paper I propose an argument for thinking that rational agents can confer normativity on things. We do have normative powers. The view I develop, however, differs radically from the Kantian one. For one thing, we create only some, not all, of practical normativity. As we will see, this more modest view of our normative powers allows us to sidestep what is widely considered to be the fatal flaw of Kantian defenses of them. For another thing, what we will is different. Most philosophers who give the will some role in practical reason, Kantians included, take our willing to be directed at action or the principle that describes action motivated in a certain way. On the view of normative powers I propose, the basic attitude of willing is ‘taking to be a reason.’ Instead of willing action, what we will is, quite literally, that a consideration be a reason.
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