Attitudinal Normativity Workshop 2

We are pleased to announce the upcoming Attitudinal Normativity Workshop 2, organized by

• Roberto Keller
• Julien Deonna
• Fabrice Teroni

All are welcome! Info: Roberto.Keller@unige.ch

Jonathan Way (Southampton)

How do norms guide our beliefs?

We are sometimes explicitly guided by norms. For instance, you might realise that you ought to leave now, and so decide to do so. Our capacity to be guided in this way – to regulate our responses by recognising the norms that apply to them – is widely held to be very important. For instance, it is often held to explain why, for instance, we are subject and accountable to norms on actions and beliefs, but not headaches and hallucinations. In this paper, I argue that our capacity to be guided in this way is limited in a way that restricts its importance. I argue that while this sort of explicit guidance may be a familiar and central way in which we regulate our actions, it is not a familiar or central way in which we regulate our beliefs. As such, it is not plausibly the ground of our subjection and accountability to norms on beliefs. This marks a striking asymmetry between practical and theoretical reason, with upshots for the philosophy of normativity.

Christine Tappolet (Montréal)

Valuings as Sentiments

We are valuing beings, beings who possess the capacity to value things. But what is it ‘to value’ something? The most common accounts in the literature hold that to value an item is either to have a first-order or a second-order desire towards it; or to believe that item to be valuable; or to care about that item; or to have a combination of all these mental states. In our paper, we raise some objections against all these accounts and defend a new affective account of valuings. Unlike standard affective accounts, according to which the term ‘valuing’ refers to a single type of affective state, such as care, we hold that ‘valuing’ refers to the members of a class of affective states, namely, the class of sentiments. On our view, to value something is to have a particular sentiment towards it. Since sentiments can be of different types, our account implies that there are as many ways of valuing things as there are types of sentiments.