Normativity and Normative Psychology Introduction

The normative domain is typically defined as the domain of what ought to be or what ought to be done, and contrasted with the descriptive domain, i.e. the domain of what is. This characterisation should perhaps not be taken too literally. On the one hand, the normative domain is quite large: it includes not only the concept of “ought”, but other deontic concepts such as “duty”, “right”, “obligation”, “permission”, as well as evaluative concepts such as “good”, “bad”, “admirable”, “disgusting”, etc. On the other hand, the normative domain includes not only thin concepts, i.e. concepts that have only a normative dimension (e.g. “right”, “wrong”, “good”, “bad”), but also thick concepts, i.e. concepts that have both normative and descriptive dimensions (e.g. “courageous”, “cruel”, “kind”). (See Ogien and Tappolet 2008) Be as it may, it is clear that the normative discourse pervades our lives, our individual behaviour and thoughts as well as our interactions with other people. It is thus unsurprising that the normative has received increasingly greater attention by the philosophical community in the last few years, up to the point where normativity has become a central subject of philosophical inquiry. This new centrality is certainly due to the importance of the questions that normativity poses – both meta-ethical (e.g. What is normativity? What is the meaning and function of normative concepts? Are there normative facts? How can we have epistemic access to such facts?) and substantial (e.g. What are our duties? What things are valuable?). Yet, it has also been favoured by a shift in the very way of philosophical theorising. In contrast with the traditional “armchair” methodology, the last decade has seen an increasing collaboration between philosophy and more empirically oriented disciplines, which has allowed philosophers to approach old debates with new instruments and data. Within this general context, the emergence of an empirically-oriented form of normative psychology – a discipline that can be seen as an outgrowth of moral psychology – has brought new attention to questions at the intersection between psychological and normative questions. The aim of this dossier published by The Ethics Forum is to present some contributions within this growing field of research. One traditional area of normative psychological research is the one concerned with the issue of moral responsibility. The first two articles of this volume belong to this area. Gary Watson’s “Responsibility and the limits of evil: Variations on a Strawsonian theme” (1987) is a classic article in the field and is here translated for the first time in French by Aude Bandini. As the title suggests, Watson’s starting point is Peter Strawson’s seminal work on moral responsibility. In “Freedom and Resentment” (1962), Strawson attempts to reverse the standard account of the concept of moral responsibility. While it is rather common to think that there is an intimate connection between the judgment that one individual is morally responsible and the disposition to treat that individual with attitudes such as approbation, gratitude, indignation, shame and guilt, the standard view has it that such responses are only secondary and follow from the judgment that the individual is morally responsible. Within this framework, the question is to understand when this judgment is justified. On the one hand, there are the incompatibilists, who typically think that moral responsibility requires freedom and that freedom requires the falsity of causal determinism. On the other hand, there are the compatibilists, who think that holding someone as morally responsible is justified only if it produces the best possible consequences, independently of whether causal determinism is true or not. By making moral responsibility dependent on a metaphysical thesis about causal …