Symposium on Habitual Ethics? A reply

Every day we do all sorts of intelligent things without necessarily deliberating about it. We simply do, or cope with what the environment throws at us. Some of those things are mundane. Others are not. When neonatal nurses detect life-threatening infections before blood tests come back positive, they draw upon skilled intuitions acquired through a complex mix of reflective and non-reflective experiences. Firemen do the same when they sense that a building is about to collapse. Our daily navigation of value-loaded situations is not that dissimilar.

Of course we do deliberate about how we should live from time to time. But we get a distorted picture of the work involved in living an ethical life if we only focus on these deliberative instances or assume that only they can contribute positively to this work. Habitual Ethics?¹ critically considers the conditions under which the habitual remains plastic enough to enrich -rather than hamper- our ethical lives. This ambition sets it on a collision course with accounts of ethical agency that deem habits a moral menace, because and to the extent that they surreptitiously compromise our autonomy.² Such defiant stances typically go hand in hand with impoverished accounts of habits, which may be presented as inflexible behaviours that are the result of direct conditioning.³ These reductive accounts not only struggle to accommodate our daily reliance on intelligent, highly adaptable habits; they also mask the contribution of the habitual to the ‘small piecemeal business’ constitutive of our ongoing ‘moral life’.⁴

Since none of this symposium's three reviews shows much sympathy for the above, reductive accounts of habit, what follows focuses on the challenges that stem from a habit-centred account of ethical agency, as these issues transpire from each of these reviews. For these reviews’ attentive reading, I am extremely grateful. While we are largely in agreement, I found Gerald Postema's way of articulating the habituated capacity for pre-reflective discernment -as a way of having a habit that is key to ethical agency- particularly helpful. It is also pertinent to Mario De Caro's important question about the interplay between habits and rational deliberation, as well as Sarah Fine's highlighting the difficulty inherent in establishing the ‘boundaries’ of a given habit –‘where does one habit end and another begin’.⁵

Rather than addressing each review in turn, what follows therefore adopts a thematic approach. For the privilege of being able to revisit these themes under the sharp light of the reviewers’ questions and insights, I thank the editor of this journal, Georgios Pavlakos. For the reviewers’ critical insights and questions -without which my own habits of thought and perception would be all too likely to stiffen- this reply is but a meagre attempt to show my appreciation.

1. Delineating the boundaries of habits: ‘habit assemblages’ and their metamorphoses

Within the wide spectrum that leads from unconscious tics and compulsive behaviour all the way to collective, goal-driven endeavours developed on the basis of habits, to identify a particular point where the habitual ceases is particularly arduous. To identify a moment in time when a habit is born is not easy either, since diminished awareness of the pattern underlying it is key to its emergence. You do not have a habit unless it has at least momentarily escaped your conscious awareness.

Important as it is, this emergence criterion isn't that helpful to those keen to delineate one habit from another, or indeed to demarcate habits from other things. Many skills, dispositions, addictions -and even some social practices- satisfy those emergence conditions too. The birth of a disposition or skill does not entail the disappearance of the underlying habit. In many cases, the same behaviour might be characterised as a habit, disposition or skill depending on one's vantage point. As a distinguishing feature favoured by many neuro-scientific studies of habit, the ‘diminished goal-sensitivity’⁶ condition proves neither necessary nor sufficient to the existence of a habit.⁷ Similar difficulties are encountered with any singular condition purporting to neatly distinguish habits from non-habits.

Availability to conscious awareness or to cognitive control are sometimes put forward as purported demarcation criteria, yet I am acutely aware of my writing habits, which I constantly aim to keep in check. The only ‘safe’, necessary conditions when trying to define habit have to do with its emergence conditions. The repetition that gives rise to a habit is as important as the fact that a habit is only born if it momentarily escapes our awareness. After that, habits come in all shapes and colours. Most are essential to our physical and mental well-being. Many make us capable of wondrous things, including the art of living together. Some hold us back, sometimes painfully so. None of them exist in isolation: not only do habits tend to cluster; they interconnect with their surrounding milieus in a way that undermines the question raised by Fine in her review: ‘what exactly are the boundaries around “a habit”?’.

Instead of seeking to ascertain ‘where does one habit end and another begin?’,⁸ the notion of habit assemblages has been put forward as a way of acknowledging the extent to which, as ‘assemblages’⁹, they ‘imbricate organisms, objects, infrastructures and atmospheres’.¹⁰ This ecological shift of focus from individual habits to dynamic mind-body-environment assemblages is crucial to grasping the conditions under which habitual agency remains capable of transformation. The transformation at stake is not only endogenous -whereas some habits remain ‘plastic’, others rigidify to such an extent as to become incapable of adaptation- but exogenous too. Transformative social or political intervention is too often assumed to require reasoned thought which breaks free from the blunting weight of habit. In contrast, Habitual Ethics? delves into what conditions the habitual's positive contribution to transformative, critical agency.

2. Non-deliberative avenues to critical agency: meta-ethical challenges

As a legal theorist, I have long been struck by the extent to which legal theory as a whole tends to take our capacity for critical agency as a given. For much of Post-world-war-II legal philosophy, the concern to prevent ‘blind obedience to law’ was so prominent that it morphed into a normative yardstick against which the merits of different legal theories were evaluated. When Hart argued that the resources of moral criticism were brought into better focus by a positivist distinction between law's validity on one hand and its merits on the other hand,¹¹ the debate largely focused on the latter distinction. To ask whether deliberative, moral criticism was the only way to prevent ‘blind’ obedience to law -and indeed what constitutes ‘blind’ obedience- would have been anathema, given the dominance of an intellectualist understanding of ethical agency.

For those committed to this intellectualist stance (most famously instantiated by Kant¹²), the threat of ethical and political perversion can only be countered by critical deliberation. Never mind the fact that, as the diaries opened up by Pauer-Studer and Velleman painfully show¹³, atrocities can have less to do with a lack of principled reflection, and more to do with such reflection acting as a shield from otherwise powerful ethical intuitions.¹⁴ On such a stance, to concede that critical agency can find some footing in our non-deliberative capacities would be to open the door to all sorts of troubles.

At the most abstract, meta-ethical level, the articulation of such a non-deliberative footing for critical agency would fly in the face of Hume's ‘interdict’, supposedly forbidding any derivation of ‘ought’ from ‘is’.¹⁵ If all we have at our disposal to trigger a movement of critical scrutiny are our habituated socio-cultural sensitivities, don't we fall into the reductivist, -‘it's all a matter of attitudes’- understanding of ethics that is so often associated with naturalism? Chapter I of Habitual Ethics? debunks that association. It is precisely because patterns of behaviour can gradually acquire normative significance -because internalised standards of right and wrong are embedded in many of our habits- that the question of what, if anything, enables us to periodically question such patterns can be so difficult.¹⁶

For as long as one assumes that rational deliberation is necessarily at the root of such questioning, the idea that living a good life demands that we be able to step up and question the usual remains pretty bland. It is only once one explores the possibility of non-deliberative avenues for such questioning that this idea takes on a more challenging turn.

The above, exploratory endeavour may be driven by perplexity at first. In fields that range from sports to professional practice, the intuitions that stem from the non-deliberative intelligence we acquire through repeated immersion in a given environment are often regarded as critical to high performance. They can be what distinguishes the merely competent from the truly brilliant (chapter II of Habitual Ethics?). Yet when it comes to the art of addressing the ethical question, those experience-based intuitions are typically denigrated. Many acknowledge that, as a matter of fact, intuitions often play a ‘causal’ role in the formation of our moral judgments.¹⁷ But this acknowledgment comes with a health warning: to view this role as anything but the result of some regrettable weakness on our part would be to misunderstand what ethics is all about. On this view, there is nothing worth calling ‘ethics’ unless there are objectively true moral values, and their objectivity can't ‘just’ be grounded in ‘what we do’.

The non-reductive naturalism developed in the opening chapter of Habitual Ethics? outlines how ethical objectivity can be grounded in ‘what we do’. Mastery of the internalised, implicit standards embedded in ‘what we do’ is crucial to acquiring the know-how that makes us capable of ethical judgment. Given that it is through a process of immersion in practices permeated with such implicit standards that we come to internalise this complex web of expectations¹⁸, we are back to our initial question: how do we account for our supposed ability to step back and critically consider those expectations? Does one necessarily have to step out of habit -and decide whether to ‘change one's habits’¹⁹ in light of ‘correct’ values, to use De Caro's words? Or is there a way of reaching such critical scrutiny by moving within habit?

Habitual Ethics? endeavours to answer this last question positively. This not only entails paying attention to the wide spectrum of the habitual – from unconscious tics to purposeful and highly adaptable habits. The possibility of non-deliberative avenues to critical scrutiny hinges on an ‘attentive’ way of having habits. Postema's review describes this way of having habits as a ‘meta-habit’.²⁰ Aside from openness to self-doubt, the required responsiveness to ‘the other’ is best conceptualised as a ‘complex habit that is neither innate, nor acquired simply by drinking the community's water […] it must be learned, practiced and strengthened in the “in between spaces” of our communities’.²¹

These in-between spaces need not be as institutionalised as the medical, cross-disciplinary discussion fora that are mentioned as a key example in the book. What matters is that these ‘spaces’ enable a movement of to and fro between the reasons or principles we associate with given practices and emergent, ‘imperfectly rationalised intuitions’.²² These intuitions might yield a sense of ‘primitive inappropriateness’²³ about aspects of our forms of life. This is perceived pre-reflectively, in the same way as one may perceive the (un)-suitability of a habitat, to borrow Williams’ ‘axiological habitat’ metaphor.²⁴ The environment or a way of living might change in such a way as to make one's present habitation feel ill-suited or cramped: so can the values presiding over our ethically-loaded practices.

To focus on the pre-reflective work involved in the transition between first- and second-person perspectives on moral values does not diminish in any way the significance of the third-person, ‘was this person right in criticising X or disobeying Y’ type of question. That line of questioning is likely to bring up the ontological concerns raised by De Caro in his review. To address those, the narrative developed in chapter I of Habitual Ethics? highlights the process that takes us from human beings with needs and desires to internalised standards of right and wrong:

Whether it be the process whereby we train ourselves to develop better, less wavy tables, or the process whereby we learn to be better friends, better parents, or better citizens, there is nothing mysterious about the way in which these processes yield standards and expectations. Far from being ‘queer’ entities, the moral norms that structure friendship (or parenting) become salient as we hold each other to the expectations we have come to develop on the basis of ongoing practices. ‘[B]y the time we have these “is's” up and running we have all that our normative nature require.’²⁵

Does this narrative leave us with a watered-down understanding of ethics, one that is unable to preserve the possibility of objectively right and wrong answers to ethical conundrums (or guide breaks from ‘bad’ habits²⁶)? The short answer is no it doesn't. Rather than rehearse the arguments that were put forward to justify this negative answer (see chapter I)²⁷, what follows focuses on the role played by rational deliberation in the emergence of a sense of primitive in-appropriateness. This question is raised most explicitly in De Caro's review: ‘I think that Delacroix's quantitative point is correct, but I wonder whether we should not also acknowledge that, from a qualitative point of view, reason plays a crucial role in our moral lives’. We definitely should. Of particular interest are the factors that may lead some to assume a ‘zero-sum game’ (so to speak), whereby emphasising the under-appreciated significance of the pre-reflective would entail under-appreciating the role of the rational within our ethical lives.

3. The interplay between rational deliberation and a pre-reflective sense of ‘primitive inappropriateness’

Whether it be the disposition to go by a sign, treat friends or shave a plank in a certain way, in each case that disposition is accompanied by a conviction that this is the appropriate way of doing things. Ginsborg refers to that conviction as an attitude of ‘primitive appropriateness’.²⁸ It is primitive in that taking something to be appropriate in this sense does not require any prior grasp of the rule.²⁹

To be receptive to the occasional need to break rules, to distance oneself from what may otherwise still be perceived as ‘primitively appropriate’, habituation needs to be continuously honed. This honing process will be supported by all sorts of things. Encounters with different perspectives, ways of living or art matter. So do multiple levels of discursive practices, from the most public-facing, reasons-based discourses all the way to the private, more tentative spaces among friends and family. As a way of capturing the significance of the movement of to and fro between imperfectly rationalised intuitions and a reasons-based apprehension of ethical conundrums³⁰, the ‘in between spaces’ referred to earlier are critical. Feelings of primitive inappropriateness may only occasionally find a constructive outlet in such spaces. Just like the rational deliberations demanded by a commitment to public discourse, these ‘spaces’ nevertheless feed into the ‘axiological habitat’ at the root of those feelings.

What is significant, for our purposes, is the fact that an emerging sense of axiological ‘dissonance’ (which may lead to a shift in morally-loaded habits) need not feed into fully-fledged rational deliberation to be of significance to our ethical lives. To understand why, take De Caro's example of Jim, ‘a person who was born in a very racist environment’.³¹ Instead of straight away stating that Jim ‘later in his life came to realize that racism is a very immoral attitude’, let's consider how Jim might come to that realisation. What follows in De Caro's proposed narrative holds:

one day, Jim encounters a wounded woman who belongs to an ethnic group different from his own. His immediate reaction is one of repugnance and, on the basis of the habits he grew up with, Jim feels the urge to run away without helping the person.³²

This instinctive reaction might leave Jim uneasy. He may have lived with this unarticulated, nagging unease for some time. When Jim retraces his steps to run back to the wounded woman, he is not deliberating about the morality of his attitude. His mind is focused on the bloody arm, her pale face and the tremor in her hand.

Should this absence of deliberation lead us to dismiss this incident as a sociological anecdote that would only become relevant to critical agency if it were to subsequently lead Jim to articulate the reasons and values that make racism abhorrent? Or should this incident be deemed to exemplify how critical agency can find a footing in non-deliberative capacities that are tied to ways of developing attentive enough habits?

Adopting the latter interpretation need not be taken as diminishing in any way the significance of rational deliberation in our ethical lives. Not only is the habitat that shapes our non-deliberative capacities structured in part by such deliberations. Instances of pre-reflectively rooted critical agency -such as those displayed in the above example- will typically need to find a relay in reasons-based discourses if they are to lead to long-term collective change.

4. Habit correction, institutional affordances and their moral risks

The impact of institutional infrastructure on the nature of the interplay between experience-based, pre-reflective judgment and rational deliberation is nicely illustrated in what Postema refers to as a ‘second order habit of the heart’, mercy.³³ In a well-functioning judicial system, mercy is allowed to ‘temper’ desert-focused justice. ‘It provides judges with a wider view of the offender, refusing to identify the person with the wrong done […] It is a trained and focused receptivity, attending to features of the offenders different from those seen and appreciated by the habit of justice’.³⁴

The relational, situational discernment required by such a ‘habit of the heart’ stands in sharp contrast to the ‘strategy of abstraction’ characteristic of any un-tempered ‘habit of justice’.³⁵ Far from being confined to the judicial sphere, this ‘strategy of abstraction’ allows for the perpetuation of collective habits of thought, which are liable to conceal ethically salient features of a situation. In the judicial context put forward by Postema, one may be shielded from these features by seeing ‘the usual man in the usual place’:

[T]he horrible thing about all legal officials, even the best, about all judges, magistrates, barristers, detectives, and policemen, is not that they are wicked (some of them are good), not that they are stupid (several of them are quite intelligent), it is simply that they have got used to it. Strictly they do not see the prisoner in the dock; all they see is the usual man in the usual place. They do not see the awful court of judgment; they only see their own workshop. (G.K. Chesterton, On tremendous trifles)³⁶

While the above quote played a significant role in shaping the research question at the heart of Habitual Ethics?, Chesterton's silence about what prompts ‘legal officials’ to ‘get used to it’ can mislead some into assuming it's all a matter of attitude, or what Annas would refer to as a ‘lack of aspiration’.³⁷ Motivation to see past ‘the usual person in the usual place’³⁸ is indeed likelier if one retains what Dewey would refer to as a ‘spirit of enquiry’. But such inquisitiveness will quickly run out of steam within an institutional infrastructure that doesn't allow any ambiguity to surface.

When the uncertainty inherent in the values constitutive of an institution is masked by or cancelled out by a strict rule-following culture, the temptation to surrender to the comforts of demobilised, abstract reasoning is high. Opportunities for the continuous honing of our ‘imperfectly rationalised intuitions’ become scarce. The resulting retrenchment to increasingly rigidified habits of thought and perception compromise the extent to which we retain our ability to be ‘dynamically responsive’ to states of disequilibrium in our relationship with our environment.³⁹

The vigilance required to counter such retrenchment cannot be assumed to take root in some rational reflection mysteriously detached from those rigidified habits of thought and perception. The work of attention necessary to maintaining a spirit of Deweyan enquiry is an effort that needs to become habitual in order to support from within a multitude of habits. Rather than conceiving of this effort as a ‘meta-habit’ -as suggested in Postema's review- the work of attention is best described a way of having a habit. The extent to which such a way of having a habit remains adequately responsive to ‘the other’ can be compromised by both endogenous, rigidification-of-self factors and exogenous factors. Among these, the structure and design of the institutional landscape is critical and under-studied.

Legal institutions feature prominently within that landscape: Postema's musings on the ‘discipline of ambidexterity’ that enables judges to ‘manage’ and ‘appreciate’ the ‘morally ambivalent relationship between justice and mercy’⁴⁰ illustrate the link between ‘attentive’ ways of having a habit and the extent to which an institution allows uncertainty to surface -and be tinkered with. Far from a given in the legal context, this ‘tinkerability’ is often out of reach when one considers the data-reliant infrastructure that increasingly moulds our habits. It is not too late to change this. Cross-disciplinary collaborations can for instance lead to designing augmentation tools with ‘built in’ incentives for the long-term, collective contestability of their morally-loaded outputs.⁴¹

5. Conclusion

It is in large part because habits are (often misleadingly) deemed obstacles to social and political transformations that Habitual Ethics? was born. Compared to the slipperiness inherent in the notion of moral change, habits offer more grip. While endeavours to capture their individual boundaries (an issue raised in Fine's review⁴²) will fail, as an object of philosophical enquiry habits have under-appreciated merits.

Prime among these is their irreverence for key philosophical dualisms. Since many habits bridge whatever gap was meant to exist between facts and values (as patterns of behaviour gradually acquire normative significance), they inherently call for the endorsement of naturalist premises. That such an endorsement need not translate into a reductivist, it's all a matter of attitudes’ understanding of ethics was not disputed in any of the three reviews. De Caro's questions target a different kind of dualism. His concerns bear on the extent to which my highlighting the possibility (and significance) of pre-reflectively rooted critical agency might underplay the importance of rational deliberation.

In many ways, such a concern is worthy of celebration, since this book was largely triggered by the opposite. Legal theory's assumption that critical agency finds its roots in rational deliberation has not only underplayed the significance of non-deliberative agency within our ethical lives. It has also led to implausible accounts of legal normativity (they are implausible because they presuppose deliberative agency all the way through⁴³). Most importantly, legal theory's haughty disregard for habits has led to a poor understanding of the ‘moral risks’ inherent in law's institutional structures.

The more these structures lack opportunities for critical engagement (and co-construction), the more they are likely to generate increasingly rigidified perceptual and evaluative habits. Because such habits are incapable of learning from and adapting to our changing environment, needs and aspirations, they cannot feed -or renew from the inside- the practices that can lead to normative transformation. Unlike the goal-oriented habits that nurture legal practice, such rigid habits are also easily exploited by ‘unscrupulous shepherds bent on a slaughterhouse ending’.⁴⁴

One need not contemplate such a slaughterhouse scenario to grasp the significance of what is missed when legal theory proceeds from a ‘deliberative all the way through’ genealogy of legal norms. Negatively, the insidious, progressive retrenchement to increasingly rigidified habits of thought and perception risks sapping legal practices from their transformative potential. The progressive drifting away from the live, quotidian and inherently contested re-articulation of law's normativity to a ‘legacy’ normative status turns legal institutions into tools of servitude (in a way that is not dissimilar to much of our current data-reliant infrastructure). Positively, an account of legal normativity that takes into account the role played by pre-reflective agency is more likely to foster institutional designs capable of supporting an ethics of attention. Without the latter, what Postema refers to as a ‘meta-habit of habit correction’ becomes out of reach; so do institutional plasticity mechanisms, such as the ‘discipline of ambidexterity’ through which judges may ‘manage’ the ‘morally ambivalent relationship between justice and mercy’.⁴⁵

Notes

1 Sylvie Delacroix, Habitual Ethics? (Hart Publishing 2022) (thereafter: Habitual Ethics?).

2 ‘[O]f all enemies, habit is perhaps the most cunning, and above all it is cunning enough never to let itself be seen, because the person who sees the habit is saved from the habit’: S. Kierkegaard, Works of Love (H.V. and Hong Hong, E.H. tr, Princeton UP 1995) 36.

3 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind: 60th Anniversary Edition (Taylor & Francis 1949/2009).

4 Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (Routledge 2013) 36.

5 Fine's review, this issue.

6 Henry H Yin and Barbara J Knowlton, ‘The Role of the Basal Ganglia in Habit Formation’ (2006) 7 Nature Reviews Neuroscience 464.

7 To show that such a condition is not necessary, see: Javier Bernacer and Jose Ignacio Murillo, ‘The Aristotelian conception of habit and its contribution to human neuroscience’ (2014) 8 Frontiers in Human Neurosciences 883. To show that diminished goal-sensitivity is not sufficient, one need only contemplate those occasions when one sets out to do something (for instance getting a book downstairs) only to find oneself wondering, once downstairs, what prompted that trip down the stairs.

8 Fine's review, this issue.

9 ‘Following Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 1987), an assemblage is a contingent ensemble of things, practices, and relations which, although appearing as a functioning whole, is not reducible to a single logic’: Carolyn Pedwell, Revolutionary Routines (McGill-Queen's University Press 2021) 16.

10 Ibid, referring to Tony Bennett and others, ‘Habit and Habituation: Governance and the Social’ (2013) 19 Body & Society 3.

11 H L A Hart, ‘Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals’ [The Harvard Law Review Association] 71 Harvard Law Review 593 Lon Fuller, ‘Positivism and Fidelity to Law: A Reply to Professor Hart’ (1958) 71 Harvard Law Review 630.

12 In On Habit, Clare Carlisle traces a philosophical thread that links Kant to Kierkegaard and Bergson, via less well-known authors such as Maine de Biran and his ambivalent appraisal of what he called the ‘double law’ of habit: C. Carlisle, On habit (Routledge 2014).

13 Herlinde Pauer-Studer and J David Velleman, ‘Distortions of Normativity’ (2011) 14 Ethical theory and moral practice 329.

14 ‘This uncompromising attitude toward the performance of his murderous duties damned him in the eyes of the judges more than anything else, which was comprehensible, but in his own eyes it was precisely what justified him, as it had once silenced whatever conscience he might have had left. No exceptions—this was the proof that he had always acted against his “inclinations,” whether they were sentimental or inspired by interest, that he had always done his “duty.”’ Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil (Penguin 1994) 137 137.

15 It is unclear whether Hume is rightly understood to forbid such a ‘derivation’. Putnam convincingly argues otherwise in: Hilary Putnam, The collapse of the fact/ value dichotomy and other essays (Harvard UP 2002) 26. In contrast, see for instance Scott J. Shapiro, Legality (Harvard UP 2011) 2615 (loc.).

16 As Postema puts it: ‘some habits, especially those that are learned through a process of intentional habituation, have standards of correctness implicit in them’ (Postema's review, this issue).

17 Jonathan Haidt, ‘The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment’ in Reasoning: Studies of Human Inference and its Foundations (CUP; US 2008).

18 Nigel DeSouza, ‘Pre-Reflective Ethical Know-How’ (2013) 16 Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 279.

19 De Caro's review, this issue.

20 Postema's review, this issue.

21 Postema's review, this issue.

22 Bernard Williams, ‘Conflicts of Value’ in Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers (CUP 1981). See also Jasper C van den Herik and Erik Rietveld, ‘Reflective Situated Normativity’ (2021) 178 Philosophical Studies.

23 Ginsborg (Hannah Ginsborg, ‘Primitive normativity and skepticism about rules’ 108 The Journal of Philosophy 227) speaks of ‘primitive appropriateness’, without delving into its opposite. Section 3.2 in Chapter I of Habitual Ethics? outlines why this is an important omission: to grasp the normative dimension of a rule is also about grasping the circumstances when that rule needs to be broken.

24 ‘We shall see their judgments as part of their way of living, a cultural artifact they have come to inhabit (though they have not consciously built it). On this, nonobjectivist, model, we shall take a different view of the relations between that practice and critical reflection. We shall not be disposed to see the level of reflection as implicitly already there’: Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Fontana Masterguides 1985) 147.

25 Simon Blackburn, ‘Normativity a la mode’ (2001) 5 Journal of Ethics: An International Philosophical Review 139, 148 148.

26 The latter formulation comes closer to the concern formulated by De Caro in his review.

27 Some worry that naturalists can explain morality's motivational pull, but only if they endorse an expressivist understanding of moral judgments (so they cannot ‘have’ the possibility of objectively true ethical judgments too). This is addressed in section 2, Chapter I of Habitual Ethics?. Others worry that such narratives can only ever yield dispositions to act or behave in certain ways: these dispositions would not be enough to account for our rule-following practices. This is addressed in section 3, Chapter I of Habitual Ethics?.

28 Ginsborg.

29 ‘The danger here, I believe, is one of giving a justification of our procedure where there is no such thing as a justification and we ought simply to have said: that's how we do it’: L. Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Oxford University Press 1956), Part 3, § 74.

30 ‘Reason pure of all influence from prior habit is a fiction’ J Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (G. Allen & Unwin 1922) 16.

31 De Caro's review, this issue.

32 De Caro's review, this issue

33 Postema's developments in his review (this issue) build on G. Postema, Law's Rule: The Nature, Value and Viability of the Rule of Law (Oxford University Press 2022), ch. 11.

34 Postema's review, this issue.

35 Postema's review, this issue.

36 G K Chesterton, ‘The Twelve Men’ in G K Chesterton (ed), Tremendous Trifles (Sheed & Ward 1955).

37 Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue (Kindle Edition edn, OUP 2011).

38 Chesterton.

39 Erik Rietveld, Damiaan Denys and Maarten Van Westen, ‘Ecological-Enactive Cognition as engaging with a field of relevant affordances’ in Albert Newen, Leon De Bruin and Shaun Gallagher (eds), The Oxford handbook of 4E cognition (Oxford University Press 2018).

40 Postema's review, this issue.

41 Sylvie Delacroix, ‘Diachronic interpretability and machine learning systems’ (2022) 1 Journal of Cross-disciplinary Research in Computational Law.

42 Fine's review, this issue.

43 My first book -Legal norms and normativity: an essay in genealogy- largely fell into that ‘exclusive focus on deliberative agency’ trap (Sylvie Delacroix, Legal Norms and Normativity: An Essay in Genealogy (Hart Publishing 2006)). Habitual Ethics? can be seen as enriching -and making more plausible- a genealogical account of legal normativity that I still endorse otherwise.

44 H L A Hart, The Concept of Law (2nd edn, Clarendon Press 1994) 117.

45 Postema's review, this issue.