https://orcid.org/0009-0002-5047-2033
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ABSTRACT
What exactly do we need to do in order to make a promise, or to exercise some other normative power? On a view relied on by many philosophers writing on promising, consent, and related phenomena, the answer is that we must communicate a suitable kind of intention. On this view, power-conferring principles assert that specific normative consequences, determined in part by the content of the communicated intention, attach to such communicative acts, and these principles need not be socially practised or accepted to be true. The paper offers a defense of this convention-independent view against the forceful challenge developed by Jed Lewinsohn in ‘The “Natural Unintelligibility” of Normative Powers’. Lewinsohn appeals to action-theoretic considerations to show that the relevant type of communicative act could not be performed under conditions of rationality and full information, and that therefore promissory power and other normative powers require the existence of social rules conferring such powers. The defense of the view targeted by Lewinsohn turns partly on the exact content of plausible constraints on the intelligibility of actions done with a particular aim, and partly on the question just how the social acceptance of power-conferring rules should be thought to matter.
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Notes
1 As Lewinsohn notes, the term ‘normative power’ can be, and has been, legitimately employed to express a concept that does not have this implication. In arguing for the unintelligibility of normative powers whose exercise essentially consists in fiat acts, Lewinsohn’s paper targets what even those who employ the term in a wider sense would regard as paradigmatic cases of normative powers, or as instances of a paradigmatic (narrow) concept of normative power.
2 I return in the final section to why the qualifier ‘naturally’ may be misleading here, to the extent that it suggests that these acts could be intelligible in ways other than by being ‘naturally’ intelligible. I think that the conclusion supported by Lewinsohn’s argument, if successful, is that these acts are unintelligible (under conditions of rationality and adequate information) except to the extent that they have normative consequences in virtue of something other than the normative principles he discusses.
3 In this paper I will use the following expressions interchangeably, since it does not seem to me that any part of Lewinsohn’s argument turns on distinctions that might be captured by more specific ways of using them: ‘φ-ing for the sake of bringing about X’; ‘φ-ing with the goal, or aim, of bringing about X’; ‘φ-ing with the intention of bringing about X’; ‘φ-ing for the purpose of bringing about X’; ‘φ-ing in order to bring about X’; ‘φ-ing so as to bring about X’.
4 The specification relation is defined by Lewinsohn on p. 16 of his paper; more on this below.
5 In what follows, I will sometimes phrase my comments in the more general register of effecting a deontic change, rather than speak specifically of incurring an obligation. This is in the spirit of Lewinsohn’s paper, which treats promissory fiats as a special case of a more general problem.
6 Could a convention-independent normative power, and hence (if Lewinsohn’s argument succeeds) one whose exercise is not an act of fiat, satisfy the ordinary concept of the power to promise? Lewinsohn does not commit himself on this question. A negative answer could be prompted by the thought that it is a conceptual truth about promissory obligation that it results from fiat, and that the concept of fiat (in the relevant sense) is exhausted by acts that are vulnerable to Lewinsohn’s argument. Or it may be that normative reflection shows that obligations that have all the typical properties of promissory obligation cannot or are unlikely to result from any act that is not an act of fiat.
7 As stated by Lewinsohn, the Contribution Condition requires the presence of a belief in the possibility of contribution, rather than just (as the weakest version of a belief requirement on intention would suggest) the absence of a belief in the impossibility of contribution. This could appear to offer a way of escaping the grip of his argument: if no particular instrumental or ‘contribution’-type belief is required on the part of someone who φs with the intention of accomplishing goal X, then a person could φ for the sake of <bringing about X by φ-ing with that intention>, even if she lacks the belief that her (simply) φ-ing could contribute to her φ-ing with that intention – as long as she does not believe that it could not contribute.
But I do not think that this is a possible way out, since Lewinsohn’s argument assumes conditions of full (relevant) information. In that context, the Contribution Condition can be replaced by an Objective Contribution Condition: a person who has all the relevant information can rationally φ with the goal of bringing about some outcome X only where her φ-ing under the circumstances could contribute to the occurrence of X. This Objective Contribution Condition requires not a specific belief on the part of a (rational) agent but requires rather that the content of the relevant belief be true. The Objective Condition states what needs to be true of the proposed action, rather than what needs to be true of an agent’s psychology.
8 Footnote 42 of his paper.
9 Stated in the objective register: If S is rational and suitably informed, S can φ with the aim of bringing about outcome X only if S’s φ-ing with that aim could contribute to outcome X.
10 Or, under idealised conditions of full information, as suitable for the purposes of Lewinsohn’s argument: all those aspects of which the agent can have knowledge.
11 Lewinsohn, footnote 42.
12 Lewinsohn points out, in effect, that the More General Condition is consistent with the following conditional: If S performs some action A* (e.g., taking a red pill) in order to achieve goal G, in the belief that doing A* can contribute to G, then for any action A (e.g., taking a pill of any colour) of which A* is a specification that will be realised if S does A under the circumstances, S can also be said to be doing A in order to achieve G (even where S does not believe that all ways of doing A could contribute to G). And that conditional seems false.
But that the More General Condition is consistent with this conditional does not show that the More General Condition commits us to accepting it. After all, the More General Condition, like the Contribution Condition, articulates only a necessary condition for φ-ing with some goal G, not a sufficient condition. It seems plausible that at least one further necessary condition is (i) that S believes that she is φ-ing (e.g., doing A / taking a pill of any colour), and perhaps also (ii) that she believes that she is φ-ing with goal G (e.g., that she has the belief: ‘I am taking a pill of any colour in order to learn the truth’). The absurdity, such as it is, of saying that I took a pill of any colour (as opposed to: a pill of some colour) in order to learn the truth may be due to the fact that on the most natural reading of that sentence, one or both of these further conditions are not met. That the More General Condition does not by itself do the work done by these further conditions does not show that it is extensionally inadequate.
Such possible further conditions aside, that I took a pill of any colour in order to learn the truth is naturally read as implying that in taking the pill, I was indifferent to its colour; and this is in tension with the More General Condition itself, which after all requires that I believed that I was taking the red pill (a belief that would in standard cases have been founded on my intending specifically to take the red pill, as opposed to being indifferent between the act of taking the red pill and the act of taking the blue pill).
13 Can we transform Lewinsohn’s own example – killing, versus killing by stabbing – into a case of this type? Perhaps so: Suppose that the killer, at least on this occasion – or perhaps on any occasion –, has no way of killing other than by stabbing, and she knows this. In that case, she knows that if she kills the victim at all, she kills him by stabbing him. I grant that it remains counter-intuitive to say that she can therefore kill him with the aim of killing him by stabbing him. But the source of that strangeness, I think, is not the specification constraint. I will not try to give a full account of what the source may be, but I suspect that it may have to do with the fact that we imagine the stabbing to be done, in this case, with the aim of killing, and that a person cannot do A (killing) in order to <do B in order to do A>. But in fact killing (simpliciter) need not be an aim the person has in this case. Her only aim may be specifically to kill by stabbing. In order to realise that aim, it is not sufficient that she stab; she must also (thereby) kill. It is true that under normal conditions, killing, as such, does not bring one closer to having killed by stabbing. But in a situation in which killing x necessarily consists in stabbing x, it does (and not just closer but indeed all the way).
14 If I were to try and pinpoint where in Lewinsohn’s chain of reasoning this possibility gets ruled out, I would say that it is in his taking a certain restrictive definition of the relation of ‘partially explaining’ to be the only alternative to the relation of fully explaining or the absence of any explanatory relation (Lewinsohn, p. 16 f.). It seems to me that some fact A can figure in an explanation of another fact B even where it is neither the case that A fully explains B, nor that A is a non-redundant part of some set of facts that fully explains B (as would be required for ‘partial explanation’ under Lewinson’s definition). I suspect that if my examples are sound, they show that a fact can sometimes be explanatory even where it is a redundant part of a fully explanatory set. That A, B, and C are jointly sufficient for explaining X does not entail that a further fact D (of which one among A, B, and C is a specification) could not also contribute to an explanation of X, as long as the presence of D – under the circumstances – entails the presence of A, B, or C.
15 What might make this belief true? One possible reason, not necessarily the only one, is that G (incurring an obligation) is a goal that I have prior to and independently of my considering exactly how to realise G, and I believe that φ-ing, on the occasion, would contribute to realising G, and I have the options of (i) not-φing or of (ii) setting aside G in considering whether and how to φ, and I refrain from taking those options. To believe that φ-ing, on the occasion, would contribute to realising G, it seems sufficient that I believe the Aim Principle and that I accept only the relaxed version of the Specification Constraint.
16 This assumption is implied by the letter of his argument on pp. 22 f. But as Lewinsohn has pointed out to me, his claim (in footnote 41 of his paper) that it does not ultimately matter to his argument how we resolve the ambiguity with respect to ‘thereby’ is meant to apply not just to the argument against the Aim Principle but equally to the argument against the Communication Principle. While I agree that the resolution of the ambiguity does not bear on the argument against the Aim Principle, it seems to me that the same does not hold with respect to the Communication Principle. More on this below.
17 The Contribution Condition is not in question: To have the aim of bringing about some result X (in this case: incurring obligation O) by φ-ing with intention C (in this case: by uttering U with the intention of getting the hearer to believe that I intend to bring about a normative change in a certain way), what I need to believe, by the Contribution Condition, is that my φ-ing with intention C could contribute to X’s coming to pass. There appears to be no problem in believing this, if the the modified Communication Principle is true and believed by me.
The Specification Constraint is not in question either. It states that I cannot believe that my φ-ing (uttering U) could even partly account for my uttering U with the communicative intention; and the modified Communication Principle can be satisfied consistently with this. Satisfying its antecedent does not require that my aim in uttering U is to do the thing that would fully and directly and uniquely account for my incurring obligation O, since satisfying its antecedent does not require that I believe that I could incur obligation O (partly) by uttering U – only that I could incur O by uttering U with a suitable intention.
18 Cf. Joseph Raz, Practical Reason and Norms (Oxford University Press 1999), Chapter 1.2 and postscript to the second edition.
19 I am assuming that the property of being believed, accepted, and/or followed – in short, being socially practised – belongs to the minimal concept of a social rule, in one familiar sense of ‘social rule’. Some conceptions require significantly more than this: for instance in stipulating that social rules are only those socially practised rules that are binding (valid, true) partly in virtue of being socially practised; or only those whose general acceptance is itself part of people's reason for accepting the rule. Lewinsohn explicitly sets aside the question whether the social rules at issue in his discussion are morally binding or what the conditions of their being morally binding are. Nor does he take any stance on whether for a rule to be a social rule its acceptance by others must be among the reasons for people’s accepting it.
20 If its truth depends on whether it is socially practised, the rule would be a social rule in yet a further sense that we may distinguish from the first two: a rule that is true or valid only if practised, or for that matter (and there may be no actual instances of this): true or valid only if not practised. A rule could be a social rule in this third sense, in having social acceptance or non-acceptance among its validity conditions, even when it is neither practised in any community nor contains any reference to social facts. The rule ‘One must never lie’ would be a social rule in this third sense if, for instance, the validity of the rule (perhaps restricted to some context) depended on whether it was widely accepted (in that context). Those who reject social relativism will explain any rule belonging to the third type by reference to some rule of the second type.
21 There may be much to be said for accepting a weaker requirement: a rule that can make our action intelligible must be one that is conceptually and epistemically accessible to all relevant parties, and perhaps one that all parties have sufficient reason to believe. But it would seem to be stretching the concept of a social rule to say that all rules meeting these conditions are therefore social rules.
22 In memory of Joseph Raz, and with gratitude. I would like to thank Ulrike Heuer, John Hyman, and Yuuki Ohta for convening the workshop ‘Reasons and Normativity: Themes from the Philosophy of Joseph Raz’; Benjamin Kiesewetter for his reaction to a draft of this article; and Jed Lewinsohn for his captivating and wide-ranging paper and for rewarding exchanges about a number of the points discussed here.