So what is a normatively incompetent agent?
—give me a reason, why I ought to be kind to others.
Following from the last essay, I'll talk about practical reasoning. The goal of this essay is to elaborate on some of the terms (and the relation between them) that come up in the literature on practical reasoning. These terms are normative, normativity, and agency, and what does being normatively competent mean? However, I'm rather more curious as to what does being normatively incompetent look like? Now I don't have any academic scholarship in philosophy, and that is why I'm thinking out loud. But whatever I'll say next has been heavily influenced by Prof. Christine Korsgaard and her, what I think, two excellent books “Sources of Normativity” and “Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity.” At a very high-level, Christine Korsgaard situates the normativity of normative claims in the agency and the autonomy of the agents.
Before proceeding further, I'll put these two paragraphs as to how decisively she puts the counter argument that could come from determinism, or the complicated relationship between prediction and deliberation that came up in the last essay, and is the main reason as to how I ended up here.
But how can this be a problem? The afternoon stretches before me, and I must decide whether to work or to play. Suppose first that you can predict which one I am going to do. That has no effect on me at all: I must still decide what to do. I am tempted to play but worried about work, and I must decide the case on its merits. Suppose next I believe that you can predict which one I'm going to do. You've done it often enough before. What then? I am tempted by play but worried about work, and I must decide the case on its merits.
The worry seems to be that if we were sure we were determined or knew how we were determined then either we could not act or we would not act, or else we would act differently. But why is this supposed to happen? Having discovered that my conduct is predictable, will I now sit quietly in my chair, waiting to see what I will do? Then I will not do anything but sit quietly in my chair. And that had better be what you predicted, or you will have been wrong. But in any case why should I do that, if I think that I ought to be working? Well, suppose that you tell me what you predict I am going to do. If you predict that I am going to work, and I think that I should work, then there is no problem. Or do I now have to do it less freely?
Back to the topic, let's start with what normative means. I'll put the definition directly below:
Definition. (Normative). Given some arbitrary object $\Phi$, if I have a reason to $\Phi$, then $\Phi$-ing is said to be normative for me.
Consider some examples:
- If I've to take a flight, I have a reason to go to the airport.
- If I want to stay alive, I have a reason to drink water, and
- If I've to keep my rented apartment, I have a reason to pay the rent.
And hence, “go to the airport”, “drink water”, “pay the rent” are all normative for me. Now consider the other familiar examples:
- Do not evade taxes.
- Do not rob a bank.
- Be kind to others.
One usually understands them to be the moral claims, social norms, or rules, etc. howsoever one wants to put it. But it is not yet clear if they are normative based on the definition provided. It requires providing a proof, as in the problem of the following form:
Problem. Prove $\Phi :=$ “do not evade taxes” is normative for me?
In asking for a proof, I'm asking for a reason as to why I ought not to evade taxes. What reason do I have to not evade the taxes. For a terminology, I'm asking for why this $\Phi$ is normative for me, or what is the normativity of “do not evade taxes.”
Our life is driven by rules and regulations and norms and obligations. As Christine Korsgaard puts it in “Self-Constitution”: human beings are condemned to action, but not only a human being is condemned to action, but we have act in a certain manner. Her project in “Sources of Normativity” is to ask where such rules, regulations, norms, and obligations, get their normativity from. For now, we can focus on moral claims, and in asking for the normativity of these moral claims, she is asking “give me a reason, why I ought to be kind to others,” as an example. I'll not go into the kinds of proofs she considers, as my point was to highlight and clarify the definition of normativity.
I'll proceed next as to note a particular peculiarity embedded in the terminology of a normative claim, and the question of asking for its normativity. It helps to think of an example what is not normative for me?
Consider that I'm healthy, and I've just eaten my food. Do I have a reason to digest the food? Is digesting the food normative for me? Well, it is not. I'm not digesting it, my body is digesting it. Take the earlier example: if I've to take a flight, I've a reason to go to the airport, and I can fail to go. I can sit in my chair, and not go to the airport. If I want to stay alive, I've a reason to drink water, but I can fail to drink water. But if I'm healthy and I've eaten, then I cannot fail to digest, and I cannot digest better today because it matters more, and I cannot postpone it to the evening because I'm busy this afternoon. This suggests that digestion is not something that is up to me. It is something that happens in me. So this is one addition to the definition of a normative claim.
Claim. (Normative). Given some arbitrary object $\Phi$, $\Phi$ is normative for me only if I have the choice or the facility to not-$\Phi$.
This seems to suggest that the question of a normative claim somehow relates to the agency or the autonomy of the agent. I can choose or fail not to drink water, or fail to pay the rent. Nothing breaks in the world if I do so. But it clarifies that a claim can be normative for me only if it can be otherwise. It is possible for me to not be kind to others, or to not pay the taxes, all in very much my agency. The point is not that whatever I can fail to do is therefore normative for me. Rather, if something is normative for me, then there has to be a possibility that I fail to conform to it.
Before I go to what would a normatively incompetent agent look like, here's the summary of the argument I've presented above:
- A normative claim presents something as something I have reason to do.
- Therefore, for the claim to be practically normative for me, its object has to be something attributable to me as an agent.
- One mark of this is that having the reason does not mechanically guarantee conformity with the reason.
- I can recognise or possess a reason to $\Phi$ and nevertheless not-$\Phi$.
- Hence, the normativity of a claim presupposes the possibility of normative failure.
- If I do not have the capacity to not-$\Phi$, $\Phi$ cannot be normative for me.
Having made this clear, now I think it is easy to see what a normatively incompetent agent looks like?
One might first think that a normatively incompetent agent is simply an agent who fails to do what they have a reason to do. But that cannot be right based on the argument above. In fact, the possibility of failure is required for something to be normative for me in the first place. If I cannot fail to $\Phi$, then there does not seem to be much sense in saying that I have a reason to $\Phi$. I'll $\Phi$ anyway.
Consider again the claim: “be kind to others.” Suppose I understand that I have a reason to be kind to someone, but I nevertheless act unkindly. I have certainly failed to conform to the reason. But it is not clear why this should make me normatively incompetent. In fact, this is exactly the possibility we required above. I can have a reason to $\Phi$ and nevertheless not-$\Phi$. Having the reason does not itself guarantee what I'll do. So merely failing to do what I have a reason to do cannot be what normative incompetence means.
Now consider another agent A. Suppose that whenever A has a reason to $\Phi$, A necessarily $\Phi$-s. If A has a reason to be kind, A is kind. If A has a reason to pay the rent, A pays the rent. If A has a reason to not rob a bank, A does not rob the bank. And suppose there is no possibility for A to not-$\Phi$, i.e. the capacity of the agent to not-$\Phi$ has been stripped away (or was not there in the first place).
One might think that such an agent is perfectly normatively competent. It never fails to do what it has a reason to do. But based on the argument above, if A cannot fail to $\Phi$, then in what sense is $\Phi$-ing normative for A? A always conforms to the normative claim, but does not have the capacity to fail to conform to it.
This is similar to the digestion example. If I eat food, and I'm healthy, my body digests it. There is no possibility for me to say that today I'll not digest it, or that I'll postpone digestion because I'm busy this afternoon. Similarly, if A cannot fail to be kind whenever there is a reason to be kind, then it is not clear in what sense being kind is something A does for a reason. A will be kind anyway.
So there seems to be a difference between conforming to a normative claim and being normatively competent with respect to it. An agent can conform to a normative claim every single time, and still lack the capacity which was required for that claim to be normative for the agent in the first place.
Following the argument, we can define a normatively incompetent agent as below:
Definition. (Normatively Incompetent Agent). Given some arbitrary object $\Phi$ which is normative for an agent A, A is said to be normatively incompetent with respect to $\Phi$ if A necessarily $\Phi$s, and lacks the capacity to not-$\Phi$.
There is a subtlety here. I'm not saying that I'm normatively incompetent with respect to digestion because I cannot choose to not digest my food. Digestion was not normative for me to begin with. The case I'm interested in is where $\Phi$ is normative for an agent, but the agent at the same time lacks the capacity to not-$\Phi$.
Now this gives a rather strange result. A normatively incompetent agent need not be an agent who always does the “wrong” thing. Neither is it the agent who always does the “good” thing. It can be an agent who cannot do the “wrong” thing. I've put “good” and “wrong” under quotes as that requires another argument as to what is “good” or “wrong”. Such an agent can always be kind, always pay its taxes, never rob a bank, and never violate any rule. It can conform to every normative claim we put in front of it. But if it lacks the capacity to do otherwise, then it is not clear in what sense any of these claims are normative for that agent.
If you cannot fail to be kind, then it is not clear in what sense you ought to be kind.