Normativity

Prime #

102

Origin domain

Philosophy

Also from

Sociology & Anthropology, Information Theory

Related primes

Moral Relativism, Virtue Ethics, Epistemic Justice, Teleology

Core Idea

Normativity is the structural feature of a domain or practice by which some states, actions, beliefs, or attitudes are held to be correct, required, permissible, or prohibited relative to a standard — such that evaluation, criticism, and guidance become possible within the domain. It is the "ought-side" of a practice: the side on which claims of correctness apply rather than merely descriptive claims about what happens. ^[1] The essential commitment is that normative statements ("you ought to φ," "this inference is valid," "that move is legal," "this belief is justified") are not reducible to purely descriptive statements about what is the case, and that understanding any domain with normative structure requires grasping both the standard and the operation of evaluation against it. Every normative domain specifies (1) the normative claim N — an ought-statement, value-attribution, or reason-assertion — which stands in a deontic category (obligation, permission, prohibition, supererogation); (2) the source-of-normativity — whether grounded in reason, social convention, institutional authority, an end or function, or divine command; (3) the binding-force authority — whether categorical (applicable regardless of desire), hypothetical (dependent on ends), or defeasible (subject to exception); and (4) the scope or domain — whether moral, epistemic, aesthetic, prudential, legal, or institutional. ^[2]

The philosophical question of normativity is the meta-level question of what grounds and explains the force of ought-claims in general, which has been a central locus of contemporary philosophy. Korsgaard's Sources of Normativity^[1] argues normativity is grounded in self-reflective rational endorsement; Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other^[2] defends a reasons-fundamentalist framework; Parfit's On What Matters^[3] pursues metaphysical foundations for normative claims; and Dancy's Ethics Without Principles^[4] develops particularist accounts of reasons. All contend with the is-ought distinction — Hume's^[5] challenge that "ought" does not logically derive from "is" — and rival frameworks for grounding (rationalist, constructivist, naturalist, expressivist, constitutivist).

How would you explain it like I'm…

Should-and-Shouldn't

Some things just are — the cookie is on the table. Other things are about what should be — you should not take the cookie without asking. The 'should' part, where we say something is right or wrong, allowed or not allowed, is what normativity means. It's the difference between describing the world and judging it.

Rules of Right and Wrong

Normativity is the part of life where some things count as correct and others as wrong — not just true or false, but what you ought to do, believe, or feel. Rules of a game say what moves are legal. Logic says which arguments are valid. Ethics says which actions are right. In each case, there's a standard you can measure against and judge by. Normativity is what makes praise, blame, criticism, and guidance even possible — without it, there'd just be a list of what happens, never a question of whether it should happen.

Normativity

Normativity is the feature of a domain in which some actions, beliefs, or attitudes count as correct, required, allowed, or forbidden according to a standard — so that evaluation, criticism, and guidance become possible. It is the 'ought' side of a practice: not just describing what happens, but judging what should happen. Saying 'this argument is invalid,' 'that move is illegal,' 'this belief is unjustified,' or 'you ought to keep your promise' all invoke normativity. The philosophical question is what grounds the force of such 'ought' claims — reason, social convention, institutional authority, function, or something else — and Hume's famous challenge that 'ought' cannot be derived from 'is' frames the debate.

 

Normativity is the structural feature of a domain or practice by which some states, actions, beliefs, or attitudes are held to be correct, required, permissible, or prohibited relative to a standard, such that evaluation, criticism, and guidance become possible within the domain. It is the "ought-side" of a practice - the side on which claims of correctness apply, in contrast to merely descriptive claims about what is the case. Normative statements ("you ought to phi," "this inference is valid," "that move is legal," "this belief is justified") are deontic (using terms of obligation, permission, prohibition, supererogation) and are widely held not to be reducible to purely descriptive statements - a thesis associated with Hume's is-ought distinction (1739). Every normative domain specifies (1) the normative claim and its deontic category; (2) the source of normativity - reason, social convention, institutional authority, function, divine command; (3) the binding-force - categorical, hypothetical, or defeasible; and (4) the scope - moral, epistemic, aesthetic, prudential, legal, or institutional. The meta-level question of what grounds the force of ought-claims is a central locus of contemporary philosophy, with rival frameworks defended by Korsgaard (self-reflective rational endorsement), Scanlon (reasons fundamentalism), Parfit (metaphysical foundations), and Dancy (particularism), among others.

Structural Signature

A normative domain exhibits three co-present features: (i) the normative claim — a standard or set of standards that defines correctness, ought-ness, or validity; (ii) a body of practice that can succeed or fail relative to the standard; and (iii) the categorical-vs-hypothetical structure — a vocabulary of assessment (ought/must/may/should/correct/incorrect/valid/invalid/justified/unjustified) in which successes and failures are expressed. The domain may be moral, legal, epistemic, logical, prudential, aesthetic, institutional, linguistic, or technical; the structure is shared though the specific standards and deontic categories differ. McDowell's Virtue and Reason^[6] argues that evaluative properties enter rationality itself, not as external constraints but as responsiveness to genuine evaluative reasons.

What It Is Not

Not all rules or norms (specific vs. general structure): A rule ("if you enter the building, sign in") is a norm, but not all norms are rules; normative structure can operate through exemplars (what would a virtuous agent do?), through teleological grounding (what serves the function?), or through constitutive practices (what makes this act a promise?). ^[4] Identifying normativity with rule-following misses the variety of normative structures.

Not just morality (domain scope): Morality is one normative domain among many; inference, law, etiquette, language, games, and crafts are all normative without being moral, and their specific norms need not align with moral norms. Confusing normativity with moral normativity risks collapsing epistemic norms into moral ones, legal norms into conventional ones, and aesthetic norms into subjective preferences.

Not all conventions or social practices: Social conventions (which side of the road to drive on) are normative but many social practices are not (the fact that people tend to wear blue on Tuesdays is descriptive, not normative); the distinction between regularity and normativity is constitutive. Kant's Groundwork^[7] grounds the categorical imperative in rationality itself, not in social convention or contingent human interests.

Not reducible to consequentialism or deontology alone: Normativity spans both consequentialist grounding (the norm serves a good outcome) and deontological grounding (the norm expresses a duty or principle); it is broader than either framework and compatible with multiple normative theories.

Not mere description of regularities: Statistical regularities (most people do X) are not normative; normative statements are about correctness, not frequency. Even a regularity that has 100% of practitioners doing it can be criticized as wrong on its normative domain.

Not all reason-giving: A reason to do something (hunger gives a reason to eat) is not automatically a normative claim; normativity involves the binding-force authority — a claim that something ought to be done, that the agent is bound to do it (categorically or given certain conditions), not merely that it is instrumentally advantageous. ^[8] Williams's Internal and External Reasons^[8] distinguishes reasons that motivate (internal, dependent on the agent's desires) from reasons that hold independently of motivation (external, allegedly normative in their own right).

Broad Use

Normativity appears in metaethics (the ground of moral ought-claims and the debate over naturalism vs. non-naturalism; Moore's Principia Ethica^[9] poses the open-question argument against naturalist reduction; contemporary responses argue normative properties reduce to natural ones or are constituted by social practice); in epistemology (the ground of justificatory ought-claims — what makes a belief justified?); in philosophy of logic (the normative force of logical inference); in philosophy of language (the normativity of meaning — Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language poses the Kripkenstein debate on normativity of meaning); in philosophy of law (the source of legal obligation and its relation to moral obligation); in game theory and institutional theory (rule-governed practice and constitutive norms); in sociolinguistics (prescriptive vs descriptive norms of language); in social theory (Bicchieri's The Grammar of Society^[10] analyzes social norms as normative-belief systems that stabilize through conditional preference); and in AI alignment (specifying correct vs merely statistical behavior and the challenge of machine normative reasoning). It recurs across essentially every philosophical subdiscipline and many empirical disciplines (sociology, anthropology, economics, psychology). Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic^[11] defends emotivism — the view that normative claims express attitudes rather than facts — while Blackburn's Spreading the Word^[12] develops quasi-realism, preserving normative judgments' cognitive content while respecting their attitude-like features.

Clarity

Normativity is clarifying as a category because it surfaces the structural feature that distinguishes rule-governed from merely regular practice: an agent can be wrong at chess, at a proof, at a promise, at a sentence — in ways that are not captured by describing what agents typically do. The category disambiguates descriptive claims ("X does Y") from normative claims ("X ought to do Y") and forces clarity about which is at issue in a given analysis.

Manages Complexity

Normativity manages the complexity of rule-governed practice by providing a unified vocabulary across domains that would otherwise be theorized in disciplinary silos (moral theory, logic, legal theory, linguistics, institutional theory). By recognizing the shared structural features of normative domains, theorists can transfer insights (e.g., about the source of norms, about rule-following, about the relation between practice and critique) across domains. Velleman's How We Get Along^[13] argues that normativity is constituted by rational agents' capacity for self-governance, grounding normativity not in external facts but in the constitutive features of agency itself.

Abstract Reasoning

Normative reasoning proceeds by specifying standards, applying them to cases, and evaluating conformity or deviance. It supports formal modeling in deontic logic (with operators for obligation, permission, prohibition), game-theoretic formalization of rules, and social-theoretic analysis of institutions. It also supports meta-theoretic reflection on the source and scope of normative force — the central subject of contemporary metaethics and meta-epistemology. Foot's Natural Goodness^[14] develops naturalist virtue ethics, arguing that normativity is grounded in facts about human form of life and natural function, bridging the is-ought gap through accounts of natural normativity.

Knowledge Transfer

Role	Moral form	Epistemic form	Legal form	Game form
Standard	Moral principle	Evidential requirement	Statute, precedent	Rule of play
Object evaluated	Action, agent	Belief, inference	Act, contract	Move
Deontic category	Obligatory, forbidden, permissible	Justified, unjustified	Legal, illegal	Legal, illegal
Ground	Reason, virtue, agreement, function	Truth-conduciveness, coherence	Authority, tradition, consent	Constitutive convention
Critique	"You acted wrongly"	"That belief is unjustified"	"That act was illegal"	"That move violates the rules"

A philosopher's analysis of moral normativity transfers to epistemology as the analysis of epistemic normativity; transfers to legal theory as the analysis of legal normativity; and transfers to institutional and game theory. The structural core in all cases is standard-plus-evaluation-plus-deontic-vocabulary; what varies is the domain and the source-of-normativity.

Examples

Formal/Abstract Example: The Normativity of Modus Ponens

Given a belief that "if P then Q" and a belief that "P", an agent ought (epistemically / logically) to believe Q; failure to do so is not merely a statistical deviation but is open to criticism as a rational failure. ^[1] The ought here is not moral (it is not morally bad to fail at modus ponens) but is normative — it involves the normative claim (correctness requires inferring Q) and the binding-force authority (categorical, independent of the agent's desires). The standard of correctness is logical validity, the objects evaluated are the agent's belief-formation practices, and the deontic vocabulary is rational/irrational, justified/unjustified. Korsgaard's analysis in Sources of Normativity develops this through the lens of the categorical-vs-hypothetical structure: hypothetical imperatives ("if you desire X, do Y") depend on prior desires; categorical imperatives ("you ought to believe the conclusion of a valid inference") bind regardless of what the agent desires.

Mapped back: This illustrates normativity across the epistemic domain, showing the is-ought distinction (the fact that P and "if P then Q" does not logically entail "ought to believe Q" without normative premises about rational agency) and the structure common to all normative domains (standard, evaluation, deontic vocabulary).

Applied/Industry Example: AI Alignment and Normative-Reasoning Formalization

AI alignment research instantiates normative-claim formalization in machine systems through reward functions, preference-learning from human feedback, and debate-based alignment. A reward function specifies the normative claim (the AI agent's actions that maximize reward are correct; those that do not are incorrect); the source-of-normativity (derived from human preferences or specified design objectives); and the scope or domain (the practical domain of the AI's actions). Yet this approach creates tension with naturalistic-ethics and value-learning approaches: if normativity is grounded in agents' self-reflective endorsement (Korsgaard), can an algorithmic system without reflective capacities be genuinely normative, or is it only norm-mimicking? If normativity is constituted by rationality itself (Velleman, Kant), does the question "what rewards should we program the AI with?" presuppose a prior normative answer about what deserves to be rewarded? ^[15] Railton's Moral Realism^[15] develops functionalist accounts of moral truth that may apply to artificial systems, yet the debate over whether such systems can possess genuine normative reasoning remains open.

Mapped back: This case exemplifies the source-of-normativity debate and the scope question (does normativity extend to artificial agents?), and shows how contemporary debates over normative grounding manifest in applied technology contexts.

Structural Tensions and Failure Modes

T1 — Internalism vs. Externalism: Williams's Internal and External Reasons defends internalism — internal reasons require motivational connection; an agent can have a reason to φ only if φ-ing coheres with their desires, beliefs, and other psychological states. Korsgaard and McDowell defend externalism — normative reasons hold independently of motivation; an agent can be rationally required to act contrary to their desires, and the normativity of the requirement is not undermined by their failure to be motivated. This debate determines whether normativity is fundamentally tied to actual motivation (internalism) or whether normative force can bind an agent who fails to recognize it (externalism). Failure mode: one position is asserted as obviously correct while the opposing framework's resources for explaining normativity are dismissed.

T2 — Naturalism vs. Non-Naturalism: Moore's Principia Ethica poses the open-question argument — for any natural property (e.g., "promotes happiness"), it remains an open question whether that property constitutes goodness, suggesting that normative properties are not natural properties. Contemporary naturalists (Foot, Geach, Railton) defend reductive or non-reductive naturalism; non-naturalists argue normative facts are irreducibly normative. This debate turns on whether normativity supervenes on natural facts (and thus whether normative claims are scientifically tractable) or whether normative facts are metaphysically autonomous. Failure mode: the debate is bypassed by asserting naturalism or non-naturalism without argument, or by conflating metaphysical naturalism (the thesis that only natural entities exist) with reductionism about normativity.

T3 — Cognitivism vs. Non-Cognitivism: Cognitivism holds that normative judgments express beliefs (are truth-bearing propositions); non-cognitivism (emotivism, expressivism, Ayer 1936, Blackburn 1984) holds that normative judgments express attitudes or commitments, not facts. Blackburn's quasi-realism attempts to preserve the cognitive content of normative judgment while respecting their expressive character. This determines whether normativity is a matter of truth (cognitivism) or commitment (non-cognitivism). Failure mode: the position is identified with its defenders' ancillary claims (e.g., emotivism identified with the claim that normative judgments are "merely emotional") rather than engaged at the level of what makes a judgment truth-bearing or attitude-expressing.

T4 — Constitutivism vs. Foundationalism: Korsgaard (1996) and Velleman (2009) ground normativity in constitutive features of agency — that to be an agent is already to be bound by norms of rationality, coherence, and self-governance. Constitutivism avoids foundational disputes by grounding normativity in what it is to be an agent. Critics argue this either over-generates norms (any constitutive feature of agency becomes a norm) or doesn't ground genuine moral normativity (which seems to require more than rational consistency). Failure mode: constitutive necessity is asserted without showing how it generates the specific normative conclusions (e.g., why constitute rationality, and not other features of agents?).

T5 — Reasons Fundamentalism vs. Value Fundamentalism: Scanlon (1998), Parfit (2011), and Dancy (2004) argue reasons are fundamental — what makes an action obligatory is that there is sufficient reason to do it. Value theorists argue value is fundamental — what makes an action obligatory is that it promotes or constitutes a good. This determines whether normativity is reason-based (agent-centered, tied to considerations that justify action) or value-based (world-centered, tied to goods that matter). Failure mode: reasons and values are treated as independent when they might be interdependent, or one framework is defended without engaging the other's resources for explaining normativity.

T6 — Machine Normativity and Algorithmic Reasoning: Whether artificial systems can be genuine normative reasoners or only norm-mimickers remains contested. If normativity is grounded in self-reflective endorsement (Korsgaard), algorithmic systems lack the requisite reflective capacities. If grounded in constitutive rationality (Velleman), the question is whether algorithmic agents qualify as rational in the relevant sense. Functionalist approaches (Railton 1986) suggest that systems that play the right functional role count as genuine reasoners; alternatives argue that normativity requires historical properties (having been shaped by habituation, community, moral development) that artificial systems lack. Failure mode: normativity is attributed to systems without attending to what grounds the normativity, or the question is dismissed as merely terminological when it carries substantial implications for AI alignment and value specification.

Structural–Framed Character

Normativity sits at the framed end of the structural–framed spectrum: its meaning is inseparable from an interpretive frame it carries from philosophy. It is not a bare pattern you simply spot in a system — it brings the whole 'ought-side' of a practice, a vocabulary of correctness, requirement, permission, and prohibition by which actions, beliefs, and attitudes can be evaluated against a standard.

The home vocabulary travels wherever the concept is applied — in ethics and the assessment of conduct, in epistemology and the standards for belief, or in law and the rules that bind — importing the contrast between what is the case and what ought to be, and the claim that genuine correctness applies rather than mere description. It carries strong evaluative weight by its very nature; normativity is the dimension on which criticism and guidance become possible. Its origin is philosophical and institutional rather than formal, bound up with the practices that generate standards, and it cannot be specified without reference to human practices, because ought-claims and the standards they answer to are irreducibly the products of evaluating agents. To engage it is to adopt the standpoint of evaluation itself, not to recognize a structure that exists independently of any standard. On every diagnostic, it reads framed.

Substrate Independence

Normativity is a moderately substrate-independent prime — composite 3 / 5 on the substrate-independence scale. Its core — the 'ought-side' of a practice, the standards that define correctness relative to a frame and make evaluation possible — is substrate-agnostic in form and reaches across philosophy, law, organizational design, and game theory. Its grounding and most-developed examples, however, remain philosophical, and the extensions into organizational culture and formal systems, while real, are noticeably thinner than the core cases. That uneven development gives it solid but middling breadth with a distinctly philosophical flavor.

• Composite substrate independence — 3 / 5
• Domain breadth — 3 / 5
• Structural abstraction — 4 / 5
• Transfer evidence — 3 / 5

Relationships to Other Primes

Parents (1) — more general patterns this builds on

• Normativity is a decomposition of Constraint

  Normativity is the specific shape constraint takes when the binding restriction operates evaluatively rather than physically: it specifies which states, actions, or beliefs count as correct, required, permissible, or prohibited, and renders the rest subject to criticism rather than impossible. It is a structurally-particularized instance of restricting an admissible set, with the added commitment that admissibility is enforced through evaluation, judgment, and the practice of holding-to-account rather than through physical incompatibility. The standard plays the role constraint plays generally — partitioning what counts as acceptable — but does so in the ought-mode.

Children (7) — more specific cases that build on this

• Rights vs. Freedoms is a kind of Normativity

  Rights vs. freedoms is a specialization of normativity: both rights (enforceable claims producing correlative duties) and freedoms (absences of constraint) are normative entitlements held to be required, permissible, or protected relative to a standard. It inherits normativity's commitment to the ought-side — evaluation, criticism, and guidance against a norm — and particularizes it by drawing the structural distinction between active claim-entitlements with duty-bearers and passive absences of interference. Both halves are normative-statement types, not descriptive ones.

• Epistemic Justice presupposes Normativity

  Epistemic justice presupposes normativity because it treats knowing and being-credited-as-a-knower as goods whose distribution can be just or unjust, and identifies specific wrongs — testimonial and hermeneutical injustice — in which persons are harmed in their capacity as knowers. The framework requires a prior ought-side: a standard against which credibility allocation and interpretive resource distribution can be judged correct, required, or prohibited. Without normativity's general apparatus of evaluation against a standard, the claim that epistemic practice can be unjust would have no traction; epistemic justice imports that apparatus and applies it specifically to epistemic life.

• Institution presupposes Normativity

  An institution is a self-reproducing complex of rules and roles whose force depends on participants treating its prescriptions as binding standards: deviations are sanctioned, expectations are reproduced across generations. This requires the normative dimension — the standing distinction between correct and incorrect conduct relative to a standard, with criticism and guidance keyed to it. Without normativity's ought-side architecture, institutional rules would be mere regularities with no enforcement logic and no basis for the expectation that participants ought to comply.

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Path to root: Normativity → Constraint

Neighborhood in Abstraction Space

Normativity sits in a sparse region of abstraction space (66^th percentile for distinctiveness): few abstractions share its structure, so a faithful description tends to retrieve it precisely rather than landing on a neighbor.

Family — Norms, Ethics & Ontology (10 primes)

Nearest neighbors

• Moral Relativism — 0.80
• Virtue Ethics — 0.79
• Mandatory vs. Default Norms — 0.79
• Paradox — 0.77
• Epistemic Justice — 0.76

Computed from structural-signature embeddings · 2026-05-29

Not to Be Confused With

Legitimacy and Normativity differ in scope: Legitimacy is one specific normative concept concerned with whether authority is perceived as rightful by those subject to it—a question about the justification and acceptance of power in governance domains—whereas Normativity is the broader structural property that applies across all domains where correctness, rightness, or justification can be evaluated. Legitimacy presupposes normativity: for authority to be legitimate, there must be normative standards against which its rightfulness is judged (consent, rule of law, fairness, moral principles, cultural tradition, etc.). But legitimacy is narrower than normativity because it operates only in domains involving authority and subordination; epistemic normativity (whether a belief is justified), aesthetic normativity (whether a judgment is appropriate to the artwork), or logical normativity (whether an inference is valid) involve no authority relation and thus raise no legitimacy question. A sovereign might be perceived as legitimate (authority accepted as rightful) while still issuing unjust laws (normatively wrong); conversely, a revolutionary government might be normatively right (pursuing just principles) but lack legitimacy (not yet accepted by the population). The relationship is: Legitimacy is the normative property of authority acceptance; Normativity is the wider property of standards and correctness that applies to authority, belief, action, inference, and practice across domains.

Fairness is a specific normative principle (one standard within the broader normative structure), whereas Normativity is the structural capacity for having standards at all. Fairness concerns impartial, justified distribution of benefits and burdens or the impartiality of procedures; it is one normative ideal among many—others include justice, efficiency, autonomy, integrity, truth-conduciveness, beauty, and authenticity. A distribution can be fair by treating similar cases similarly and respecting relevant distinctions, yet might still fail other normative standards (it might be unfair yet cruel, unfair yet illegal, unfair yet aesthetically dissonant). Conversely, something can be normatively wrong without being unfair: it can be unjust (violating a positive right), incoherent (violating logical normativity), inauthentic (violating aesthetic normativity), or inept (violating technical normativity) without being unfair. Fairness is one normative principle; normativity is the structural framework that enables fairness and other normative principles to function. The relationship is: Fairness presupposes Normativity (the capacity to evaluate against a standard), but Normativity does not presuppose Fairness (you can have normative domains without fairness at their center, like logic or aesthetics).

Consent is a specific normative mechanism or instrument by which one agent authorizes another's action, whereas Normativity is the broader structural property that creates the space in which consent operates. Consent grounds normativity in certain contexts—contractarian theories of morality, political legitimacy, and sexual ethics all appeal to consent as a normative foundation. Yet consent is not the only source of normativity, and not all normative force derives from consent. Epistemic norms (you ought to believe according to the evidence) do not reduce to consent—whether you have given consent or not, your belief is unjustified if contradicted by evidence. A chess move is illegal (violates normative rules) regardless of whether all players have consented to the rules; the rules existed before any particular player consented to join the game. Legal normativity in inherited legal systems rests partly on consent (contract law, constitutional founding) and partly on non-consensual sources (precedent, statute, custom). Consent is one normative mechanism; normativity is the structural framework within which consent and other mechanisms (authority, function, rationality, community) operate. The relationship is: Consent is one way normativity can be grounded (especially powerful in domains involving free choice and autonomy); Normativity is the broader structure that consent presupposes and which other sources of normativity activate.

Solution Archetypes

Solution archetypes in the catalog that build on this prime — directly (this prime is a source ingredient) or as a related prime.

Built directly on this prime (7)

• Ethical Context Translation
• Meaning Reconstruction
• Normative Assumption Explicitness
• Regress Termination Rule
• Social Reality Construction Audit
• Taboo Boundary Navigation
• Tradeoff Guardrail

Also a related prime in 19 archetypes

• Adjudication Process Design
• Authority Legitimacy and Consent Foundations
• Category Boundary Audit
• Consent Manufacturing Through Intellectual Leadership
• Cross-Cultural Perspective Training
• Dialectical Synthesis
• Dissonance Resolution Pathway
• Equity Adjustment
• Historical Contextualization
• Informed Consent Governance

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Notes

Held at High confidence. Normativity is a foundational philosophical category with many sub-entries in this encyclopedia (see moral_relativism, virtue_ethics, epistemic_justice, and others in the normative cluster); this entry represents the cross-domain structural concept without privileging any specific normative theory or domain.

References

[1] Korsgaard, C. M. (1996). The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge University Press. Korsgaard Sources of Normativity self-reflective rational endorsement. ↩

[2] Scanlon, T. M. (1998). What We Owe to Each Other. Harvard University Press. Scanlon What We Owe Each Other reasons contractualism. ↩

[3] Parfit, D. (2011). On What Matters (2 vols.). Oxford University Press. Parfit On What Matters moral metaphysics normative truth. ↩

[4] Dancy, J. (2004). Ethics Without Principles. Oxford University Press. Dancy Ethics Without Principles particularist reasons. ↩

[5] Hume, David (1739). A Treatise of Human Nature. Book I: Of the Understanding. Hume impressions and ideas ancestor phenomenalism ↩

[6] McDowell, J. (1979). Virtue and Reason. Monist, 62, 331–350. McDowell Virtue Reason evaluative properties rationality. ↩

[7] Kant, I. (1785). Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Paton (1953) / Gregor (1997). Kant Groundwork categorical imperative rationality normativity. ↩

[8] Williams, B. (1981). Internal and External Reasons. The Philosophical Review, 86, 109–137. Williams Internal External Reasons internalism normativity. ↩

[9] Moore, G. E. (1903). Principia Ethica. Cambridge University Press. Moore Principia Ethica open-question argument naturalism. ↩

[10] Bicchieri, C. (2006). The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms. Cambridge University Press. Bicchieri canonical three-condition norm stability framework. ↩

[11] Ayer, A. J. (1936). Language, Truth and Logic. Gollancz. Ayer Language Truth Logic emotivism normative non-cognitivism. ↩

[12] Blackburn, S. (1984). Spreading the Word. Oxford University Press. Blackburn Spreading Word quasi-realism normative judgments. ↩

[13] Velleman, J. D. (2009). How We Get Along: An Essay on Love, Morality, and the Social Contract. Picador. Velleman How We Get Along constitutivism agency normativity. ↩

[14] Foot, P. (2001). Natural Goodness. Oxford University Press. Foot Natural Goodness naturalism virtue normativity form of life. ↩

[15] Railton, P. (1986). Moral Realism. Philosophical Review, 95(2), 163–207. Railton Moral Realism functionalism normative facts. ↩