Norm Descriptivism: From ‘Is’ to ‘Ought’
John Ku, University of Michigan
Howard Nye, University of Michigan
I. Introduction
We constantly make judgments of what an agent should do, or what actions she has reason to
perform (and probably other people do too). Some philosophers claim that what we are doing is
judging whether or not these actions conform to certain standards that are in no way essentially
tied to the agent’s own deliberations. Examples might include views that what an agent should
do just is what is commanded by certain supernatural entities, what is customary in her society,
what maximizes universal happiness, or what is congruent with certain objects in Plato’s heaven.
Others claim that what we are doing is expressing something like our endorsement of the agent’s
conduct, which is obviously in no way essentially connected to the standards that guide the
agent’s deliberation.
We think these approaches all go wrong from the start. In order to carry the kind of
normative force they do, judgments of what reasons for action an agent has must be essentially
connected to the standards that guide the agent’s own deliberations. This is what we take to be
the most crucial intuition about normativity, and exploring, developing, and supporting this
connection to deliberative standards drives the structure of this paper. Of course there will be
standards guiding deliberation that agents can rationally scrutinize, but the very fact that agents
can do this shows that their deliberative processes must involve built-in standards to which these
less fundamental standards are being held. We will in fact argue that the only thing an agent can
possibly be doing in deliberation is questioning whether she is conforming to these built-in
standards. Since the normative question of what an agent should do just is this question the
agent is asking in deliberation, that an agent should do something just is for these standards to
prescribe her doing it.
II. The Structure of Deliberation
One might wonder, however, what exactly this talk of deliberative standards or standards guiding
an agent’s deliberation amounts to. In this section we will attempt to give a more precise
account of what it means. In doing so we intend to give an account of what any agent or entity
acting for reasons must be doing in deliberation.
To illustrate the distinctive character of agency and deliberation, let us start by
contrasting it with the motivational systems of non-agents. Many non-human animals (e.g. mice)
seem to have motivational states in accordance with certain patterns that we as observers could
formulate. For instance, we might observe that when mice are hungry, they tend to be motivated
to seek food. We might formulate a norm or imperative that the mouse seems to be following,
like “when you are hungry, seek food!” In such cases it would also appear that there is a
mechanism within the mouse that causes its behavior to follow this pattern, and in this sense we
might say that the mouse internalizes the norm.1
It seems, however, that while human behavior sometimes merely follows patterns in the
same ways as that of animals like mice, humans also often do something different. While
creatures like mice have representations of the world that play a causal role in their behavior,
they seem to lack representations of their own motivational states and behavior. Humans, on the
other hand, do seem to have representations of their own motivational states and behavior.
Furthermore, these representations do not seem to be merely epiphenomenal, but play an
important causal role in human motivation and behavior. These representations seem to play a
1
This notion of norm internalization, while inspired by and broadly consistent with that of Gibbard (1990) is in fact
somewhat broader, as it does not require that there is any “coordinative rationale” behind the attitude or behavior
pattern in question (see Nye (2005b)).
crucial role in the phenomena of human criticism and evaluation of their motivational states and
actions, as well as many of their more “reflective” practices. When humans criticize or evaluate
their attitudes, they must be holding these attitudes up against some standard that they have some
kind of access to. Appearances of the conformance (or lack thereof) of their attitudes to the
standard, moreover, seems to exert causal influence on the attitudes they actually come to have –
which is just to say that these evaluations are not merely epiphenomenal. This kind of causal
influence from internal representations of standards seems to be exactly what goes on when
humans intuitively “endorse principles” or “accept norms.”
To accept a norm in this way requires that the norm play the causal role of such a
standard, but so far this standard could just be something like an intuitively “first-order”
principle, like “don’t lie!” However, we certainly seem to be able to evaluate such first-order
principles themselves. Yet, to evaluate these principles, it seems that we must be doing the same
thing that we do in evaluating our attitudes – namely holding them up to some standard in a way
that causes our acceptance (or rejection) of them to conform to it. Now, at some point, our
psychologies will run out of standards against which to assess other standards.2 The standards at
2
Which will be the case, moreover, for any entity with finite psychological capacities. One can, however, certainly
imagine entities (whether psychologically finite or infinite) who lack unified standards for assessing the standards
that determine what norms they accept. These entities might accept various first-order norms, some of which might
be supported by a chain of higher order norms terminating in one highest order norm, while others of which are
supported by a chain of higher order norms terminating in a different highest order norm. There might, of course, be
some causal mechanism within the entity that causes the prescriptions of one of the highest order norms to win out
over the other on various occasions, but such agents would, ex hypothesi, lack any standard or principle by which to
genuinely adjudicate conflicts between the prescriptions of these norms. We would thus argue that such entities are
in fact “fractured agents”; both of the psychological governance processes of the highest order norms would be
“unified agents” that both in a sense inhabit the entity in question and war within it. Views according to which we
humans are fractured agents may have been held by Henry Sidgwick (1874), thought modally possible by Francis
Hutcheson (1725), and may be held today by people who hold particularly strong versions of the thesis of the
incommensurability of reasons.
Moreover, even if an entity were a unified agent (i.e. with a single highest order norm or something like it)
at a point in time, it might be fractured across time – due to (merely causal) changes over time in what its
fundamental norms are. Allan Gibbard in fact expresses the view that we humans fit exactly this description in Wise
Choices, Apt Feelings (see especially chapters 9 and following).
Our view can accurately accommodate the conceivability or even existence of statically or dynamically
fractured agents. Our view explains what it is for the unified agents within the fractured agent to have reasons, and
which our psychologies terminate – which are those used as standards for determining the
acceptance of all other principles – we might call “fundamental norms.”
We conclude from these facts about our practices of principle acceptance and evaluation
that we have a dedicated psychological system – which we might call a normative governance
system3 - that employs these fundamental norms to evaluate our acceptances, motivations, and
actions with the following features:
1.) It exerts direct causal influence on our motivations and actions; appearances that our
motivations conform (or fail to conform) to norms in the system tend to cause us to have (or
refrain from having) them.
2.) It is unified by the direct causal influence that higher-order accepted norms exert on lowerorder accepted norms; appearances that a lower-order norm conforms to (or fails to conform to) a
higher-order norm in the system tend to cause us to accept (or refrain from accepting) it.
Note that the higher-order norms we accept, including our fundamental or “highest-order”
norms, need not be (and usually are not) those we consciously reference in our deliberations or
those we ordinarily think to be more or most fundamental. All that must be the case for us to
accept these norms in this way is for our cognitive architecture to include representations of them
in this psychological system and for these representations to cause our actual acceptances to
conform to them in the way described above.
simply insists that there are no further principles to which the fractured agent can appeal to, and thus no further
reasons that apply to the fractured agent.
3
Allan Gibbard uses this phrase to refer to the psychological mechanism underlying the shaping of attitudes and
actions in response to normative judgments. While Gibbard does himself think that this mechanism is essentially
one for ensuring coordination-via-consensus formation (which view we argue against) and describes it in these
terms, it seems that what he primarily intends the phrase ‘normative governance system’ to refer to is that of the
truth-maker of attitude guidance via normative judgments, whether it is coordinative or not (which is consistent with
our usage here).
It seems, moreover, that deliberation on the part of any agent can be nothing other than
the evaluation of attitudes and actions by reference to the standards of a dedicated psychological
system with features 1.) and 2.).
Intuitively, deliberation is a process of searching for
authoritative grounds for endorsing actions and principles. This kind of search involves coming
to be motivated to act or accept a principle when it appears to be prescribed by standards the
agent trusts. But what could this kind of search amount to other than an attempt to determine the
prescriptions of a system of this kind at work in the agent’s psychology? To question the
authority of a principle ultimately involves nothing other than holding it up to a standard with the
kind of causal influence we attributed to fundamental norms. To settle a deliberative question is
to determine whether a principle does meet such a standard.
III. Normativity
With this account of deliberation in mind, we can now turn to the meaning of normative
judgments that an agent has reason to perform an action. We will here further articulate and
argue in support of our claim that the normative question of what an agent should do just is this
question the agent is asking in deliberation. Having established this, we will explain how, given
our account of what question the agent is asking in deliberation, we can arrive at an analysis of
these normative judgments.
We would like to articulate a more general intuition that normative judgments of what an
agent should do are intimately connected to the endorsement of the agent whose reasons they are.
To do this, let us begin by contrasting it with views that sharply conflict with it. As mentioned in
the introduction, some philosophers have held the view that when a speaker makes a judgment of
what an agent should do she is expressing something like her own endorsement of the agent’s
conduct.4 Of course, when an agent makes judgments about her own reasons for action, the
speaker and the agent are one and the same, which may lend an air of superficial plausibility to
the view. But consider cases in which the speaker and the agent are different people. According
to these views, the speaker’s judgment that the agent has certain reasons for action expresses
(roughly) the speaker’s endorsement of the agent’s acting in that way. One might wonder how in
these cases the mere expression of the speaker’s endorsement could look anything like a
normative judgment of what reasons the agent has for action. If judgments about an agent’s
reasons for action were simply something like expressions of what the speaker endorsed and not
conceptually connected to something about the agent’s endorsement, it would simply look as
though the speaker is either failing to address the topic of the agent’s actions or simply browbeating or “spitting at” the agent.
What this seems to suggest is that the conceptual connection of normative judgments to
endorsement must be to the agent’s rather than the speaker’s endorsement. This view of the
connection goes hand in hand with a picture according to which normative judgments play their
primary role in guiding agents’ deliberations. But it also allows for a more accurate picture of
what goes on in normative discussions and generally judgments of what reasons another agent
has for action. On this view, normative discussion proceeds as a kind of public deliberation, in
which discussants work together to determine what is prescribed by what an agent ultimately
endorses. The agent whose reasons are in question may or may not be party to the discussion,
but what normative discussants are doing is essentially “taking up the perspective” of this agent.
For instance according to Allan Gibbard’s expressivist account (which may be the most prominent contemporary
theory of normative judgments), the content of normative judgments – including judgments of what reasons for
action an agent has – are to be explained as expressing mind states of norm acceptance (Or one’s “ruling out” of a
set of systems of norms or factual-normative worlds (See Gibbard’s Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, Chapter 5)).
Gibbard intends this mind state of norm acceptance to coincide with and help elucidate that of a judge’s
endorsement.
4
Such a view of the dynamics of normative discussion obviously allows that there can be mere
exchanges of normative judgments, i.e. ones more motivated by “brow-beating” or convincing
by any means necessary than the objective of figuring out the prescriptions of what the agent
ultimately endorses. It is merely a view according to which there is a genuine conceptual
distinction to be made between normative discussion as public deliberation proper and the mere
exchanges of normative judgments that are in fact parasitic on it.
This review of the force of normative judgments seems to support a view of normative
judgments according to which they are judgments about what an agent ultimately endorses. In
explaining the structure of deliberation, we gave an account of what it could be for an agent to
endorse a principle or treat it as authoritative, according to which this must amount to viewing it
as prescribed by her normative governance system (or what her fundamental norms prescribe).
Hence, it seems that normative judgments that an agent should do something amount to nothing
other than judgements that her normative governance system prescribes doing it.
Much the same conclusion can be drawn from our examination of the dynamics of
normative judgments in discussion.
The lesson we drew from this examination was that
normative questions of what an agent has reason to do have the same content as the questions she
asks herself in deliberation. The account of deliberative questioning we reached earlier was that
it involved nothing other than holding up a principle or action to the standards of one’s
normative governance system. Hence, it would seem that normative judgments would have the
same content as those an agent reaches in settling deliberative questions, which content we
argued is that of a judgment whether a principle or action is prescribed by her normative
governance system.
Thus, the understanding of the meaning of normative judgments to which we have come
is the following:
Norm Descriptivism:5
Agent A has reason to φ iff A’s normative governance system prescribes A’s φ-ing.
Note that this view offers us a naturalistic, descriptivist analysis of normative concepts that
reduces normative facts to facts about a dedicated psychological system guiding the agent’s
attitudes and actions.
Some have held that because ‘ought’ judgments have an essential
connection to the guidance of agents’ attitudes that no descriptive or ‘is’ judgments could have,
one can never infer an ‘ought’ judgment from any set of purely ‘is’ judgments. However, once
one appreciates the structure of deliberation and the content of the ‘is’ judgments we have
proposed normative judgments can be analysed into, one can see that some (very specific) ‘is’
judgments do indeed have the essential connection to the guidance of agents’ attitudes that
normative judgment do. Judgments of what one’s normative governance prescribes simply are
the descriptive judgments that cause one to endorse or reject attitudes and actions. ‘Ought’
judgments just are a particular, essentially attitude guiding kind of ‘is’ judgments.
While we have for expository purposes focused on the case of reasons for action, the line
of thought behind the norm descriptivist analysis actually allows us to give analyses of all
normative concepts. Just like judgments of what an agent should do, normative judgments that
an agent has reason to have any kind of attitude – including beliefs, emotions, and other
motivational states (like desires) – are essentially connected to the endorsement of the agent
whose reasons they are. Exactly analogous considerations to those we have discussed in the case
Inspiration for the name of our view is drawn from Allan Gibbard’s naming his particular expressivist view “norm
expressivism.” Just as he attempts to draw on features of normative governance to support a particular expressivist
account of the meaning of normative judgments, considerations of normative governance shape and drive our
particular descriptivist view.
5
of deliberation about action show that agents can have normative governance systems that
prescribe what to believe, feel, and desire. Thus, analogous arguments would support the
following general analysis of normative concepts, motivated by the relationships between
normative judgment, deliberation, and endorsement:
Generalized Norm Descriptivism:
A has reason to , (where  is any particular attitude - a belief, an emotion, another
motivational state – or action) iff A’s normative governance system prescribes A’s -ing.
IV. Replies to Objections
One might worry that an analysis like ours could not capture the normative force of morality.
However, our view can indeed capture an in fact vindicate the view that one necessarily has
reason to fulfill one’s moral obligations.
It seems impossible to understand what moral obligations are without analyzing them in
terms of warrant or reasons to feel emotions like guilt, resentment, and impartial anger. If one
considers all of the disparate kinds of things that people have intelligibly held to be morally
obligatory (e.g. such things as not harming others, not defecting in collective action problems,
but also doing all manor of apparently miscellaneous things like observing rules of etiquette,
abstaining from random sexual practices, and obeying the de dicto will of alleged deities), it
seems that one can find nothing common to their judgments other than the view that people
should feel guilt towards doing such things, and others are justified in feeling resentment or
impartial anger towards them if they do. Thus, as a conceptual matter, if one is genuinely
morally obligated to do something, one should feel guilt towards not doing it.6
6
Note that the kind of guilt involved in feeling guilt towards doing something is a prospective version of the
emotion we might more readily identify as guilt, which is often retrospective in character. However, this feeling of
prospective guilt surely exists and plays a crucial role in our social and normative lives – it may be more often
referred to in ordinary English as a “feeling of obligation.”
Now, as Gibbard (1990) and Scanlon (1998) have argued, our assessments of the
rationality of our actions proceeds via our assessments of the rationality of the motivational
states that lead us to them. Thus, our actions are caused to conform to our assessments of the
rationality of the motivational states that lead us to them. Hence, because our actions are
normatively governed via the normative governance of our motivational states in this way,
reasons to be in motivational states just constitute reasons for action (i.e. the actions motivated
by those motivational states). Note that guilt is indeed a motivational state; part of what it is to
feel guilty towards doing something is to be motivated not to do it. Thus, if one has reason to
feel guilt towards doing something, one necessarily has (at least some) reason not to do it.
Hence, since moral obligation is conceptually tied to warranted guilt in the way just described, if
one is morally obligated not to do something, then one necessarily has reason not to do it.7
Understood on our account, what it is for an agent to have reason to feel emotions like
guilt, and thus have reasons to be motivated and act out of it, just is for the agent’s normative
governance system to prescribe her feeling guilt. Now, one might still wonder whether we have
any genuine moral obligations, which conceived on our account amounts to wondering whether
our normative governance systems ever prescribe our feeling guilt towards actions. However, it
would seem just as implausible to suppose that our normative governance systems never
prescribe our feeling guilt as it would to suppose that they never prescribe our being in any other
motivational states (e.g. desire). We often feel guilt; sometimes we think it warranted and
sometimes think it unwarranted, just as we often desire things and sometimes think these desires
warranted or unwarranted.
Since both motivational states, along with their normative
This line of argument is proposed, discussed, and defended in some detail in Nye (2005a), and “Morality and the
Bearing of Apt Feelings on Wise Choices.”
7
governance, are evolutionary adaptations, there is no reason to suppose that our normative
governance systems would never prescribe either, and every reason to think that they often will.
A final objection to our view might run as follows. One might agree that we have a
normative governance system that prescribes attitudes, actions, and norms on our parts, and is
responsible for our ability to criticize, evaluate, and endorse them, but still raise the question,
“why should I endorse what my normative governance system prescribes? Why should I accord
such authority to my normative governance system?” But given our account of deliberation and
endorsement, questioning whether or not to endorse the prescriptions of one’s normative
governance system just amounts to questioning whether or not our normative governance
systems prescribe their own prescriptions. Such questioning is well within the scope of our
view, as our view renders such questions intelligible.8 It is in fact conceptually possible for there
to be agents whose normative governance systems simultaneously prescribe various things and
also prescribe rejecting their own prescriptions. Such agents might be aptly referred to as ‘liar
paradoxes’, and might not be guided very effectively by their normative governance systems, but
this does not detract from the plausibility of our view. In short, these agents might be screwed,
but our view would not.
8
We are grateful to Matthew Pugsley for very helpful discussion on this point and the suggestion that our view
delivers this result.
Works Cited
Gibbard, Allan. Wise Choices, Apt Feelings. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 1990.
Hutcheson, Francis. Treatise II: An Inquiry Concerning the Original of our Ideas of virtue or
Moral Good. 1725.
Nye, Howard L.M. “Emotion, Motivation, and Normativity: A Case Study of Francis Hutcheson
and the Normativity of Benevolence and Moral Goodness” (manuscript), 2005a.
Nye, Howard L.M. “Do Evolutionary Considerations Support Gibbard’s Theory of Normative
Judgment?” (manuscript), 2005b.
Nye, Howard L.M. “Morality and the Bearing of Apt Feelings on Wise Choices” (manuscript),
2005.
Scanlon, T.M. What We Owe to Each Other. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 1998.
Sidgwick, Henry. The Methods of Ethics. 1874. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company,
1981.