This thesis explores a novel approach to understanding H.L.A. Hart's account of the 'normativity of law'. A successful account of the 'normativity of law' is meant to inter alia establish how legal requirements come to be morally binding. It will be argued that the internal point of view, key to Hart's account of normativity, can intelligibly constitute the 'source' of moral bindingness only if one assumes a projectivist model (resting on a non-cognitivist metaethic). The projectivist model understands moral bindingness as the motivational pull exerted by a moral judgment owing to the attitude of approval underlying it. Hart never expressly endorsed projectivism - far from it: he refused to take any firm metaethical stance at all. This thesis argues, however, that there are semantic and metaethical elements in Hart's scheme that naturally lend themselves to a projectivist model. A good portion of this thesis comprises in setting out, aligning - and where appropriate, emending - those elements so as to yield a coherent projectivist model of the 'normativity of law'. While discussing Hart's account of normativity occupies a bulk of this thesis, its overarching telos would be to take the first steps towards attempting a new begrundung of the projectivist model of 'normativity of law'. It does so by setting out the conceptual underpinnings of the projectivist model and by allaying some of the misgivings surrounding it. The projectivist model used to be prominent in the first half of the 20th century, thanks to the pioneering works of the Scandinavian Legal Realists, but has of late largely fallen into disrepute. Although Hart is widely credited with having taken apart the Scandinavian Legal Realists' project - who themselves saw Hart's project as contiguous with theirs - it will be argued that there is indeed a great deal convergence between the projects of Hart and the Scandinavian Legal Realists.

The principle of reflexivity, as laid out by David Bloor (in Knowledge and Social Imagery) poses serious challenges to STS - while STS analysts attempt to show the partiality of scientific claims, they simultaneously offer those analyses via authoritative pronouncements in scientific language, while claiming a scientific foundation. This thesis questions the understanding of science as a form of inquiry distinct from other forms of inquiry, especially focusing on the elusive distinction between science and technology. The thesis analyzes Andrew Pickering's problematic attempt (in The Mangle of Practice) to dissolve the science/technology distinction through his 'Theory of Everything'/Mangle concept. Building an approach from commentaries on Pickering's work combined with resources from the STS tradition, especially from Latour and Haraway, the author proposes a new observational stance; this stance insists on the perspectival nature of all observation, and thereby claims to be reflexively robust; furthermore it maintains an agnostic attitude with regard to the science/technology distinction. / Master of Science

Thesis (MA)--University of Melbourne, Dept. of Philosophy, 2010. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (p. 55-57)

Constitutivism is a kind of metaethical theory according to which one can explain reasons or normativity in terms of what is constitutive of agency. Any constitutivist theory makes three basic claims: (1) that some feature is constitutive of agency, (2) that one can explain reasons or normativity in its terms, and (3) that doing so has plausible first-order normative implications. I consider the paradigmatic constitutivist theories of Christine Korsgaard and J. David Velleman and the more recent variant developed by Michael Smith, and I argue that each fails adequately to justify at least two of the three basic constitutivist claims. I then argue that a constitutivist strategy can nevertheless be adapted to explain the necessary connection between normative judgment and motivation. More specifically, I argue that practical deliberation has two constitutive features. First, it aims at proceeding in a rational way from premises to conclusions. Second, it has an internal connection with motivation: barring weakness of will, people are motivated to act in accordance with their deliberative conclusions. Because a person's normative beliefs guide the course of her deliberation, and her deliberation motivates her action, a person will be motivated to act in ways that correspond to her normative beliefs, which her sincere normative judgments express. This account provides a cognitivist explanation for a phenomenon often taken to be the most important evidence for non-cognitivism or expressivism.

This thesis explores untheorized themes of pronatalism and childfreedom in Lithuania. Through an analysis of interviews of childfree women, I show the prevalence of a pronatalist norm in Lithuanian society, and how it’s challenged by the phenomenon of childfreedom. I examine women’s paths to childfreedom, the normative pressure they experience, and their views of their position. Pronatalist pressure transforms, when challenged by childfreedom, and especially when it is openly declared. I show that pronatalism is not easily challenged and childfreedom impacts both - the norm and the women, transgressing it. I argue that childfreedom can be seen as an act of resistance to the pronatalist norm, yet this view is restricted by significant limitations.

Reasons fundamentalists assert that normative reality is constituted by exemplifications of the normative reasons relation: an irreducible, sui generis relation that strongly supervenes on non-normative reality. In this dissertation, I argue that reasons fundamentalists cannot explain why exemplifications of the normative reasons relation strongly supervene on non-normative reality. Irreduciblists about normativity can avoid this problem by asserting, contra the reasons fundamentalist, that normative reality is constituted by exemplifications of thick properties, which provide material for a conceptual analysis of normative reasons. The theory that results analyzes normative reasons for action as answers to questions why an action promotes a thick property. Nearly every normative theorist affirms what I call Additive Normative Supervenience (ANS): Normatively discernible worlds must be non-normatively discernible. ANS asserts that, if Edward Snowden is morally good, then Snowden's counterparts in worlds that are indiscernible in all non-normative respects must be good. Reasons fundamentalists struggle to explain why ANS is true. I consider and reject potential explanations of ANS that appeal to conceptual entailment and a posteriori necessity. Rosen has recently offered an argument against ANS. Rejecting ANS, however, problematizes irreduciblist accounts of normative explanation and normative epistemology. Irreduciblists can avoid this dilemma by arguing that ANS is either incoherent or false and adopting an alternative formulation of normative supervenience. Bilgrami's arguments against the intelligibility of normative supervenience doctrines purport to show that ANS is in fact unintelligible, and Merricks' arguments against the supervenience of consciousness on microphysical properties can be extended to show that ANS is false. Neither argument, however, establishes the falsity or unintelligibility of a modified formulation of normative supervenience, Transformative Normative Supervenience (TNS): Normatively discernible worlds must be descriptively discernible, where descriptive discernibility is just discernibility with respect to non-normative properties or thick normative properties. Irreduciblists can explain the truth of TNS by adopting non-centralism about normative reasons--that is to say, by maintaining, contra the reasons fundamentalist, that normative reality is constituted most fundamentally by exemplifications of thick properties. This allows the irreduciblist to provide an account of normative explanation and normative epistemology, analyze normative reasons in terms of thick properties, and preserve buck-passing accounts of thin normative properties. Scanlon has argued that the reasons relation is a four-place relation, relating the facts that are reasons for an agent to perform an action in a given circumstance. I argue that facts are also reasons for an action with respect to a thick property that that action will promote, in contrast to sets of distinct actions that the agent could perform instead. The resulting six-place relation turns out to be an instance of the relation that holds between why-questions and answers. What it is to be a normative reason for an agent to do something is to be a correct answer to a question why that agent's doing that action will promote a thick property. Decades ago, Anscombe had also suggested that reasons were answers to why-questions of a certain kind. The attractiveness of this position has been relatively underappreciated in the philosophy of normative reasons, in part because Anscombe had offered the reasons- as-answers thesis as a thesis about motivating reasons rather than normative reasons. The reasons-as-answers thesis also provides resources for those irreduciblists about reasons who reject my non-centralist conclusions to avoid the wrong kind of reason problem for buck- passing accounts of normativity: they can distinguish between right and wrong kinds of reasons by distinguishing between answers to distinct kinds of why-questions.

This dissertation examines a particular quality of emotion experience that has received little attention in contemporary philosophical and psychological studies of the emotions. This is inversely proportional to the significant attention it receives in literature. I will refer to it as poignancy. Poignant emotions, such as nostalgia and the lyrical feelings pervasive in poetry, are emotions about time’s passage, or the fleetingness of things. My inquiry concerns the normative evaluation of such emotion experiences. Episodes of nostalgia and lyrical emotions are typically experienced as profound while they last, but they are also notoriously apt to be dismissed as sentimental, even by those who feel their pull. Sentimentality is a term of censure that exclusively targets emotions and emotionality; if an emotion is sentimental, then something about it is supposed to be false and wrong. But what are the merits of this charge against poignant emotions? When one has a nostalgic or lyrical emotion episode and reproaches oneself for being sentimental, who is correct—the person in the first moment, convinced by the emotion, or the person in the next, who doubts or retracts it? To adjudicate these disputes, we must turn to what I call the standard model of emotion evaluation that has emerged in the philosophy of emotions. This is a normative apparatus that enjoys wide consensus, but it has been built to evaluate the standard stock of examples in the literature, such as fear. Its application to nonstandard cases has not been undertaken. A major task of this dissertation is therefore to analyze poignant emotions in such a way that renders them evaluable on this model. However, once these analyses are in place, it turns out that the normative evaluation of poignant emotions yields surprising conclusions. In spite of their stigmatization, nostalgic aestheticizations of the past are much less vulnerable to the charge of sentimentality than commonly assumed. And lyrical feelings about the fleetingness of things are almost entirely immune to the charge, in a way that risks undermining our critical discourse about such emotion experiences.

This dissertation examines a particular quality of emotion experience that has received little attention in contemporary philosophical and psychological studies of the emotions. This is inversely proportional to the significant attention it receives in literature. I will refer to it as poignancy. Poignant emotions, such as nostalgia and the lyrical feelings pervasive in poetry, are emotions about time’s passage, or the fleetingness of things. My inquiry concerns the normative evaluation of such emotion experiences. Episodes of nostalgia and lyrical emotions are typically experienced as profound while they last, but they are also notoriously apt to be dismissed as sentimental, even by those who feel their pull. Sentimentality is a term of censure that exclusively targets emotions and emotionality; if an emotion is sentimental, then something about it is supposed to be false and wrong. But what are the merits of this charge against poignant emotions? When one has a nostalgic or lyrical emotion episode and reproaches oneself for being sentimental, who is correct—the person in the first moment, convinced by the emotion, or the person in the next, who doubts or retracts it? To adjudicate these disputes, we must turn to what I call the standard model of emotion evaluation that has emerged in the philosophy of emotions. This is a normative apparatus that enjoys wide consensus, but it has been built to evaluate the standard stock of examples in the literature, such as fear. Its application to nonstandard cases has not been undertaken. A major task of this dissertation is therefore to analyze poignant emotions in such a way that renders them evaluable on this model. However, once these analyses are in place, it turns out that the normative evaluation of poignant emotions yields surprising conclusions. In spite of their stigmatization, nostalgic aestheticizations of the past are much less vulnerable to the charge of sentimentality than commonly assumed. And lyrical feelings about the fleetingness of things are almost entirely immune to the charge, in a way that risks undermining our critical discourse about such emotion experiences.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of London, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 281-292) and index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of London, 1996. / Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. 281-292) and index.