Disclaiming Responsibility, Voicing Disagreements, and Negotiating Boundaries

This chapter introduces the novel category of ‘disclaimers’—distinctive normative acts which challenge third-party attributions of responsibility in a community governed by norms of mutual accountability. While the debate focuses on evasive and wrongful refusals to take responsibility for one’s wrongs, this chapter argues that disclaimers are fundamental modes of exercising normative powers, whose main functions are demanding recognition, responding to wrongs, voicing disagreement, exiting alienating conditions, and calling for a fair redistribution of specific responsibilities. In particular, understood as disclaimers, denials of responsibility are shown to be key modes of ethical and political empowerment, which play a significant role in producing normative changes and directing societal transformations.

Adaptive and anti-adaptive neighbourhoods: Investigating the relationship between individual choice and systemic adaptability

Recent work on ‘anti-adaptive’ neighbourhoods has highlighted a number of common features, including scale of design, number of designers, mono-functionality, percentage of public space, planning rules and system of ownership. This article aims to provide a more general conceptual analysis of adaptability and anti-adaptability in terms of degrees of individual choice, where an individual’s choice set is understood as a combination of individual freedoms, both physical and normative, and of individual normative powers. Individual choice is constitutive of adaptability, and its ‘non-specific’ value helps to explain why adaptability is itself seen in a positive light. Thus, the article points to a potentially unifying explanatory factor that can help us to better understand the various common features of anti-adaptive neighbourhoods highlighted in the recent literature. The final part of the article discusses some of the implications of this reasoning for policy and design.

Your word against mine: the power of uptake

Uptake is typically understood as the hearer’s recognition of the speaker’s communicative intention. According to one theory of uptake, the hearer’s role is merely as a ratifier. The speaker, by expressing a particular communicative intention, predetermines what kind of illocutionary act she might perform. Her hearer can then render this act a success or a failure. Thus the hearer has no power over which act could be performed, but she does have some power over whether it is performed. Call this the ratification theory of uptake. Several philosophers have recently endorsed an alternative theory of uptake, according to which the hearer can determine the nature of the act the speaker performs. According to this theory, if the hearer regards an utterance as illocutionary act y, then it is act y, even if the speaker intended to perform act x. Call this the constitution theory of uptake. The purported advantage of this theory is that it identifies a common but underanalysed way in which speakers can be silenced. I argue that despite its initial intuitive pull, the constitution theory of uptake should be rejected. It is incompatible with ordinary intuitions about speech, it entails a conceptual impossibility (the unintentional exercise of normative powers), and it has unsavoury political implications, entailing that marginalised speakers barely qualify as agents.

Autonomy and Pluralism in Private Law

This chapter addresses the significant subsets of private law—notably, but not only, property and contract—which contribute to people’s autonomy. It argues that private law is guided by an autonomy-enhancing telos. Indeed, private law, at its core, facilitates people’s self-determination and forms the foundation of a social life premised on the maxim of reciprocal respect for self-determination. Private law can enhance people’s autonomy because its fabric is not only made of duty-imposing doctrines. Rather, many of its rules—and, importantly, the two private law building blocks of property and contract—are essentially power-conferring. The normative powers instantiated by property law and by contract law allow people to have private authority over resources and to reliably benefit from others’ promises. They thus facilitate a temporally extended horizon of action, which is conducive, perhaps crucial, to people’s ability to plan. Moreover, contract and alienable property are also key for people’s mobility, which is a prerequisite for self-determination; and both expand the options available to individuals to function as the authors of their own lives. Such an autonomy-based private law must be structurally pluralist; multiplicity of property types and contract types facilitates the rich diversity of interpersonal relationships needed for adequate self-determination.

5. Legislating in the European Union

This chapter discusses the procedures for the adoption of legislative and other normative measures in the EU. It touches on a wide variety of subjects: forms of legal act; law-making competences and choice of procedure; the delegation of normative powers; and the application of the constitutional principles of conferral, subsidiarity, and proportionality. A number of more abstract matters are also covered, such as the hierarchy of norms and the ‘democratic deficit’.

Appropriate Normative Powers

A normative power is a power to alter rights and duties directly. This paper explores what it means to alter rights and duties directly. In the light of that, it examines the kind of argument that might support the existence of normative powers. Both simple and complex instrumentalist accounts of such powers are rejected, as is an approach to normative powers that is based on the existence of normative interests. An alternative is sketched, where normative powers arise based on the appropriateness of a person responding to a decision by limiting their freedom.

Do We Have Normative Powers?

‘Normative powers’ are capacities to create normative reasons by our willing or say-so. They are significant, because if we have them and exercise them, then sometimes the reasons we have are ‘up to us’. But such powers seem mysterious. How can we, by willing, create reasons? In this paper, I examine whether normative powers can be adequately explained normatively, by appeal to norms of a practice, normative principles, human interests, or values. Can normative explanations of normative powers explain how an exercise of the will can afford us special freedom in determining our reasons? I argue that normative approaches to answering this question prove to be inadequate. To vindicate the thought that normative powers can make our reasons ‘up to us’, we need an altogether different approach to understanding them, one that is located not in the normative but in the metaphysical. I end the paper by sketching a metaphysical explanation of normative powers. This metaphysical defence of normative powers provides a window into a different, more agent-centered way of thinking about rational agency.

The Roles of Rights

This chapter aims to clarify the moral foundations of private law’s response to wrongs, as well as the underlying deontic structure of relationships of right, duty, wrong, and remedy in ethics and in law. It begins by introducing the idea of ethical individualism. Ethical individualism implies that: duties are individuated, individuation of duties entails that the right-holder will ordinarily enjoy certain powers in relation to the normative significance of wrongs that they suffer, and the morally salient facts about right-holders that justify their rights are such as to require special consideration of the right-holder in the discharge of individuated duties. This chapter presents some important refinements on ethical individualism and registers some caveats to accounts of civil wrongs which expressly or impliedly endorse it. One refinement explains variability in the law’s recognition of normative powers in right-holders. Another refinement this chapter discusses is in relation to the analysis of rights and powers at issue in third-party beneficiary arrangements.

Commitment and the Second-Person Standpoint

On Chang's voluntarist account of commitments, when we commit to φ, we employ the 'normative powers' of our will to give ourselves a reason to φ that we would otherwise not have had. I argue that Chang's account, by itself, does not have sufficient conceptual resources to reconcile the normative significance of commitments with their alleged fundamentally volitional character. I suggest an alternative, second-personal account of commitment, which avoids this problem. On this account, the volitional act involved in committing is one of holding ourselves accountable, thus putting us under to a pro tanto obligation to ourselves. The second-personal account implies that there is an interesting link between commitment and morality.