Lars Moen (Australian National University)

WHY GROUPS ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE

Abstract:
Collective responsibility is the view that groups can be responsible for their causal impact
on the world, either instead of or in addition to their individual members. An individualist
account, on the other hand, holds that only individuals can be responsible. Individuals
often act collectively, of course, but they are individually responsible for their collective
behaviour as long as it is under their control on the basis on their intentions.
Over the last two decades, a strong argument for collective responsibility has emerged,
primarily under the lead of Christian List and Philip Pettit. On the basis of rigorous social
choice theory, they show how some groups can form attitudes that most, or even all, of
their members reject, and therefore satisfy three necessary and jointly sufficient conditions
for responsibility. First, they can make normatively significant choices—that is, choices
involving the possibility of doing something good or bad, right or wrong. Second, they
can understand the situation and have access to relevant evidence so as to be in a position
to see what is at stake. And third, they possess necessary control for choosing between
the options; the choice is truly up to them. When the group forms attitudes irreducible to
those of its members, List and Pettit argue, the group members do not control the group’s
attitude formation. How the group chooses between options is therefore, at least partly,
under its own control.
In this paper, I challenge collective responsibility and defend a strictly individualist
account. I do so not by challenging these three conditions for responsibility. I instead
show how groups cannot satisfy these conditions, and I especially focus on the third
condition.
The argument for group autonomy is based on the result that aggregating individuals’
complete and consistent attitudes towards a set of logically interconnected propositions
(e.g., ‘p’, ‘if p, then q’, ‘q’) might lead to inconsistent group attitudes (e.g., ‘p’, ‘if p then q’,
‘¬q’). Avoiding this problem therefore depends on a mechanism that can attribute
attitudes to the group that a majority, or even all, of its members reject. This gives the
group some control over its own attitude formation. It can therefore satisfy the third
condition for responsibility, in List and Pettit’s view.
I show how this defence of collective responsibility fails to appreciate how individuals
behave strategically within the group structure. Knowing how their group will resolve
inconsistencies, the group members have an incentive to vote strategically so as to ensure
collective attitudes consistent with their attitude towards the proposition they deem most
important. I show how group autonomy depends on sincere voting, and how strategic
voting deprives the group of the self-control required for responsible agency. The required
sincerity depends on the questionable assumption that group members see the
propositions on the agenda as equally important. On the more realistic assumption that
they attach greater importance to some propositions than to others, we can expect group
members to vote strategically and thus undermine group autonomy and collective
responsibility.

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Sena Bölek (Bilkent University)
BASIC MORAL CERTAINTIES, DEEP DISAGREEMENTS, AND COGNITIVE COMMAND

Abstract:
In Truth and Objectivity, Crispin Wright investigates the ways in which discourse about
morality can be truth-apt without holding a realist stance by offering his minimalist
conception of truth against the deflationary accounts. For Wright, “truth need not be the
exclusive property of realism” since he thinks that truth-predicate is aimed at providing a
neutral ground between realists and anti-realists (1992: 12). All we need to do, he argues,
is to determine some principles that a truth-predicate can satisfy so that we can decide
which notions of truth pass the truth-predicate test. Thus Wright introduces the criterion
of Cognitive Command as a sort of test for a given discourse to count as minimally truth-
apt, arguing that moral realism is defensible iff it is a priori that any moral disagreement
between realists and anti-realists involves a cognitive shortcoming. But it should also be
noted that exhibiting the Cognitive Command criterion does not per se suffice to impose
the realist notion of truth. Realists should also ensure that the alleged proposition in a
given discourse accurately corresponds to reality (1992: 84).
In light of these assumptions, Wright puts forward a dilemma against moral realism: A
realist must choose either that it is a priori that any moral disagreement between realists and
antirealists involves a cognitive shortcoming or that we cannot possibly have evidence for
moral truths. Put it another way, we are inapt to be neutral when it comes to disagreements
in morality because differences in our moral opinions cannot be regarded as cognitive
shortcomings (1992: 200). In this regard, moral discourse fails at exerting Cognitive
Command (cannot pass the truth-predicate test) and creates irresolvable deep
disagreements. Wright thinks that since truth (or what he calls “the objectivity of
meaning”) only comes out when our cognitive failures are eliminated from a given discourse
–that is to say, when the resolution is possible, disagreements between realists and anti-
realists have to be cognitive disagreements.
It is clear that what counts as a shortcoming affects the way we understand whether a
moral disagreement is radical or not. That is why the first realist reaction is to provide a
solution against the problem of deep disagreement by proposing false beliefs as cognitive
failures. agree with Wright that such a solution would not save realists from the dilemma.
But I think that another possibility for defending moral realism is to save realists from an
a prior emphasis. I will therefore show that we need not accept the dilemma for the
following reasons. Contra Wright, I shall argue that realists do not have to accept that it is
a priori that no moral disagreement is radical since we can show that the radical
disagreement between realism and anti-realism is rooted in their basic moral certainties.
That is, deep moral disagreements are indeed analogous to disagreements over basic moral
certainties rather than beliefs (or any other cognitive state). To do so, as I will give a general
characterization of what hinges are (or should be) based on the current debates, I will
propose my account of hinge epistemology. Following Nigel Pleasants, I will extend
Wittgenstein’s inquiry into basic moral certainties while giving a response against
Pleasants’ naturalistic explanation. Then, I will examine how disagreement might occur in
Wittgensteinian hinges and argue that what it changes in disagreements over moral hinges
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is the same as in the cases of empirical hinges. I will thereby show that the disagreement
between realists and anti-realists is a kind of deep disagreement over basic moral
certainties, which cannot be rationally resolvable. And this claim is the real mark of
realism.

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Luca Passi (University of Cambridge)
PRESUPPOSITION AND AUTHORITY
Abstract:
You and I are two peers on a desert island: you give me an order, I obey. Am I licensing
you authority? The answer is not obvious: according to Austin, the authority relationship
must exist before the order is given. Even if I obeyed, that would be a mere abuse of
ordinary language usage. According to others, by taking your order as binding, I am
licensing you authority. How is this possible? The mechanism behind this phenomenon is
as follows: by giving me the order, you are not asserting an authority you do not have, you
are presupposing it. And when I obey, it is because your presupposition of authority has
been accommodated.
Taking inspiration from the philosophy of language and linguistics, and from the
phenomenon of ‘presupposition accommodation’ (described by Stalnaker, Lewis and
others), authors such as Witek, Sbisà and Langton have held that ‘presuppositions of
authority’ can be accommodated in the context of a conversation. In ‘How to Establish
Authority With Words’, Maciej Witek offers an account of how authority can be licensed
in informal settings. This paper presents Witek’s work, criticises it, and offers a different
explanation of the phenomenon of licensed authority in informal settings.
The accommodation of authority in informal context is a distinct phenomenon from
presupposition accommodation in the philosophy of language. For authors like Stalnaker,
presupposition accommodation is merely the acceptance at the level of common ground
of a presupposition. If I say to you, I have to pick up my sister from the airport, I am
presupposing that I have a sister. If you do not challenge or block my presupposition, the
presupposition that says I have a sister is added to the common ground (the set of
proposition mutually believed to be accepted). The world outside the heads of the
participants in a conversation may be different (e.g. I might not have a sister).
According to Witek, the Stalnakerian picture is not enough. Authority is a real property of
the objective context. The objective context is the set of states of affairs, whether
normative or physical, relevant to a speech act's evaluation. In this sense, authority cannot
be reduced to the propositional attitudes of the participants in a conversation (i.e. to its
common ground). In order to explain how presupposition accommodation can take place
at the level of objective context, we need a different notion of presupposition, which
Witek calls 'Austinian presupposition'. With this notion at hand, Witek explains in what
sense it can be accommodated.
In my paper, I defend the plausibility of the mechanism described by Witek and others,
but I show its mysteriousness. To demystify it, I propose to combine it with the
Stalnakerian picture. My thesis is that the accommodation of authority in the objective
context requires a change in the cognitive context, and this change can be explained
through the Stalnakerian presupposition accommodation. Stalnaker's solution demystifies
Witek's, offering a plausible solution to the problem of licensed authority in informal
settings.

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Susana Cadilha (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa)
THE LIMITS OF CONSTRUCTIVISM

Abstract:
In this paper, I would like to understand whether a constructivist approach to ethical
normativity could deal with the problems of irreducible subjectivity that it naturally carries.
The constructivist view is claimed to be a third view, a way to avoid the problems that
both objectivist and subjectivist approaches to ethical normativity bring along with them.
A constructivist view is defined by the idea that rational agents can legislate to themselves.
This locates the source of normativity within the agent, which they recognize via a process
of rational deliberation, rather than through pre-existing, passive dispositions. In this
sense, ethical normativity is the expression of the activity of rational agency. Such a
conception rests on the supposition that ethical normativity does not merely spring from
our subjective interests and desires, but from our nature as rational agents. More recently,
though, Street argued for a form of constructivism that she designates as Humean, not
Kantian: in this case, the agent’s reasons that justify our ethical judgements and norms
depend, ultimately, on what the agent happens to value, her contingent internal desires
and dispositions. This means that it is possible to delineate different constructivist
approaches – an objectivist form of constructivism versus a subjectivist form of
constructivism.
In this paper, my aim is to address the following questions:
i) First, is it really possible to disentangle the objective and the subjective aspects of
practical reason?
I will argue that it is.
ii) Is this subjectivist form of constructivism satisfactory? I believe that constructivism
about normativity has in fact to deal with some fundamental issues, and I will try to argue
that the first one is indeed the threat of psychologism. If the constructivist approach aims
at justifying ethical norms by appealing to their constitutive relation to the structure of
agency, it is possible to understand that relation as some kind of psychological necessity.
Michael Bratman (2012), for instance, argues that the threat of psychologism is real and
here is why: at the bottom of the process of normative reasoning are non-cognitive
attitudes such as love and caring, but it is not plainly understandable how ethical
judgements and norms that we want to justify in an objective or at least intersubjective
way can be derived from those conative attitudes. Is the idea that there are reasons/values
as recognized from an impartial point of view, and reasons/values as recognized from a
personal point of view compatible with the realistic idea that moral value does not
ultimately depend on human beliefs or attitudes?
iii) But I also want to assess whether to understand the constitutive relation between
ethical norms and the structure of agency itself as some kind of psychological necessity is
highly undesirable, as some indeed think it is, or if it is possible to think that the
contingency that such a psychologism entails is not lethal to the foundation of morality,
since there are plenty of other rational activities humans engage with whose foundation
5
rests in contingent aspects about our beliefs and attitudes but that doesn’t prevent us from
take them seriously.

6
Yair Levy (Tel Aviv University)
WHAT IS REASONING?

Abstract:
Understanding the nature of reasoning, both practical and theoretical, is a central task for
the study of agency, action, and normativity. Despite fierce disagreement on detail, recent
work in the philosophy of agency and the philosophy of normativity tends to agree that
reasoning consists in a personal-level, conscious, fully explicit process of transition
between mental attitudes. Here I argue against this consensus that the conception is much
too narrow and should be supplanted by a more adequate one. I first criticize several extant
versions of the conscious-mental-process-view, due to John Broome and Conor McHugh
& Jonathan Way, respectively, arguing that each faces counterexamples and falls short of
capturing the nature of the phenomenon. I show that, contrary Broome’s (and others’)
view, reasoning is plausibly a functional kind; and that, contrary McHugh & Way’s (and
others’) view, there is plausibly no single function that is definitive of reasoning. I then
adduce further, more general grounds for doubting the conscious-mental-process-view,
arguing that it cannot capture intuitively paradigmatic cases of reasoning and is not
continuous with the science of reasoning.
In the second part of the paper, I build on the shortcomings of extant accounts to
motivate and defend an alternative view of reasoning. On this view, very roughly, a
reasoning agent is one whose behaviour can be represented as if she were undergoing a
conscious mental process, whether or not she is actually undergoing such a process. I
expound the virtues of this alternative approach, which include, among other things, its
greater explanatory power and the explanation it provides for the Aristotelian doctrine
that practical reasoning concludes in action. I draw an analogy between my approach and
Expected Utility theory (Decision Theory), where so-called ‘representation theorems’
guarantee that agents whose behaviour meets certain axiomatic conditions can be
represented as if they are maximizing their utility function. As I argue, the applicability of
EU theory to both normative and descriptive contexts – used as it is both to guide agents’
behaviour, and to explain and predict it – makes it an especially suitable model for the
study of reasoning more broadly.

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Laura Marcon (University of Granada)
WHAT GIVES US A REASON TO CHANGE? JOINT COMMITMENTS AND NORM-
GUIDED BEHAVIORS

Abstract:

According to Bicchieri’s (2006) influential account, social norms require three elements:
empirical expectations, normative expectations and conditional preferences. In order to
change maladaptive or reputedly harmful social norms we need to ascertain, first of all,
whether a collective behavioural pattern can be defined as a social norm. If this is the case,
we should explore which tools could be most appropriate to diagnose and change the
norm’s dynamics. According to this model, one of the main motivational mechanisms is
constituted by expectations: one person has reason to behave in a norm-based way
because she sees what others do and because she thinks they believe that she should do
so as well. However, there are situations where personal normative beliefs and social
expectations may hinder the norm change: in a case of pluralistic ignorance, people within
the same reference network disapproves of a certain widespread social norm, but think
that most of relevant others keep on complying with it. This would imply a discrepancy
between what people personally support as normative beliefs and the observed public
behavior (Bicchieri 2017), making a norm’s change harder and slower.
Tools that we may use to disentangle this kind of dynamics are of the utmost
importance when the followed, even if disapproved, norm is maladaptive (i.e., Female
Genital Cutting). Keeping such cases in mind, our research question is: could joint
commitments (Gilbert 2006, 2014) be a motivational factor that counters the dynamics of
maladaptive norms? There are grounds to suspect that this may be the case. However, it
is not clear how; hence a second question: how can a joint commitment be effective in
starting a behavioural change?
In order to answer the first main question, it is crucial to understand (i) what kind of
preferences (conditional vs. unconditional) commitments are based on and (ii) what is the
relation between social expectations and commitments.
The purpose of this work would be to analyse (i), as the first step to support the thesis
that joint commitments can be considered as motivating factors. Commitments to comply
with a pre-existing social norm could be held by conditional preferences – as well as for
social expectations. But, if we look at people trying to change a maladaptive norm, their
commitment could be sustained by unconditional preferences, that is, their commitment
to start behaving differently from what others do/believe would be based on preferences
thar are not conditional on others’ behaviours and beliefs.
So, my suggestion is that a commitment, to motivate people to change “bad” norms,
would need to be justified by some moral argument (that represents what we ought to do
and for which reasons, independently of what others do/think), and by a joint deliberation
to change the norm. If people had the chance to express their personal normative beliefs
associated with some maladaptive norm (as in the case of pluralistic ignorance), maybe
they would feel jointly committed to convert their personal normative beliefs into
collective ones, changing the observable effects of some public behavior.
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Jacopo Domenicucci (University of Cambridge)
TRUSTING AS SETTLING
Abstract:
This paper is about the mental metaphysics of trust. I identify a standard assumption in
the way the mental state of trust is modelled in the literature (the Expectation Principle)
and I argue that we should abandon it in favour of my Settling Conjecture.
The two models differ in how the agency of our trustees features in our mental states
of trust. For the standard approach, trust takes some future, expected acts as its typical
object, as I show. My proposal, instead, is to treat trust as a mental state that generically
settles how we interact with a person — I call this the Settling Conjecture.
Can the standard approach show that there is nothing more to trust than the trustful
expectations they identify, and that this metaphysically cheaper option does not miss
anything important about the phenomenon? Can the Settling Conjecture show that its
more costly commitments are worth it and reveal something important about our mental
state of trust?
This paper addresses these questions and argues that my proposal captures important
traits of trust that the reductive claim would otherwise miss. I reveal a neglected tension
between trusting and the close focus on expecting that comes with the standard approach.
A naive focus on trustful expectations results in a picture that distorts the actual mental
activities involved in trusting. If expectations were as salient in trust as philosophers
standardly assume, trust could not function as it does. In contrast, the Settling Conjecture
reflects some important traits of trust.
The paper is structured in six sections. In section 1, I offer a general presentation of the
standard assumption that I want to challenge (the Expectation Principle) and of my
proposal (the Settling Conjecture). In section 2, I stage the contrast between the Settling
conjecture and the Expectation Principle. I bring out how the Expectation Principle
mistakes trust for an exploratory state, while the Settling Conjecture recognises it as a
settling state. In sections 3 to 7, I offer five arguments in favour of Settling Conjecture
and against the Expectation Principle. In section 3, I show how the Settling Conjecture
makes better sense than the Expectation Principle of how we can reap the benefits of
expert-advice. In section 4, I show how the Expectation Principle conflicts with the quality
of our trustful experience. Trusting comes with a soothing and stress-relieving experience
which is not accommodated by the Expectation Principle. In section 5, I show that the
Expectation Principle conflicts with the structure of our attention while we trust. Trust
carries a distinctive pattern of attention that structurally differs from how we distribute
our attention when trust is missing — and which is missed by the Expectation Principle.
Next, section 6 focuses on the action-guidance of trust. I show that a model of trust relying
on the Expectation Principle misrepresents a central way in which trust can shape our
conduct. Section 7 argues that the Expectation Principle further overstates the importance
of intentional attributions in trust.

9
Jeremy David Fix (University of Oxford)
PRACTICAL COGNITION AS VOLITION
Abstract:

Call practical cognitivism the view that practical reason is our type of will and practical
cognition is our type of volition. According to this view, I have a single capacity to act as
I understand is legitimate. Practical cognition is then our type of volition.
This essay is about two puzzles cases which many philosophers take to refute practical
cognitivism. In akratic action, I act as I understand is illegitimate and do not act as I
understand is legitimate. In permissible action, I act in one way which I understand is
legitimate and not in another which I also understand is legitimate. In both, my
understanding of the legitimacy of acting in some way comes apart from my acting in that
way. Many philosophers think that such actions are possible only if practical reason is not
the will and only if practical cognition and volition must be distinct exercises of distinct
capacities.
I argue that practical cognitivists can explain the possibility of such actions. The key is
to understand that the claims that practical reason is the will and that practical cognition
is volition are about a capacity. A capacity of an organism is a potentiality to do something,
and one differs from another given what they are capacities to do. If practical reason is
our will, then as with the wills of other animals, practical reason is a capacity to realize
representations or do as we think. Unlike their wills, though, practical reason is a self-
conscious capacity, and generally, self-conscious capacities are potentialities which the
subject exercises through grasping the rational basis for such an exercise. So practical
reason is a capacity to act as the subject understands is legitimate, with everything after
‘to’ characterizing the capacity.
Claims about the nature of the capacity are not universal generalizations over its
exercises because organisms can exercises their capacities more or less successfully as
against the function of that capacity. To exercise a capacity successfully is to do what the
capacity is a potentiality to do. To exercise a capacity unsuccessfully is to fail in doing what
the capacity is a potentiality to do by missing the mark in some way. Practical reason is a
capacity of an organism and so its exercises divide into the successful and the failed. Since
it is a self-conscious capacity, it allows for distinctively rational and irrational forms of
success and failure. I shall argue that if practical reason is the self-conscious will, akratic
action is a type of failed exercise of that capacity and permissible action is a type of
successful exercise.
With respect to akratic action, I do not act as I understand is legitimate and act as I
understand is illegitimate. This is to partially and incompetently exercise a capacity to act
as I understand is legitimate just as tripping is partially and incompetently to exercise my
capacity to walk. With respect to permissible action, I act in one of two ways which I are
both legitimate. This is to completely and competently exercise a capacity to act as I
understand is legitimate in one of two ways open to me as stepping first with my right
foot rather than my left is to completely and competently exercise my capacity to walk in
one of two ways open to me.
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