Drawing the mark of the normative

Abstract

What is normativity? What is the mark of the normative? What distinguishes normative from descriptive properties, facts and propositions? A good start at answering these questions is to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for when any proposition is a normative proposition. I proceed to answer these questions by identifying necessary and sufficient conditions for when a proposition is normative, as these conditions track the normativity of a proposition. What I do not do in this thesis is advocate for a specific answer. That goal is beyond the scope of the current work. Instead, I examine two approaches and critically assess their prospects for success. The first is inspired by the work of Kit Fine and Gideon Rosen, which is based on the modal status of a proposition. The second is by Barry Maguire, which is based on the grounding relations between propositions. Along the way, I explicate certain constraints upon the normativity of propositions, which furnish us partial answers by providing necessary conditions, yet sufficiency conditions remain elusive. Making progress on this front by providing conceptual constraints on which propositions are normative contributes towards philosophical debates concerning the reality of ethics, its reducibility, its necessity, as well as reformulations of Hume’s Dictum that Ought-Statements are not derivable from Is-Statements.