Normative and non-normative sanctions

Ok – my goal here, as I said in the last post, is to start thinking more seriously about coercion within a Brandomian apparatus – and I am ‘giving myself permission’ to flail around pretty wildly in doing so.  In this post I want to start “going back to the beginning” – the first chapter of ‘Making It Explicit’, in which Brandom outlines some of the basics of his normative pragmatics.  I ought to do a truly careful close re-read of this chapter, but I’m just going with a straightforward re-read for now.

Brandom cites a Haugeland paper on Heidegger as a representative of the broad analytical approach he is critically endorsing and extending.  I finally got around to reading that paper today, but Haugeland’s remarks are, to be honest, so underdeveloped relative to Brandom’s own account that I think it’s best to just stick with Brandom’s account, treating it as its own thing.  I feel like I discussed Brandom’s discussions of regulism and regularism ad nauseum on the blog a decade or so ago, so I’m going to skip over those now.  Once we get past that framing of the problem space, then, I want to break Brandom’s argument down into two very broad stages (each with many subcomponents).

Stage one: Brandom endorses a sanctions-based account of the institution of normativity by social practice.  Here I’m going to quote Brandom at some reasonable length.  Here is Brandom summing up after his discussion of Haugeland:

The approach being considered distinguishes us as norm-governed creatures from merely regular natural creatures by the normative attitudes we evince – attitudes that express our grasp or practical conception of our behaviour as governed by norms.  These normative attitudes are understood in turn as assessments, assignments to performances of normative significance or status as correct or incorrect according to some norm.  The assessing attitudes are then understood as dispositions to sanction, positively or negatively.  Finally, sanctioning is understood in terms of reinforcement, which is a matter of the actual effect of the sanctioning or reinforcing responses on the responsive dispositions of the one whose performances are being reinforced, that is sanctioned, that is assessed. (35)

Now here is Brandom summing up his summary:

The fundamental strategy pursued by such a theory is a promising one.  As here elaborated, it involves three distinguishable commitments.  First, Kant’s distinction between acting according to a rule and acting according to a conception of a rule is taken to express an important insight about the special way in which we are normative creatures.  Second, the pragmatist regress-of-rules argument is taken to show that in order to make use of this insight, it is necessary that the sort of normative attitude that Kant takes to play an essential mediating role in our government by norms be understood as involving implicit acknowledgement of norms in practice.  Specifically, it is necessary to make sense of the idea of practically taking or treating performances as correct or incorrect.  Third, taking or treating performances as correct or incorrect, approving or disapproving of them in practice, is explained in terms of positive and negative sanctions, rewards and punishments.  This tripartite strategy is endorsed and pursued in the rest of this work.  There are reasons not to be happy with the regularist way of working it out [i.e. Haugeland’s] that has just been sketched, however. (35-6)

Ok.  I feel like I’ve spent countless hours of my life unpacking this kind of stuff on the blog already, so I’m not going to do so again at length here.  Brandom is saying, basically 1) what picks out sapient creatures is that we are bound by rules-as-norms, not just rules-as-laws-of-nature; 2) those rules are instituted in social practice – specifically, by normative attitudes which treat actions as correct or incorrect (as following or not following a rule) in practice; 3) the way in which normative attitudes treat actions as correct or incorrect is by sanctions.  In other words, Brandom is building in sanctions at the very foundation of his entire explanatory apparatus.  This is, fundamentally, a sanctions-based account of normativity.

That’s part one of Brandom’s argument in this chapter.  We can see this first part of the argument as radically ‘deflationist’ or strongly pragmatist.  The argument thus far is explaining apparently mysterious or metaphysical entities (norms) entirely in terms of social practice.  Thus far, then, we might take Brandom to be engaged in a form of ‘naturalised epistemology’, in which normativity is explained in wholly naturalistic terms – and indeed, in a certain sense, Brandom is indeed doing this.  But now comes part two of the argument.

In part two of the argument Brandom (so to speak) changes tack, and starts ‘rowing away’ from what one might take to be the strongest available form of deflationary naturalism.  Here again I’m going to quote from Brandom at reasonable length.  Now we’re on pages 42-43.

In this connection it is important to realize that it is one thing to understand practical assessment as sanctioning, and quite another to understand sanctioning in nonnormative terms such as reinforcement.  A retributive approach to the normative need not be given a naturalistic turn at all.  Defining normative attitudes in terms of dispositions to impose sanctions does not by itself reduce the normative to the nonnormative – it just trades off one sort of norm for another.  At the most basic level, to reward someone is to offer some good (either objectively or subjectively), and to punish them is conversely to inflict something bad.  Benefit and harm, desirable and undesirable, are concepts that also have normative senses.  Indeed, these senses would seem to be primary, so that some sort of reductive hypothesis would be needed to naturalize them.  To turn the retributive story about normative attitudes into a naturalistic one, an account might for instance understand what is good (and so rewarding) in terms of what is desirable, what is desirable in terms of what is desired, and what is desired ultimately in terms of what is pursued.

Commitment to such a reduction is optional.  Positive and negative sanctions may consist in acclaim and censure that itself has only a normative significance.  A correct action might be rewarded by the grant of some extraordinary privilege or by the release from some onerous obligation – and the status of such a response as reward need not depend on whether the one rewarded would in fact have been disposed to act so as to fulfill the obligation had it not been lifted.  An incorrect action might be punished by withholding a license to act in certain other ways or by imposing an extraordinary obligation – and the status of such a response as punishment need not depend on whether the one punished is in fact disposed to refrain from acting even without the boon of entitlement, or is in fact disposed to act so as to fulfill the obligation imposed.  In such cases one is rewarded or punished for what one does “in another world” – by a change in normative status rather than natural state. (42-3)

Ok.  I think it’s worth elaborating in slightly more detail the theoretical move that Brandom is making here.  To do this, it’s worth being clear about the kind of position that Brandom is here differentiating himself from.

Let’s say we grant the position that Brandom endorses in part one of his argument in this chapter. (And I do in fact endorse that position!)  That is to say: an account of normativity that is, fundamentally, grounded in sanctions.  It would seem the most natural thing in the world to move from this position to a non-normative understanding of sanctions.  For example (as Brandom says) we might choose to understand the efficacy of sanctions in terms of the pleasure or pain they induce.  Then (the reasoning would go) we can reconstruct the entire apparatus of instituted normativity on the basis of a utilitarian calculus of pleasure and pain that can (we might argue) be understood in wholly naturalistic terms.  We could even go a step further, and build our entire apparatus on the basis of empirically-describable behavioural dispositions, without even the utilitarian subjectivism needing to get involved.  In this way we have given a full account of the institution of normativity in terms of wholly non-normative categories.

Now – this is interesting in part because the utilitarian version of this approach is basically what modern economics does.  That is to say, the entire marginalist and game-theoretic formal apparatus of modern economics is grounded in the idea that we can analyse human behaviour in terms of instrumental rationality oriented towards some kind of specifiable individual-level preference function.  From a Brandomian perspective, this is a reductionist naturalistic account.  (And this is the case even if we might have doubts about the empirical adequacy of this approach – and even if we regard this approach as ‘idealist’ in something like the Marxist sense.  These are all orthogonal issues.)  We can, in other words, draw a sharp distinction between a social-theoretic approach grounded in a pleasure-and-pain calculus and instrumental reason, and a Brandomian normative pragmatics, which has a non-instrumental understanding of reason at its core.

So if we were to adopt this (naturalistic, reductionist, non-Brandomian) approach, we might for example see the sanction associated with transgressing a norm as grounded in “beating people with sticks” – i.e. inflicting some sort of pain-based punishment.  Then the norm is ultimately explicable in those ‘naturalistic’ terms – because the sanction in question can be explained naturalistically.  Brandom is drawing a distinction between this kind of (pain-and-pleasure-based) sanction, and a sanction the substance of which is itself normative.  In the case of a sanction that is itself normative, the ‘punishment’ involves simply a shift in the set of rights and obligations that the social actor in question is taken to enjoy.  For example (as Brandom says), an additional set of obligations might be imposed on the social actor in question.

Now, what if the social actor transgresses those norms (those obligations) in turn?  Here, again, there are (Brandom argues) two available forms of sanction: normative and non-normative.  In the case of a normative sanction, the sanction in question is again just a shift in the social actor’s normative statuses, without necessarily any accompanying pleasure-and-pain-based sanction.  In the case of a non-normative sanction, it’s the pleasure and pain that are doing the work.

Assume then that once again we impose a normative (rather than a non-normative) sanction.  What if the social actor transgresses these newly-instituted (now third-order) obligations?  Here again other social actors can decide whether to impose a normative or a non-normative sanction.  And so on and so on.

The picture Brandom is painting then goes as follows: when we impose normative sanctions, we can create a chain of normative sanctions that in principle continues indefinitely.  Or, at any given point in that chain, we can choose to impose a non-normative sanction instead.

And this analysis makes available two different kinds of explanatory account.  On the one hand, we can argue that chains of normative sanctions must ultimately be ‘grounded’ in a non-normative sanction.  In this scenario, we could argue, the non-normative sanction expresses the final ‘true’ sanction, the reality of which then retroactively flows ‘back up’ the chain, explaining all preceding normative sanctions in non-normative terms.  Alternatively, we could propose an account in which chains of normative sanctions need never terminate in a non-normative ‘ground’.  These two kinds of account, therefore, replicate the fundamental distinction between ‘reductionist’/naturalistic/pleasure-and-pain-based accounts of normativity, and accounts of normativity that – while pragmatist – are not reductionist in this sense.  This latter kind of account can never be reduced to (for example) a utilitarianism-plus-instrumental-reason account of normativity.

Brandom, of course, endorses the non-reductionist (in this specific sense) approach.  Brandom is interested in a theoretical approach in which normative sanctions can never be reduced to non-normative sanctions – in which the normativity never ‘goes away’.  Brandom’s is, fundamentally, a normative pragmatics – he thinks that you can’t get rid of the normativity, and replace it with a fully naturalistic pragmatics, without losing something critical.

Now – this position itself needs to be qualified in important ways.  (Among other things, this argument has confused a lot of people about the sense in which Brandom’s account is non-naturalistic.  Brandom is emphatically not – repeat not – suggesting that there is anything magical going on here; rather, he is, I believe, arguing the much more technical point that our normative categories cannot be translated into non-normative vocabulary without a loss of sense.  But this isn’t really relevant to the line of argument I’m trying to pursue here.)  Nevertheless, I think this sketches the basic opposition that Brandom is drawing in these passages.

In the next post in this series, I want to start picking away at this opposition, and this set of arguments, informed by the perspective of Charles W. Mills-style “non-ideal theory”.