Jan Bransen

Philip Pettit's ethocentric account of rule-following is elaborated and defended in this paper as basically a story about the capacity to reason organized around largely implicit assumptions about what is and what is not normal. It is argued that this account can be insightfully used to elucidate the practical reasoning of agents confronted with the normative indeterminacy that seems to be characteristic of radically new situations. It is shown that practical reasoning consists to a large extent in the capacity to articulate, specify, and evaluate implicit assumptions about what is and what is not normal. One corollary of this account of practical reason is investigated in some detail: the predominant role of intrapersonal divergence of habits in reasoning about an apparent normative indeterminacy and the related, merely criteriological role of convergence with respect to determining the right rules to follow.

‘Kijk. Mijn kasteel heeft het overleefd!’ roept mijn zoon enthousiast. We zijn hier gisteren ook aan het strand geweest en er is inderdaad nog iets te herkennen van het bouwwerk dat hij hier toen gemaakt heeft. Het hoge water heeft nog niet alle sporen uitgeveegd, maar om nu te zeggen dat de vage contouren in het zand de uitroep rechtvaardigen dat ‘het kasteel’ het ‘overleefd’ heeft… Dat rekt óf het begrip kasteel óf het begrip overleven toch een heel eind verder op dan we normaal gesproken acceptabel zullen vinden. Maar op vakantie zijn we niet zo streng en al zeker niet over de woorden van een kind. Ik begrijp heel goed wat hij bedoelt en ik zie het zelf ook. Inderdaad, hier waren we gisteren en het kasteel van mijn zoon heeft de nacht overleefd

Blindness in therapy? Love? Or science? In this paper we dispute what seems an obvious truism these days: that increasing the influence of scientific research on psychotherapy is a good thing. We begin with an exploration of two distinct capacities that contribute in significant ways to human flourishing: knowledge and love. We then argue that modern society rather onesidedly capitalizes on the growth of scientific knowledge. This has an important drawback because the dominant model of growth presupposed in scientific research is built on the idea of reducing the potentially disturbing influence of the subjective engagement of the scientist with the object of knowledge. This is ordinarily quite a fruitful idea that has, however, paradoxically bad effects in evidence-based therapy. This is the case, we argue, because in a scientifically informed therapy the therapist should, in some sense, try to be blind to the effects of his expertise on his clients’ expectations of his expertise. A scientific, disengaged perspective therefore frustrates the therapist’s need to invest in the formation of a charitable relationship with his clients. Next we argue that the popular prejudice against love – that it is blind – is not as plausible as it is considered to be. To be sure, love invites cognition to accept a subservient role, but, we argue, this has some advantages too. It encourages the lover to discern particularly positive and promising features of the object of his love, and this, we argue, is crucial to a successful therapy in two ways. On the one hand, the therapist needs to engage with these positive and promising features to succeed in building the needed charitable relationship with his clients. And on the other hand clients often go into therapy because they lack access to their own positive and promising features and are therefore unable to entertain a charitable relationship with themselves. We conclude that with respect to psychotherapy there might be good reason for contemporary society to capitalize on the growth of love, rather than the growth of knowledge.

This paper argues that there are practical problems of such a kind that neither impartial morality nor rational choice theory can provide us with comfort and guidance in our attempt to make the right choice if confronted with such a problem. It argues that both morality and rational choice theory are bound to misconstrue problems of this kind. Appreciating the limits of both morality and rational choice theory, as currently discussed in the literature (Wolf, Morton, Pettit, Hollis & Sugden), enables us to identify the features of these particular practical problems, and allows us to elaborate the idea of an alternative of oneself, which is crucial to a proper understanding of the kind of practical problem the paper draws attention to.

This paper investigates the possibilities of ordinary people to estabish a moral authority in a subclass of everyday scenarios in the public domain that are characterised by an underdetermination of the obtaining norms and regulations. The paper offers a strategy based on hospitality to challenge the all too common practice of ignoring one’s responsibility as a moral agent and to hide in one’s shell, hoping that others (police power!) will solve one’s problem. The paper begins with a description of a few scenarios in which it is less or more complicated for people to intervene as authorities. The tendency in such scenarios to retreat from one’s responsibility is analysed in terms of a distinction between power and authority, the latter enabling interventions based on a framework of justifying reasons. It is argued that a lack of confidence in the availability of such a framework of justifying reasons might explain the popularity of the current defensive tendency, especially against the background belief that interventions based on power are by default unjustified. An analysis is provided of trust as an attitude that complements authority. No authority, and no framework of justifying reasons, without trust. But a crucial feature of trust is the courage to accept one’s own vulnerability. This insight is used as the stepping stone for the alternative stategey based on hospitality. A sketch is provided of how this might work, involving five steps, the crucial ones being (1) an invitation to the other people in the scenario to compose a plural subject and (2) an offer to take up the responsibility to host this plural subject acknowledging one’s vulnerabilty to the independence of one’s guests.

In this paper I argue that to understand minded agency – the capacity we typically find instantiated in instances of human behaviour that could sensibly be questioned by asking “What did you do?” – one needs to understand childhood, i.e. the trajectory of learning to act. I discuss two different types of trajectory, both of which seem to take place during childhood and both of which might be considered crucial to learning to act: a growth of bodily control (GBC) and a growth in taking responsibility (GTR). The discussion of GTR takes up about half of the entire paper. In the final two sections I argue that GTR is the most promising trajectory in terms of which to understand a child’s process of learning to act.