Sandro Guli’

In Social Goodness, Charlotte Witt holds that any adequate account of social role normativity must explain the resources available to critical selves. Her artisanal model identifies two such resources: habituation, which engenders practical mastery along with a habit of excellence, and an articulated grasp of the practice’s know-why. I argue that these resources remain limited because the artisanal model under-theorises the linguistic dimension of social normativity. I draw attention to three aspects of discursive normativity that together show why language is indispensable for understanding critical agency. First, articulating a norm is a practical intervention that places the norm itself at issue through publicly attributable commitments. Second, linguistically articulated reasons circulate across practices, introducing heterogeneous normative pressures that local expertise alone cannot register. Third, performative speech acts institute roles and deontic commitments independently of telic excellence. Taken together, these dimensions show that discursive practices supply critical selves with resources that are not exhausted by habituation or know-why

In this paper, we concentrate on the controversy over internalism and externalism about the normativity of social roles and defend internalism. According to the internalist, we are subject to the normativity of a social role we occupy only if we adopt an attitude or act in a way that makes the norm binding on us. According to the externalist, we can be subject to the normativity of a social role simply by virtue of occupying it, regardless of our attitudes or acts. We analyse a crucial problem raised by Charlotte Witt for internalism––namely, that internalism cannot explain important cases of role non-conforming behaviour––and argue that John Searle’s and Robert Brandom’s internalist theories offer responses to this problem, albeit incomplete ones. We then outline a novel internalist model of the normativity of social roles––loosely inspired by Hegel’s theories of recognition––according to which we are normatively subject to the social roles we occupy either through our uptake of their norms or our recognitive habituation to them. We show that this model is not afflicted by Witt’s problem. In the conclusion of the paper, we consider how one can be released from social role norms and suggest that our model can shed new light on the mechanisms of social role oppression.

Åsa Burman has recently introduced the important notion of telic power and differentiated it from deontic power in an attempt to build a bridge between ideal and non-ideal social ontology. We find Burman’s project promising but we argue that more is to be done to make it entirely successful. First, there is a palpable tension between Burman’s claim that telic power can be ontologically independent of deontic power and her examples, which suggests that these forms of power share the same basis. Second, it is not completely clear how telic power specifically helps non-ideal social ontologists explain oppression. We offer solutions to both problems. First, we argue that Burman’s arguments for the conclusion that telic power can exist without deontic power are unsuccessful. Burman contends that this is possible because some social roles involving telic power can exist independently of institutions as sets of constitutive rules, which are––in her opinion––the source of deontic power. Burman’s arguments are not persuasive because she disregards the plausible view that all social roles involve deontic power, whether or not they are institutional. Second, we argue that while the exercise of deontic power requires a collective recognition of the social roles of the interacting agents and, therefore, a recognition of the associated norms, the exercise of telic power does not require recognition of the relevant norms. This is why invoking telic power is particularly useful in explaining how oppression and injustice can arise. Lastly, we suggest that the relation between teleological normativity and the forms of telic power has not been fully clarified by Burman and requires a deeper analysis.