Sander Voerman | Philosophy
My current project involves a naturalistic approach towards practical normativity. In recent work, Harry Frankfurt argues that the “self” or the “structure of the will” of a person involves empirical facts about what that person cares about, and that these facts provide the person with normative reasons. However, he remains pretty armchair about the nature of these facts. Furthermore, a number of critics have argued that self-disclosure does not imply normative competence (Bratman, Watson and Wolf, among others).
In order to address the latter issue without adopting moral realism, I distinguish a normative will, consisting of consistent patterns across affective dispositions, from a cognitive will, consisting of self-attributions which function as interpretations of those patterns. The possibility for the cognitive will to misrepresent the normative will allows us to reconcile the idea that normative reasons are grounded in the self with the intuition that a person can get his normative judgements wrong.
Next, in order to get the theory out of the armchair, these concepts of a normative and cognitive will need to get embedded in (or confronted with) empirical theory from the behavioural sciences. In particular, I would like to investigate how these concepts might apply to certain methods in psychotherapy that seem to be related to motivation, the will, and personhood.
This project is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and is part of the Tilburg Hub for Ethics and Social Philosophy (THESP) and the Tilburg Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science (TiLPS).