Normative Attitudes

Robert Brandom sees Kant and Hegel as both working to reconcile the modern notion that normative statuses depend on normative attitudes with a genuine bindingness and objectivity of normativity. The key point that he associates with modernity is the idea that normative statuses are not somehow pre-given. As I would put it, the normative statuses of things depend on complex reflective judgments involving many elements.

Brandom’s language about attitude-dependence is intentionally broad enough to encompass all the forms of modern subjectivism, which is the opposite evil to traditional groundings of normative statuses in pure deliverances of authority. At its most primitive level, it expresses the idea that everyone judges for herself, which is indeed a popular sentiment in modern culture. Expressed this way, without qualification, it makes it impossible to separate right from wrong. Brandom seems to want to say that even this vulgar subjectivism or voluntarism is historically progressive compared to the traditional “authority-obedience model”; I tend to think they are equally bad.

The real positive lesson that Brandom extracts from this, though, is something to the effect that everyone deserves a seat at the table in inquiries about the good. He does not himself support the view that everyone gets to judge everything for herself.

Indeed he points out that the very best version of this individualist view — Kant’s theory of the autonomy of moral subjects — is criticized by Hegel as one-sidedly individualistic. Kant complements autonomy with a strong emphasis on respect for others, but according to Brandom, Hegel also thinks that Kant effectively treats both autonomy and respect as principles that themselves do not depend on any normative taking of things to be such-and-such; i.e., at a meta-level Kant still treats autonomy and respect as the same kind of givens that he recommends we avoid depending upon in all our particular judgments. With his theory of the coming-to-be of genuine objective oughts through processes of mutual recognition, Hegel is able to show a genesis of autonomy and respect, as themselves instances of the same kind of normative taking involved in particular judgments.

I’m not completely happy with Brandom’s choice of the thin term “attitude” in this context. I would prefer to say, for example, that normative statuses depend on reflective judgment. Attitude by itself says nothing about its derivation; an attitude just is what it is, and might be entirely arbitrary. But I suspect that Brandom implicitly has in mind something like a complex propositional “attitude”. Then on his view of what it is to be a proposition, necessarily we are in the space of reasons, and subject to all of its dialogic give and take, just by having such an attitude.

Empathy and Mutual Recognition

On a purely universal ethical level, it seems to me that empathy is to “double empathy” as respect for others is to mutual recognition. This is a lesson for all humans. Life is a two-way street.

“Mind reading” — the attribution of mental states to people — is not particularly empathetic or respectful. When I empathize with you, I don’t claim to read your mind. I pay attention to you in your particularity, without imposing my view of you on you.

Kantian respect for others is better served by not imputing mental states to people. The imputation of mental states tends to be presumptuous, and that can make it invasive.

What really matters for ethics are our commitments as evinced by words and deeds, not our supposed mental states. Our deeper intentionalities and spirit are embodied in the nuances and context of our “outer” words and deeds. What are often taken as clues to supposed mental states, such as facial expressions and vocal intonations, are superficial, ephemeral, and unreliable in comparison with these.

Explicit words should be questioned mainly when they seem to be out of sync with our deeds. Things like the spontaneous facial expressions and vocal intonations of others affect us psychologically, but that is as much a matter of our psychology as of the other person. The bottom line is that by themselves, these are not decisive evidence of what anyone’s attitudes truly are. Evidence of a person’s commitments and character comes from looking at the bigger picture of everything they say and do.

We all have the experience of fleeting feelings that we do not act on, but that momentarily affect us. Our spontaneous physical mannerisms may reflect these. Insofar as it is practically necessary to make judgments about people, we should judge them based not on superficial and ambiguous signs of the fleeting impulses they experience, but rather on the nuances and context of what they deliberately do.

For example, I work very hard not to show impatience with exasperating but ultimately harmless little behaviors of people I care about, but a flicker of impatience may nonetheless show on my face. In this kind of circumstance, I think someone deserves to be given credit for the deliberate choice not to make an impatient remark, rather than to be judged for a facial expression that was not a deliberate act.

The bigger picture is far more important than what is immediate. And we should not assume that other people’s subjective experience (or its relation to physical expression in the moment) is analogous to our own.

Empathy as an Ethical Stance

Ethically, empathy belongs in the same space as Aristotelian friendship, in which the friend is as another self; and with the golden rule; Kantian respect for others; and Hegelian mutual recognition. It is a prescription for non-egotism and avoidance of self-centeredness. Nothing is really more important than genuinely caring for others, which must include listening to them, and not simply doing or telling them what we think is right for them.

There is a fine line between making and asserting our own independent judgments of what is right — which every ethical being needs to be able to do — and imposing them on others. Empathy is what helps us navigate these gray areas.

I personally see a complementary principle that helps complete this. That is that we should in general as much as possible mean what we say, and say what we mean. I see this partly as a matter of personal integrity, and partly as a way of helping others understand us as best possible, when they may not themselves see things as we do. This can also be understood as a kind of more specific empathy for the listener on behalf of the speaker.