Capacities and the good: How can capacities contribute to explaining normativity and value?

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Erasmus Mayr; Professorin Dr. Barbara Vetter
• Subject Area: Practical Philosophy ; Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 439616221

• Final Report Year: 2024

Final Report Abstract

Much of what we do is done by exercising capacities: abilities and skills, virtues and charactertraits. It is widely thought that such capacities contribute not only to what we do, but also to the value of our actions. Many believe that a success is worth more when it is due to the exercise of a capacity: when a football player scores a goal, many people believe that this was a better performance if the player scored because she was skilful than if she scored by sheer luck; when a person keeps her promise because she is a virtuous person, many people think her action is better than if she only kept the promise because, by a happy coincidence, she felt like doing so. Some believe that capacities also give rise to values and norms by imposing normative standards on those who possess or exercise the capacity – for instance, that any being with the capacity to reason and deliberate is, just by virtue of possessing that capacity, subject to certain norms about how they ought to reason. Capacities and the Good aimed to investigate fundamental questions at the intersection of metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of action and epistemology about capacities themselves and their role for norms and values. To that end, the project developed a general view of what constitutes an ability, as opposed to a mere disposition, habit, or tendency. The core idea was that abilities are characterized by adaptivity, a form of flexible adaptation both to external circumstances and to the agent’s varying and possibly conflicting goals and values. Unlike other approaches in the literature, the adaptive abilities approach provides a natural framework for understanding what it is to exercise an ability, and for accommodating unsuccessful exercises of abilities. With such an approach in hand, we investigated the relation between capacities and responsibility, highlighting the role of fallibility and of explanatory concerns in assigning responsibility to agents. We also contributed novel arguments to the debate about ethical constitutivism, i.e., the view that our capacities give rise to ethical norms by having in-built (‘constitutive’) standards to which we are subject simply in virtue of exercising these capacities. Furthermore, we addressed questions in epistemology concerning our cognitive capacities, clarifying the nature and value of such capacities and helping answer the venerable question why knowledge – which is typically due to the exercise of cognitive capacities – is more valuable than merely true belief.

Publications

• Inference Is Not a Process. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 100(3), 539-549.
  Kietzmann, Christian
  
• Can realists reason with reasons?. Philosophical Explorations, 25(2), 159-169.
  Kietzmann, Christian
  
• Möglichkeit ohne mögliche Welten, Philosophisches Jahrbuch 129 (2022), 115- 137
  B. Vetter
  
• Adaptive abilities. Philosophical Issues, 33(1), 140-154.
  Mayr, Erasmus & Vetter, Barbara
  
• Freedom & Responsibility in Context, by Ann Whittle. Mind, 134(533), 191-200.
  Vetter, Barbara
  
• The Action-Guidingness of Rational Principles and the Problem of our own Imperfections, Philosophical Inquiries 11: 1 (2023), 127-141
  E. Mayr
  
• What Does Aristotle’s Craftsperson Understand?. Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 107(3), 373-405.
  Kietzmann, Christian
  
• Why reasons and reasoning don’t come apart. Synthese, 202(5).
  Kietzmann, Christian
  
• Joseph Raz on responsibility and secure competence. Jurisprudence, 15(1), 99-115.
  Mayr, Erasmus