Shaping the Normative Landscape

David Owens

An ambitious original theory of the normative nature of social relationships
A unified account of moral, political, and legal rights and obligations
Major work by an internationally acclaimed philosopher

Shaping the Normative Landscape

David Owens

Description

Shaping the Normative Landscape is an investigation of the value of obligations and of rights, of forgiveness, of consent and refusal, of promise and request. David Owens shows that these are all instruments by which we exercise control over our normative environment. Philosophers from Hume to Scanlon have supposed that when we make promises and give our consent, our real interest is in controlling (or being able to anticipate) what people will actually do and that our interest in rights and obligations is a by-product of this more fundamental interest. In fact, we value for its own sake the ability to decide who is obliged to do what, to determine when blame is appropriate, to settle whether an act wrongs us. Owens explores how we control the rights and obligations of ourselves and of those around us. We do so by making friends and thereby creating the rights and obligations of friendship. We do so by making promises and so binding ourselves to perform. We do so by consenting to medical treatment and thereby giving the doctor the right to go ahead. The normative character of our world matters to us on its own account. To make sense of promise, consent, friendship and other related phenomena we must acknowledge that normative interests are amongst our fundamental interests. We must also rethink the psychology of agency and the nature of social convention.

Shaping the Normative Landscape

David Owens

Introduction
Part One: Interests
1. Blame and Guilt
2. Wronging
3. Obligation
4. Obligation and Involvement
Part Two: Powers
5. The Problem with Promising
6. The Promissory Interest
7. The Possibility of Consent
Part Three: Practices
8. What is a Promise?
9. The Promissory Bond
10. Which Promises Bind?
References
Index

Shaping the Normative Landscape

David Owens

Author Information

David Owens is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading. He is the author of two previous books: Causes and Coincidences (Cambridge 1992) and Reason Without Freedom (Routledge 2000). He has held visiting appointments at Yale University, Oxford University, Sydney University, London University, and at the Catholic University of Lublin.

Shaping the Normative Landscape

David Owens

Reviews and Awards

"In Shaping the Normative Landscape, a highly original work that should be of interest to anyone working in moral philosophy and related areas in legal and political theory... Owens's analysis of normative interests is insightful, and the general theoretical framework he develops on this base provides powerful explanations of many normative phenomena central to our social interactions." --Journal of Moral Philosophy

"Shaping the Normative Landscape does two important things. First, it shows how these two general approaches can be reconciled. Second, it shows that some intractable difficulties across a wide range of normative phenomena have both an underlying unity and elegant solution. More importantly, the solution itself is intuitively appealing." - -Erin Taylor, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"Changes one's view of an important subject." -Allan Gibbard, Times Literary Supplement

"[A]mbitious, instructive and sophisticated." - Gerald Lang, Analysis

"Shaping the Normative Landscape is bound to shape the philosophical landscape, by contributing to particular philosophical debates and by introducing a new and exciting proposal about how we should understand our normative environment." -- Ethics