Normativity

This volume is built on the papers given at the 1998 Ratio conference on normativity.
The 1998 RATIO conference was on normativity, and this volume is the ostensible result. The speakers at the conference were Peter Railton, Derek Parfit, and John Skorupski, who at the last minute kindly took the place of Joseph Raz, whom illness had prevented from giving his paper. The paper that Derek Parfit gave at the conference has sadly ceased to exist in any recognisable form, and so cannot be included here. But the collection is enhanced by the contributions of Frank Jackson, John Broome and Christopher Hookway, and I am grateful to them for allowing their work to appear in this context.
My introduction starts with some general remarks about normativity, and then turns to discuss a theme that links several of the essays in this volume.
It is often said that normativity is the characteristic common to everything that appears on the "ought" side of the distinction between what is and what ought to be. This is true, however, only if our "ought" here is not particularly a moral ought, nor even just a practical ought; and true only if we include what is good and bad under the general heading of what ought to be or not to be. For the notion of value (good and bad) is held to be as normative as the notion of the right; in other terms, the class of the normative has two distinct sub-classes, the evaluative (good, bad, etc.) and the deontic (right, wrong, duty, obligation, permission - and perhaps also "ought"). Perhaps, then, it would be better not to have any single term like "ought" as the mark of the normative, and to say merely that normativity is a feature common to both sides of the evaluative/ deontic distinction. I confess, however, that I find it helpful to keep an "ought" in mind when thinking about normativity.