Where do norms come from: from transcendent reason, or from the customs, practices, and forms of life through which human beings become normative creatures?
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1. Guest
Jay Garfield is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Smith College and Harvard Divinity School, and Professor of Philosophy at Melbourne University. He work has focused on Buddhist philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics, cross-cultural work, and more.
Check out his book, "Norms and Nature: A Humean Account of the Sources of Normativity"!
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/norms-and-nature-9780197839768
2. Book Summary
In Norms and Nature, Jay Garfield argues that the central philosophical question is where normativity comes from: whether norms are grounded in something transcendent, as in broadly Kantian approaches, or instead arise immanently out of human life itself. He frames this through the Euthyphro problem and then broadens it by drawing on Daoist and Buddhist traditions, using them to ask not just whether norms are discovered or made, but also whether they come from “above” in the form of principles or from “below” in patterns of human practice. Garfield’s overall answer is resolutely neo-Humean: norms are real and authoritative, but their source lies in custom, convention, and the natural and social forms of life through which human beings become normative creatures.
The book’s middle argument is that this Humean naturalism does a better job than neo-Kantian transcendentalism of explaining both the origin and the authority of norms. Garfield insists that the normative domain is unified across ethics, epistemology, language, politics, and related practices, even if those domains differ in content. He then develops an account of custom as both biological and social, tracing its evolution phylogenetically and ontogenetically: human beings are not simply rule-followers by abstract reason, but animals whose hypersociality, trust, language, and inherited practices generate the normative space they inhabit. In that sense, normativity is neither an illusion nor a mysterious extra ingredient added to nature; it is a natural, emergent feature of human life.
In the final part, Garfield applies this framework to particular domains—especially language, knowledge, ethics, and politics—and then turns to personhood itself. His picture is that to be a person is to be formed within a web of shared meanings, customs, and mutually reinforcing social practices that both shape us and are sustained by us. The result is a conception of human beings as thoroughly natural creatures whose normative lives are nonetheless fully real and binding. So the book is not just an argument about Hume versus Kant; it is a broader attempt to explain what it is to be human as a socially constituted, norm-governed being without collapsing into nihilism or crude relativism.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:49 - Overview of book
04:51 - Unity of norms
09:08 - Further source?
14:11 - Transcendent views
19:38 - Why listen to God?
22:28 - Religious communities
25:58 - David Hume
33:23 - Language and norms
34:33 - Other animals
37:16 - Authority of norms
43:04 - Worry
44:53 - Moral intuitions
50:52 - Moderate relativism
54:37 - Open question argument
57:41 - Political norms
1:03:53 - Normative skepticism
1:09:30 - Cross-cultural work
1:10:46 - Trust
1:14:16 - What is a norm?
1:15:04 - Value of philosophy
1:15:59 - Conclusion
