Shaping the Normative Landscape

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.

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.

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