Standards and normative authority

Abstract

Abstract Norms, rules, or standards require, recommend, or evaluate actions and attitudes. Claims about what agents have a reason to do or ought to do can be true according to or relative to standards. These statements will be familiar to anyone versed in recent work in metaethics and especially those interested in the debate over whether some standards are authoritatively as opposed to merely formally normative – i.e., the debate over whether some standards, like those of morality or prudence, ‘really’ or ‘genuinely’ tell agents what they have a reason to do or ought to do, while other standards, such as those which constitute certain conventional codes of behaviour, do not. But what are standards? And what is it for normative claims to be true or false according to standards? In this paper I raise a challenge for normative authority scepticism – the position that the idea that some standards are authoritatively normative is incoherent, confused, or otherwise defective – through an examination of these questions.