Habit and Normativity

Enactive theories of habit treat habits not merely as behavioral regularities but as self-sustaining, precarious organizations that can constitute sources of normativity. This paper grants that individual activities may possess genuine correctness conditions and that normative appropriateness is not reducible to behavioral probability. It instead isolates a higher-order problem generated by the coexistence of multiple habitual or regional identities. If distinct identities can generate conflicting local norms, an account that makes comparative or whole-level evaluations across those norms requires a principle that selects, orders, weights, or aggregates them independently of the action that actually occurs. Without such a constraint, the framework risks explaining A by retrospectively emphasizing one identity and not-A by emphasizing another. I call this the norm-selection problem. A wedding-smoking case is used to distinguish local correctness from cross-identity evaluation. The paper then argues that the selection problem creates a second burden: if context-sensitive dispositions, salience, and affective dynamics already explain which action occurs, the theory must clarify what additional explanatory constraint is contributed by normative appropriateness.