The Emergence of Norms in Generative Relational Being: A Preliminary Discussion

A norm differs from a regularity in that people hold one another to it. Where this holding comes from, and whether it can be justified, are treated by two separate literatures: one models the emergence of norms and is silent on justification, the other argues justification and treats emergence as irrelevant. The naturalist takes the division to favour him, arguing that a complete account of emergence renders justification a residue. Normative philosophy answers by invoking the is-ought gap, and thereby concedes the point it means to deny. This paper argues the reverse. A sanction cannot be distinguished from an aggression by any description of the sanctioner's behaviour, the difference being a fact about the configuration in which the act stands. Normative vocabulary therefore appears in the explanans of any emergence mechanism, and a correct account of emergence requires normative philosophy in place of eliminating it. The paper develops a positional account of normative emergence within the Generative Relational Being framework. Composition of relations generates loci occupied by no participant, and bindingness is borne at such a locus and by no relatum. The dyad is accordingly pre-normative. Power is asymmetry, of which interpretive asymmetry is the kind whose monopolization forecloses correction of the others. Generativity is the condition under which valuing occurs and is not itself a value, so the demand to justify it is malformed, and five conditions of normative generation are stated as conditions and not as evaluative criteria. Non-exploitation is derived in place of being imported: a configuration providing no locus at which a participant's excess can register has foreclosed the source of its own further generation, so that the distinction between generation and extraction becomes internal to the mechanism. As a preliminary discussion paper, its aim is to establish the mechanism and to name what the framework must next supply: a composition rule, an account of scale, and an epistemic criterion by which a configuration might determine from within whether it generates or extracts.