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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books The Varieties of Normativity: an Essay On Social Ontology V.

On Robust Normativity In spite of the fact that Hart cares about legal institutions, that Rawls cares about political institutions, and that Searle cares about social institutions, they, and the legions who have followed in their footsteps, have all avoided addressing the challenge encapsulated in Raphael’s charge of triviality - the challenge that their respective logical analyses tell us “virtually nothing” about the normativity that is interwoven in the fabric of institutions of the various non-game-related types referred to in the foregoing.

For aside from the sorts of normative demands to which secondary rules, practice rules, and constitutive rules give rise, there exist in law, politics and society other types of demands which are similarly non-conventional. Each of us believes that he has an obligation to respect other human beings; each of us believes that he has an obligation to apologize to those we might have wronged.

These beliefs do not depend for their existence on any promises we have made, and neither do the associated obligations. Each of us believes, similarly, that intentional wrongdoing ought to be blamed more severely than unintentional wrongdoing; each of us believes that wrongdoers ought to be blamed. These views, again, are clearly normative, and they do not depend for their existence on any promises or contracts.

We believe (with Searle) that a minimum dose of realism is necessary for any sane philosophy.[^38] Moreover, (also with Searle) we understand realism as an ontological thesis: “realism … is not a theory of truth, it is not a theory of knowledge, and it is not a theory of language”, and Searle himself has recently admitted, that “if one insists on a pigeonhole, one could say that realism is an ontological theory: it says that there exists a reality totally independent of our representations”.[^39] Yet Searle avoids the discussion of realism as pertains to the dimension of moral normativity.

Indeed at crucial junctures Searle shuns ontology entirely.