Metanormative Contextualism and Normative Uncertainty

Abstract

Debates over metanormative contextualism—the thesis that the semantic value of normative “ought” claims varies with conversational context—have reached an impasse when evaluated through cases of descriptive uncertainty. While contextualist, relativist, and invariantist frameworks can each account for competing “ought” claims made under empirical ignorance, this stalemate dissolves when examining practical deliberation under normative uncertainty. In scenarios where an agent is uncertain between competing moral theories and adopts a compromise course of action, the agent’s reasoning relies on an initial “ought” claim derived from candidate first-order normative principles to justify a second “ought” claim tailored to normative uncertainty. Rival semantic accounts fail to explain the rational coherence of this reasoning. Relativism cannot identify a single context of assessment from which both the premise and the conclusion can be endorsed simultaneously, rendering the deliberative inference unintelligible. Invariantist approaches face either an infinite regress of posited senses, unviable wide-scope conditionals, or uncharitable attributions of blatant incoherence. By contrast, metanormative contextualism accommodates such deliberation by positing a contextually determined shift in the operative normative standards across utterances, thereby securing the semantic consistency and internal rationality of reasoning under normative uncertainty. – AI-generated abstract.