Norms and Explanation of Action

It seems obvious that the mere acknowledgment of a norm cannot explain the agent’s undertaking what the norm prescribes; Steglich-Petersen makes the point as there is no strong relation between normative judgments and motivation from such judgments. To explain why someone does what a norm prescribes, according to Steglich-Petersen, we need to know not only that they acknowledge the norm, but that they are motivated to follow it. I will argue that this apparent truism is false in the case of constitutive norms. In a constitutive norm, the action specified in the correctness condition is constitutive of what is governed by the norm. I will focus on the constitutive norm of belief to argue that the mere acknowledgment of the norm suffices to explain the transparency of belief. That is to say, I explain why a subject who deliberates whether to believe that p thereby, in virtue of acknowledgment of the belief norm, deliberates whether p.