NORMATIVE FORCE AND NORMATIVE FREEDOM: HUME AND KANT, BUT NOT HUME VERSUS KANT Peter Railton Abstract Our notion of normativity appears to combine, in a way difficult to understand but seemingly familiar from experience, elements of force and freedom. On the one hand, a normative claim is thought to have a kind of compelling authority; on the other hand, if our respecting it is to be an appropriate species of respect, it must not be coerced, automatic, or trivially guaranteed by defi- nition. Both Hume and Kant, I argue, looked to aesthetic experi- ence as a convincing example exhibiting this marriage of force and freedom, as well as showing how our judgment can come to be properly attuned to the features that constitute value. This image of attunement carries over into their respective accounts of moral judgment. The seemingly radical difference between their moral theories may be traceable not to a different conception of normativity, but to a difference in their empirical psychological theories – a difference we can readily spot in their accounts of aesthetics. Introduction ‘Normativity’ is, for better or worse, the chief term we philoso- phers seem to have settled upon for discussing some central but deeply puzzling phenomena of human life. We use it to mark a distinction, not between the good and the bad (or between the right and the wrong, the correct and the incorrect), but rather between the good-or-bad (or right-or-wrong, . . .), on the one hand, and the actual, possible, or usual, on the other. Ethics, aes- thetics, epistemology, rationality, semantics – all these areas of philosophical inquiry draw us into a discussion of normativity. And they do so not because we philosophers import this notion into our inquiries, but because – sometimes rather belatedly – we discover it there whether we went looking for it or not. I said ‘for better or worse’ because, while it is useful to bring these various normative phenomena together, the term ‘normativ- ity’ itself bears the stamp of but one aspect of such phenomena:  Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Ratio (new series) XII 4 December 1999 0034–0006  Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999