Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Topoi https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-022-09795-0 Making us Autonomous: The Enactive Normativity of Morality Cassandra Pescador Canales 1  · Laura Mojica 2,3 Accepted: 21 January 2022 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2022 Abstract Any complete account of morality should be able to account for its characteristic normativity; we show that enactivism is able to do so while doing justice to the situated and interactive nature of morality. Moral normativity primarily arises in interpersonal interaction and is characterized by agents’ possibility of irrevocably changing each other’s autonomies, that is, the possibility of harming or expanding each other’s autonomy. We defend that moral normativity, as opposed to social and other forms of normativity, regulates and, in some cases, constitutes this very possibility. Agents are thus morally responsible for caring about their own and others’ autonomies in interaction. In our conception, moral normativity is embodied, situated, and deeply afective, and is constituted in social practices and maintained in interaction. We identify at least two necessary conditions for moral normativity to arise as a social practice. The frst is our embodied constitution as living beings who are precarious and therefore vulnerable and in need of interaction with others and with the environment. The second is our sociolinguistic nature, which allows us to exponentially expand our possibilities for action and normatively distinguish among them. We fnish by drawing a distinction between moral character and the moral content of interactions, which allows us to universally recognize the ethical dimensions of all human interaction while doing justice to the situated character of morals. Keywords Moral normativity · Ethics · Cognition · Autonomy · Heteronomy · Phenomenology 1 Introduction In recent years, research has been growing on ethics 1 and moral cognition from an embodied and enactive perspective. Afective, interactive, and phenomenological dimensions of ethics and morality have been given attention, and enactive accounts of each have been advanced (Colombetti and Tor‑ rance 2009; Loaiza 2019; Urban 2015). Even so, the way in which the normativity specifc to ethics might be under‑ stood under the enactive approach has not yet been explic‑ itly delineated. This matter is particularly pressing because any complete account of ethics and moral cognition should be able to account for their characteristic normative nature, as opposed to other normative human behaviors, such as following social conventions or satisfying individual bio‑ logical needs. This situation feeds the internal and external criticisms of embodied approaches that point to the lack of specifcity of the enactive account of normativity. This paper attempts to show how the normativity specifc to morality might be understood using an enactive approach. We argue that moral normativity fundamentally arises from our vulnerability in interaction, that is, given our pre‑ carious and embodied nature, we are intrinsically vulnerable to change, to being changed, and to die. This constitutive vulnerability implies that the possibility of being irrevo‑ cably changed is always present in the interaction between human agents, as well as in the design of our objects and infrastructures and our engagement with them. There is an intrinsically moral dimension in these interactions and * Cassandra Pescador Canales cascanales@gmail.com Laura Mojica laura.mojica460@gmail.com 1 Posgrado en Filosofía de la Ciencia, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), CDMX 04510, México 2 División Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Cuajimalpa (UAM‑C), CDMX 05300, México 3 Embodied Cognitive Science Unit, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), Okinawa, Japan 1 We understand ethics as a normative notion that guides the morally right course of action, which concerns promoting autonomous life and its prosperity, i.e., to take care of the autonomies of the agents. Under this defnition, the terms “ethic” and “moral” are interchange‑ able in many instances, which is in line with the usage of these terms in the enactive literature on the topic.