ABSTRACT
Ascriptivists such as H.L.A. Hart, J.L. Austin, and Joel Feinberg defended a conceptual link between agency and normativity by putting forward the thesis that the attribution of an action is also an attribution of responsibility. This thesis has been heavily criticized for not providing an accurate model of what is signified by action statements and attributions of responsibility. In this chapter, I explore two ways of supporting it philosophically. The first is based on the constitutivist view, developed by Philippa Foot and Michael Thompson, according to which the concept of agency is dependent on the concept of life form. The second is founded on the Hegelian idea of recognition as part of the human form of life. According to this second idea, recognition shows how the sociality of agency creates the conditions for normativity. It is argued that the sum of both strategies makes it possible to explain some basic normative notions. The result is a weak social constitutivism that shows how the interpersonal meaning of our actions makes us responsible for them and allows us to build the normative landscape.
