ABSTRACT
This chapter formulates the problem of structural heteronomy, a new ethical problem that concerns understanding. As Robert Brandom has shown, concept-users can assess and revise the concepts they use, and thus exercise autonomy over the understanding the concepts articulate. This can be done by assessing and revising the rules of inference that, in part, constitute the content of the concepts in question. Assuming the perspective of autonomy as the ethical ideal, we are ethically required to thus govern ourselves also in the domain of understanding, besides the determination of the will in moral psychology. However, the regress of rules shows that conceptual norms are by default implicit in a discursive practice, indeed that it is structurally necessary for concept-use to rest on a background of a dispositional, as opposed to representational, understanding of the relevant norms. The problem of structural heteronomy follows: we must always rely on some conceptual norms that are implicit and, as such, defy rational control, but we are ethically required to make such norms explicit as rules of inference that increase autonomy over the concepts and our own understanding.
