RIP Seminar 25 October 2017

Åsa Burman (Stockholm University)

Telic Power

Analyses of institutional facts and their deontic powers is central in the field of social ontology. In this talk, I argue that deontic power is too narrow to capture important dimensions of the social world, eg, gender relations. I introduce another category of power – telic power – which has hitherto been overlooked. To explain telic power, I distinguish between two types of normativity in the social world: deontic normativity concerns what we can demand of each other and teleological normativity concerns ideals that we try to live up to and others expect us to live up to.

For example, some functions of being a woman are defined in terms of a purpose or goal (teleological), rather than in terms of rights and obligations (deontic), which means there is an ideal measuring how well we live up to this purpose. This ideal provides agents with reasons for action, eg, a woman (sometimes) perceives she ought to live up to a certain ideal and others are expecting her to do so. I provide a definition of telic power and argue for its explanatory value by showing how reasons for action deriving from telic power can both come into conflict with as well as reinforce reasons for action deriving from deontic power.