De las normas como compromisos prácticos y de la locura como incumplimiento de tales compromisos

Abstract

From a post-metaphysical point of view, and making use of arguments provided mainly by Ludwig Wittgenstein, I will try to endorse the following thesis in this paper: that norms in general receive their normative character only from the responsibility that is attributed to each agent when they act in a social context. This context is full, thus, of normative commitments as its sine qua non. Since (in post-metaphysics) these commitments cannot co-respond to any other (metaphysical) instance apart from the social agents, we have here a kind of commitments very near to what traditionally has been conceived as an ethical-political notion of responsibility. A rule does not request us to fulfil it, but we humans do request others to do so; if a rule has not been obeyed, we ask for accounts of its unfulfillment, or apply different kinds of measures against the violator. In fact, if someone fails to fulfil an important rule, it is even possible to separate them from our life in society, pronouncing them to be absolutely «evil» or persistently «mad». When we realize in such a way that the power of rules dwells only on this sort of mutual responsibility, a new rule (a rule of tolerance) can become reasonable for us: the rule of tolerating the possibility of other commitments with different rules in alien contexts that have generated other responsibilities different from ours.