The Nightlight Principle: Normative Internalism, Anti-Luminosity, and the Limits of Normative Theory

Abstract: Normative internalists and externalists disagree about things like whether, if you ought to do something, it must be that you’re able to tell that you ought to do it. Normative internalism is most naturally defined in a way that requires at least some normative states to be luminous—such that, necessarily, if we’re in them then we can tell that we are. But as no interesting normative states are luminous, I'll propose a next best version of normative internalism. It doesn’t require luminosity, but comes close, and therefore promises to accommodate almost as many internalist intuitions. However, I'll show that this weaker version of normative internalism entails something radical: that the set of all normative facts (facts about what we ought to do, are rational in doing, etc.) can’t be codified. And I'll argue that this isn’t a good enough reason to reject it.