Normative Behaviourism and Action-Guidance: The Challenge of the Climate Crisis

This article examines the normative potential and limitations of Normative Behaviourism (NB) as a method for political theory, paying particular attention to its capacity to orient political action under conditions of radical contextual change. NB, as developed by Jonathan Floyd, grounds normative knowledge in historically expressed political preferences, particularly through acts such as crime and insurrection, distancing itself from mentalist approaches that rely on philosophers’ abstract reasoning. While recent critiques have raised concerns about NB’s susceptibility to complacency towards the status quo, Floyd has responded by introducing experimental tools to strengthen the method and to demonstrate its progressive potential. Building on this debate, the article advances a different line of critique: even if a progressive version of NB is possible, the method may fail to provide adequate normative guidance in moments of severe political crisis, when urgent reforms are required and expressed preferences are distorted or unavailable. Using climate change as a case study, the argument highlights how collective action problems, causing a gap between expressed and hidden political preferences, undermine NB’s orientative function. In such contexts, the reliance on past behaviour, social experiments, or inspiration from previous institutional principles proves insufficient to address unprecedented challenges. The article argues that NB must adapt both its sources of normative knowledge and its style of practical reasoning if it is to remain relevant in circumstances of radical political change. Specifically, it suggests broadening the scope of normatively relevant behaviours to include new forms of political contestation and incorporating unsystematic, case-sensitive reasoning akin to that found in political realism. In this way, NB could overcome its tendency towards normative silence in times of crisis and better equip political theory to respond to pressing global challenges such as climate change.