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Kevin Mulligan has argued that intuitionism about values is a powerful tool to explain, among other things, "the distinction between what I ought to do and what I must do (practical necessity)" (Mulligan, Leben mit Gefühlen: Emotionen, Werte und ihre Kritik, pp 141–164, 2009). The distinction concerns the difference between moral norms, conceived of as external reasons of acting, and personal norms, conceived of as internal reasons. The kind of intuition the argument relies on is affective and characterized in terms of "being struck by value". One crucial assumption is that affectivity subsumes epistemic states (non-reactive knowledge) and motivational states (reactive emotions). Value feeling is presented as a kind of non-propositional knowledge that can and often does acquaint us with what we value most, with the inner norms or "vocations' that constitute the person we are. The aim of the present paper is to explore to what extent this specific view on personhood that links the knowledge-emotion-value relation of affectivity (KEV) to a personal property of inner normativity (IN) can modify or improve theories of so-called social persons or plural persons. In a first step, I will outline the criteria established for "plural persons' by their advocates. On the basis of these criteria, I will then discuss some reasons for the claim that "plural persons' do have inner norms of the kind mentioned before. In a third step, I intend to show how the KEVIN account interferes with some of the criteria for "plural persons", mainly because of its emphasis on affective knowledge. I conclude that accepting KEVIN either leads to abandoning the claim that plural persons have inner norms or requires the criteria for plural persons to be modified.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-05146-8_5

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