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Joseph Heath's avatar

In the passages you cite, I am using the word normative as a synonym for "moral." (So if you go through and substitute the word "moral" for "normative" you see what I'm saying.) "Normative" in that sense means "how things ought to be". It is the opposite of "descriptive," which means "how things are." The fact that my substack post contains, in the first paragraph, reference to two very technical works of academic Marxism, one of them written in German, suggests that the intended audience consisted of people likely to be familiar with this vocabulary.

For what it's worth, the reason that I used the term "normative" and not the more familiar term "moral" is that a lot of people involved in the debates I was discussing insist that "justice" is not the same as "morality." So we often use the word "normative" as a catch-all term to describe anything having to do with values, ethics, morality, justice, laws, etc.

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Anti-Hip's avatar

My recollection from college philosophy and economics:

-- positive - what is (facts)

-- normative - what should be (opinions) - That's why "moral" could work for some people as a substitute.

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