Habitual Ethics?

Sylvie Delacroix is the Jeff Price Chair in Digital Law at King's College London, UK.

I. What is a Habit?
II. The Habitual and the Ethical: Unhappy Marriage?
III. Why Does ‘Habitual Ethics’ Matter Today?
IV. Chapters Overview

PART I
HABIT AND INDIVIDUAL AGENCY
1. From Facts to Norms (and Back)
I. Defining ‘the Natural’ (and the Role of Science)
A. When ‘the Natural’ is Restricted to that which is the Result of Elementary Forces
B. Inhabited Nature
II. The ‘Motivation Problem’
III. ‘Following a Rule’
A. ‘Primitive Appropriateness’
B. Dispositions, the Possibility of Mistakes and ‘Primitive Inappropriateness’

2. Habit and Skill Acquisition
I. Skilful Coping and Skilful Action
II. The Structure of the Environment and its Impact on Skill Acquisition
A. The ‘Skilled Intuitions’ Stance
B. The ‘Heuristics and Bias’ Stance
C. Explaining Divergent Stances on Intuitive Expertise by Reference to the Structure of the Environment
III. ‘Tacit’ Learning Attitude(s)
A. Automaticity and Availability to Conscious Awareness
B. Automaticity and Adaptability
i. External Goal Adaptability
ii. Adaptability of One’s Self-understanding

3. Routine and Rigidified Habits
I. Teleologically Indeterminate Professional Encounters
A. The Situational Vulnerability at the Heart of the Lay–Professional Encounter
B. The Particular Responsibility that Stems from Lay Situational Vulnerability
II. Humility and ‘Sophia’: Pre-Conditions of Habit Plasticity?
III. Obstacles to Habit Plasticity in Professional Contexts
A. Case Study
B. The Emotional and Physiological Costs of Habit Reversal
C. Balancing Model Stability and Habit Plasticity within the Learning Process

4. Growing Out of the Habitual
I. Growing Out of the Habitual: Habit versus Reason
II. When ‘Reason’ Shields Us from Normative Significance

5. Growing within the Habitual
I. Responsiveness to Reasons
A. Why ‘Reasons’?
B. The Gap between ‘Reasons’ and Normative Significance
II. Habit and the Work of Attention
A. GP Consultation with Seemingly ‘Peripheral’ Child Safeguarding Concerns
B. Imposing a Mental Defence in Criminal Law
C. Seeing Past Habitual Salience and the Role of Personal Encounters
III. Responsiveness to the Other: A Forgotten Capability?
A. Selective Responsiveness and the Possibility of Immanent Critique
B. A Pervasive – Yet Optimistic – ‘Mode of Being Ethical’?
C. Compromised ‘Forms of Life’

PART II
COLLECTIVE HABITS AND MORAL TRANSFORMATIONS
6. Law and Habits
I. The Narrow View: The Step from ‘the Pre-Legal to the Legal’
A. Organically Grown Customs versus ‘Constitutive’ Practices
B. Addressing a ‘Defective’ Form of Social Control Through ‘Official’ Rules
C. Accounting for the Emergence of Law as a Normative Phenomenon
II. Non-Deliberative Components within a Genealogy of Legal Normativity
A. Habit Hostility
B. Habit Ambivalence
i. The Wittgensteinian Take on ‘Custom’
ii. The Weberian Narrative
C. From Collective Patterns of Behaviour to Legal Norms
III. The Types of Habits Law May Foster
A. Qualitatively Different Habits
B. Division of Normative Labour and its Moral Risks
C. Legal Institutional Structures, Alienation Risks and Habit Rigidification

7. Algorithmic Habits and Social Transformations
I. Inferred Traits and Optimisation Endeavours
A. Profile-based, Personalised Optimisation Tools
B. Manipulation as Hidden and Non-deliberative Interventions
II. Precluded Transformations: Alienation Through Reification
A. Narrowing of Imaginative Horizons
B. Habitats and their Inherent Narrowing of Encountered Worldviews
C. Habitat Co-construction and the Possibility of Experimentation
III. Ensemble Contestability
A. Case Study
B. From ‘Passive’ and Individualist Explanations to Ensemble Contestability
IV. Bottom-up Data Trusts