On norms | Prof Robert Brandom

"I'd like to ask you one question with regards to norms if I may. If I think of the practice in Ireland, if we can imagine it, of making same sex marriage, something that is forbidden, and then we come to the conclusion that although this is the practise enforced, we wish to recommend a change that we think is more just. So then the first case could be described as sociological, it is normative but only in the sense of reporting, lets say the cyclic character of the practice in play, but we ourselves are raising the higher order question of whether this practice should carry on in this way, so we make a claim it is faulty in this or that respect, now is that also to be characterised in the same description you gave, or is there a distinction on your own account, shall I say it's a sociological analysis and what might we call, what I would call the agentive in the normative sense, this being the type of question that is usually thought of when one thinks of normativity in the ethical or religious context, what would you say about that?"
'From German Idealism to American Pragmatism - and back': Keynote lecture of 2015 Summer Institute in American Philosophy delivered by Robert Brandom (University of Pittsburgh). June 12, 2015.
Kant’s most basic idea, the axis around which all his thought turns, is that what distinguishes exercises of judgment and intentional agency from the performances of merely natural creatures is that judgments and actions are subject to distinctive kinds of normative assessment. Judgments and actions are things we are in a distinctive sense responsible for.
The classical pragmatist versions of naturalism and empiricism fit together much better than the traditional and logical empiricist versions that preceded and succeeded them. Far from being in tension, they complement and mutually support one another. Both the world and our knowledge of it are construed on a single model: as mutable, contingent products of statistical selectional-adaptational processes that allow order to pop to the surface and float in a sea of random variability. Both nature and experience are to be understood in terms of the processes by which relatively stable constellations of habits arise and sustain themselves through their interactions with an environment that includes a population of competing habits.
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Questioners audio is almost inaudible up to 1:48.
Reading transcript recommended.

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sittlich*, not cyclic, in the question transcript