118 Maarten Franssen
person has a compelling or conclusive reason to do Z, or that, taking into account all
reasons the person has for or against the doing of Z, the balance of reasons pleads for
doing Z.^19
It is the concept of a “reason,” or rather the relation of being a reason for something,
that is thought central and primitive. Other concepts spanning up the normative domain,
such as “good,” “bad,” “right,” “wrong,” or “ought to,” are at a minimum candidates for
being defi ned in terms of reasons. The overall notion of the “normative” has itself been
characterized in terms of reasons in the following way by Dancy (2006a): a normative
fact is the second-order fact that another fact (usually, but perhaps not necessarily, a fi rst-
order fact) is a reason for someone to do one of the things that one can have reasons for,
that is, to believe something, to aim for something, or to act in a certain way. This is very
broad. Elsewhere, however, I have shown (Franssen 2006) that this can be applied to
characterize the normative dimension—normative in the present sense related to what
people can believe, aim for, or do—of technical artifacts.
On this account, the functions of technical artifacts can be shown to be related directly
to reasons for a special form of acting, that is, using some object as an intermediate to
achieve a particular goal. On this account, the evaluative claims such as “x is a good F-er”
or “x is a poor F-er” can be interpreted as truly normative statements if they are taken to
express not the fi rst-order fact that the performance of x can be placed somewhere on an
ordinal scale of performances of (possible) tokens of the (functional) type but the second-
order fact that because of the fi rst-order fact that x has certain physical features, which
determine its performance relative to the performance of other tokens of the functional
type X, if someone has a reason for F-ing, then this person has a reason to use x for F-
ing.^20 Or to use a paradigm rather than abstract language, “This is a good knife” expresses
the second-order fact that because of its physical characteristics, if someone has a reason
for cutting something, this person has a reason to use this knife for that task. For malfunc-
tion, by a similar but shorter account, “This is a malfunctioning knife” expresses the
second-order fact that because of the physical characteristics this knife has, which make
it the case that it lacks the capacity to cut adequately, one has a reason not to use this knife
for cutting. The reference to the reason that one must have for cutting in the fi rst place is
now redundant.
This account brings out the normativity associated with the functionality of technical
artifacts only at the most general level. It goes no further than claiming that the charac-
teristics given to artifacts by their designers present us with some reason to use the arti-
facts, except when these characteristics are absent, notwithstanding their design, in which
case we have a reason to avoid them. Nothing is said on how good or strong such reasons
are. It is defi nitely false that the statement “This is a good knife” can be read as expressing
that anyone who has a reason for cutting something should use this knife to do it, since
there may be a better knife available. Nor can “This is a poor knife”—even in the case of
an extremely poor knife—be interpreted as expressing that one should not use this knife