James Lenman & Yonatan Shemmer - Constructivism in Practical Philosophy [1 ebook - PDF] (Philosophy)

English | ISBN: 0199609837 | 2012 | PDF | 261 pages | 6 MB

This volume presents twelve original papers on constructivism--some sympathetic, others critical--by a distinguished group of moral philosophers. "Kantian constructivism holds that moral objectivity is to be understood in terms of a suitably constructed social point of view that all can accept. Apart from the procedure of constructing the principles of justice, there are no moral facts." So wrote John Rawls in his highly influential 1980 Dewey lectures "Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory.

Since then there has been much discussion of constructivist understandings, Kantian or otherwise, both of morality and of reason more generally. Such understandings typically seek to characterize the truth conditions of propositions in their target domain in maximally metaphysically unassuming ways, frequently in terms of the outcome of certain procedures or the passing of certain tests, procedures or tests that speak to the distinctively practical concerns of deliberating human agents living together in societies. But controversy abounds over the interpretation and the scope as well as the credibility of such constructivist ideas. The essays collected here reach to the heart of this contemporary philosophical debate, and offer a range of new approaches and perspectives.

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Constructivism is by now a prominent position in the field of philosophical theorizing about the sources and nature of normativity, apparently jockeying with more entrenched meta-ethical rivals such as expressivism and realism. Taking inspiration from Rawls' pioneering Dewey Lectures, "Kantian Constructivism in Moral Philosophy", constructivists seek to account for the objectivity and authority of (some region of) normativity by showing it to arise from, or be "constructed" within, the practical point of view of the agent or community of agents. Often, although not always, this takes the form of specifying a procedure, a device of representation, through which normative principles may be derived from the relevant conception of the person or community of persons.

The twelve authors of this helpful anthology represent a wide variety of positions on constructivism, ranging from believers of various stripes to perplexed and outright skeptics. The essays presuppose familiarity with the burgeoning literature on constructivism, so the volume will best serve those doing research or offering graduate courses. I will focus on three broad topics that cut across several of the essays: (1) the contrast between constructivism and expressivism, (2) the proper scope or ambition of a constructivist theory, and (3) the contest between Humean and Kantian constructivisms.

Let us call a theory "realist" if it accounts for normativity by appeal to a fixed and independent order of normative facts or reasons. Constructivism shares with expressivism an opposition to realism so understood. Expressivists tend to be motivated in this opposition by a desire to make normativity safe for a naturalistic understanding of the world. They set out to explain how normatively-ladenlanguage and thought could come to exhibit the logical and semantic properties it does without appeal to an independent order of moral facts. Some constructivists, by contrast, are immune to such naturalistic anxieties. In any case, their primary opposition to realism arises from the thought that realism cannot explain the practical authority of norms, and their goal is to explain how a normative order can be binding on us. As is so often the case in philosophy, constructivism and expressivism, setting out from different questions, in pursuit of different aims, traverse what is pretty clearly the same terrain with apparently conflicting results. Given their different starting points and aims, the difficult question then arises how the resulting positions are related.

As a whole, the anthology is something that anyone who works on constructivism or meta-ethics more generally will probably want to own. Some of the individual essays are worth the entire price of admission. On the other hand, the anthology is somewhat unfocused and highly specialized. One striking absence from its pages is the voice of Korsgaard. She is the direct or indirect target of several essays, and provides the inspiration and animus for the discussion throughout. This absence may not have been for lack of trying, but this reader felt it.
MsSVig