Constructivism as a distinct metaethical position has garnered significant interest in recent years due in part to Sharon Street’s theory, Humean metaethical constructivism. According to Street’s account, practical reasons are constructed by individual valuing entities. On this view, then, whether a particular reason applies to an individual is completely contingent upon what that individual actually values. In this article I argue for the recognition of multiple sources of practical reasons and values, including both individuals and communities. The resulting view, which (...) I call layered constructivism, strengthens the constructivist project and begins to resolve some of the common critiques leveled against Street’s Humean constructivism. To begin, layered constructivism retains many of the benefits of Street’s approach, such as providing a naturalistic picture of normativity and maintaining a close tie between practical reasons and individual motivation. Moreover, the inclusion of collective sources of normativity and the importance of the resulting values for individuals is supported by recent empirical research on norms. Layered constructivism can also respond to the common concerns that Humean constructivism fails to adequately account for the immense influence our social lives have on our normative reasons and values, and that it entails an objectionable level of contingency. Finally, acknowledging the existence of differently constructed reasons helps us make sense of the pervasive human experience of navigating a variety of seemingly incommensurable normative reasons. (shrink)

In The Sources of Normativity, Korsgaard argues for what can be called “The Universality of Humanity Claim” (UHC), according to which valuing humanity in one’s own person entails valuing it in that of others. However, Korsgaard’s reliance on the claim that reasons are essentially public in her attempt to demonstrate the truth of UHC has been repeatedly criticized. I offer a sentimentalist defense, based on Adam Smith’s moral philosophy, of a qualified, albeit adequate, version of UHC. In particular, valuing my (...) humanity, understood as (my awareness of) my perspective and the reasons determined from within it, entails valuing your humanity, understood as (your awareness of) your perspective and the reasons determined from within it. Given Korsgaard’s emphasis on the publicity of reasons in her argument for UHC, I also discuss the role of reasons in my account. I argue that the relative weights of (at least some of) an agent’s reasons are determined from within a shared evaluative point of view, namely, the standpoint of what Smith calls “the impartial spectator.” These reasons have normative authority over and constrain the agent’s private reasons, that is, those that are determined from within her own particular evaluative point of view. (shrink)

Humean constructivists object to Kantian constructivism that by endorsing the constitutivist strategy, which grounds moral obligations in rational agency, this position discounts the impact of cont...

We argue that Reasons Fundamentalism, as defended by T.M. Scanlon, faces two important difficulties—one ontological, the other epistemological—namely the ontological proliferation problem and the reliability challenge. We suggest that formal constructivism can avoid these difficulties, and that Scanlon would do well to adopt it. We also show that Scanlon’s three main objections to this view depend either on a misunderstanding of what formal constructivism is or on a question-begging argument in favour of realism.

When it comes to the metaethical task of explaining and making sense of what it is that we are doing while doing ethics, the subject of moral objectivity occupies an important and special place within that task. Thus, it is often agreed that being able to explain and justify the objective features of common moral practice is one of if not the most important task for any metaethical theory to undertake. In this dissertation, I tackle the issue of ethical objectivity (...) on behalf of metaethical constructivism. To be more precise, my aim is to make plausible, strengthen, and defend the constructivist original contribution to contemporary metaethics by developing a novel constructivist account on the objectivity of ethics. While the account that I develop herein presents a novel and independent approach to the subject of moral objectivity on behalf of constructivism, it also places itself between the two other positions within the constructivist camp that openly strive to secure ethical objectivity – namely Kantianism on the one hand, and the more recently developed Humean objectivist view on the other. It is for the latter reason that I call my own view the hybrid view. (shrink)