Abstract

Agency and the Foundations of Ethics is an ambitious, engaging, and challenging book.1 The foundational problem of ethics, Paul Katsafanas tells us at the outset, is providing a justification of morality’s authority, one that can fend off skepticism. Constitutivism undertakes to do just that, by giving an account of the nature of action in terms of some constitutive aim, which will at once vindicate the authority and illuminate the substance of practical normativity. Such a strategy is, Katsafanas argues, uniquely poised to succeed in providing a foundation for ethics, but it has so far failed to deliver. We thus need a new and improved version, and that is precisely what Katsafanas offers: a...