According to the legal-grammatical picture of constitutivism, the constitutive standards of a kind x carry an existential threat: abiding by them is necessary for being an x at all. But this seems to leave no room for defective x’s—the bad-x problem. A functional model escapes this problem, yet it fits structural rational agency poorly. I argue that a suitably complex legal-grammatical model—one attentive to how legal enterprises are materially realized—makes room for genuinely internal violations: intelligible fouls, correctable from a dynamic kernel of perfect compliance. The existential threat survives, yet genuine defect finds a place within it.

Constitutivists say authoritative practical norms are grounded in the nature of action. But how are they so grounded? I argue that there is a deep, under-appreciated division among constitutivists on this point. “Transcendental” constitutivism says all rational agents are committed to practical norms on pain of inconsistency. “Functional” constitutivism says that complying with practical norms is necessary to realize the function of action. These views come apart, and the distinction between them has important implications for both how constitutivists should defend their view and how they should respond to the most popular objections to it: the “shmagency” and “bad action” problems.

Non-naturalists claim that normative properties are sui generis, attitude-independent, and irreducible to natural properties. A common objection is that although we shape our lives around normative properties, non-naturalism rules out any plausible explanation of how this is possible. Non-naturalism seems to imply that we are hopelessly alienated from the normative. Our goal here is to better understand this worry and use constitutivist resources to develop a novel response. The basic thought is that we are constituted—as deeply social agents—to be gripped by normative properties. So while our constitution does not ground normativity, it grounds our non-alienation from it.

Recent decades have witnessed sharp disagreement about the character of Kant’s metaethical position. Constructivists have read him as thinking of moral value, against the example of his rationalist predecessors, as constructed by acts of the human mind. Realists have read him as thinking of such value, in the company of these predecessors, as constituted prior to human nature altogether. I argue that both camps have mischaracterized Kant’s position, in particular as it contrasts with that of the rationalists, and that the correct characterization depends on an underappreciated distinction between two forms of constitutivism. While the rationalists follow a medieval precedent in thinking that the human will is by nature the power to love and pursue a good constituted prior to it, so that they are aptly described as endorsing a heteronomist constitutivist conception of the relation of the will to the good, Kant defines the good in terms of the will as the object to which its internal standard directs it, thereby embracing an autonomist constitutivism.

I offer an account of how a constitutivist metaphysics of capacities grounds a unique interpretation of propositions about the nature of our action, focusing on propositions about acting under the guise of the good and acting from practical knowledge. I then show that these interpretations can not only explain the possibility of cases often taken as counterexamples to these propositions but can also explain why those cases are odd or not paradigmatic exercises of the relevant capacity.

This essay develops a disability-based epistemic challenge to nature-first constitutivism, a family of views on which standards of excellence and defect for (human) agents are grounded in the nature of (human) agency. The core idea of the challenge is that various culturally prevalent negative assumptions about disability, along with related phenomena such as disability invisibility, introduce ideological distortions into our assessment of what (human) capacities for agency and the associated excellences and “defects” are like, occluding from view the worthwhile hypothesis that some disabled modes of agency might be compatible with agential excellence. Such distortions may be avoidable, but only by seriously interrogating the assumptions about disability that underpin them, as well as specific disabled modes of agency. I develop this challenge in detail by focusing on one disability affecting agency: ADHD. I conclude by outlining related metaphysical questions regarding plural forms of agency, situating these questions within the emerging literature on pluralist constitutivism.

Capacity constitutivism is a recent form of constitutivism that seeks to ground normative facts in our capacities as agents and believers. Its epistemic version holds that epistemic normativity, including epistemic reasons, is grounded in our epistemic capacities. The success of this project depends crucially on how those capacities are understood. This paper clarifies the distinctive nature of epistemic capacities by contrasting them with capacities in sports, arts, and games. I then argue that this distinctiveness helps explain why the well-functioning of epistemic capacities can ground genuine normativity, while the well-functioning of other capacities cannot.

Epistemic norms seem to exhibit a substantial normativity in a way that conventional norms or rules of games do not. I argue that we can only allow for this distinction if the epistemic normative domain is not isolated from the broadly practical domain. I contend one cannot have both (a) epistemic purity and (b) substantial normativity. The paper begins bymaking the challenge clear, then lays out three recent attempts to meet this challenge, and argues that they are not successful. It ends by clarifying what is at stake in the debate; what are the concerns if purity is lost?

Ordinary thought and talk accepts epistemic evaluation as genuinely relevant to or bearing on what and how we ought to believe, all things considered. In this article, I treat our pretheoretical commitment to the normative significance of epistemic evaluation as a kind of datum that epistemic theorizing ought not merely accommodate but explain. I argue that familiar versions of two popular sorts of explanations are not well-positioned to fully vindicate our pretheoretical commitment to the genuine normative significance of epistemic evaluation. And I develop an alternative, fully vindicating explanation of this datum.