II. Kant's Constructivism

I take Kant's view to be constructivist in at least the following sense: there are truths about what we have reason to do (or how we have reason to act), and those truths are themselves established by the exercise of practical reason. They do not, that is, exist as objects of moral cognition prior to the activity of practical rationality in us as agents. Kant himself makes just this priority claim for the nature of good and evil and their conceptual dependence on the moral law, which is the form of pure practical reason:

The contrasting view would be one in which the order of explanation would be reversed. For Kant, this would mean that the moral law would be understood as undertaking the realization of good conceived as somehow prior to and independent of that law; as Rawls frames the contrast, it would involve an order of moral facts prior to and independent of our investigation of that order, which it is the aim of moral cognition to detect and represent accurately (a view he refers to as “rational intuitionism”).Footnote ⁵ Berys Gaut calls this contrasting view the “recognitional model” of practical reason, and says that it construes practical reason as “the capacity to recognize and be motivated by what has objective value.”Footnote ⁶

Constructivism, as I understand it, may be seen as one form of nonskeptical negation of recognitionalism, as a competing theory about the ontological priority of practical truth and our recognition of it. “Practical philosophy,” Korsgaard says, “is not a matter of finding knowledge to apply in practice. It is rather the use of reason to solve practical problems.”Footnote ⁷ In speaking of “finding knowledge,” she refers to the recognitionalist conception of the role of practical reason which constructivists reject. The model of the normative world and our relation to it is, on the recognitionalist conception, very like the model of the empirical world and our relation to it. We gain empirical knowledge when we are impinged upon by elements of that world which exist prior to our apprehension of them. In a similar way, the recognitionalist sees us as being impinged upon in some fashion by elements of a moral or normative order—again, elements which exist prior to our apprehension of them. By way of contrast, on the constructivist conception our relation to those elements is essentially active, and in some fashion our activity explains the existence of the normative truths themselves.

Kant's primary motivation for constructivism, as I understand him, arises from his conviction that our autonomy as moral agents can be preserved only if we give to ourselves the laws governing our conduct. Autonomy, as Kant makes it out, is the capacity we have for the “determining grounds” of our wills to be self-imposed by the exercise of our reason, rather than imposed on us by natural law, as is the case with nonrational animals.Footnote ⁸ Such autonomous willing is necessary, he maintains, for the very possibility of value in the world. The only unconditional good—and the condition of all the good that there is—is good willing.Footnote ⁹ And good willing is just willing that is determined by reason—by the application of practical rationality to the principles upon which we choose to act.

From this framework follows the nature and extent of Kant's constructivism.Footnote ¹⁰ True claims about how we ought to conduct ourselves are made true in virtue of a certain property of the principles (or maxims) on which we act. That property is, in its most perspicuous formulation, the property of being suitable for willing as universal law. Kant's idea is, first, that to see ourselves as acting—as being the causes of the actions and outcomes we will to bring about in the world—our willings and our actions must be connected in a law-like (that is, uniform) way. We must, that is, act according to laws. For our willings to have moral worth, however, the laws upon which we act must be rational, not merely causal.Footnote ¹¹ Moral worth depends on willing in ways that are determined by reason, and this means that the principles upon which we intend to act—our maxims—can be morally valuable only when they pass a certain test of reason. The test of reason Kant proposes is the most basic and indispensable of rational tests: the bare avoidance of contradiction. Kant says of this test that it is needed “in general for the possibility of any employment of reason…. [It is] the condition of having any reason at all.”Footnote ¹² Impermissible maxims, he tells us, are those that cannot be willed as universal because doing so involves the agent in a contradiction of one sort or another. Thus, the crucial property that establishes the truth of claims about how we ought to act is that of surviving a certain process of rational scrutiny—a process that it is incumbent upon us, as moral agents, to undertake in determining how to act. In this sense, the truth-makers for true normative judgments are constructed by a process we engage in as rational agents. The judgments are true in virtue of their surviving this process, and since the process is one in which our practical rationality is the effective agency, we can be said to have constructed that truth.Footnote ¹³

The contrast to this sort of constructivism—an archetypical recognitional view—might be represented by a proposal we might take from Plato's Republic. Footnote ¹⁴ Suppose there is a Form of the Good—an idea that exists in a world of ideas, and which is the essence of what is common to all things good; their resemblance to (or “participation in”) this Form is the reason we call all these divers things good. On this picture, when a practical judgment is true, what would make it true is X's standing in a certain relation with the Form of the Good.Footnote ¹⁵ Our task as rational agents would be to recognize and respond to that Form as best we could; this is just what rational agency would consist in.

Why does Kant reject recognitionalism and see moral truth as constructed instead? The best place to look for an answer to this question is Kant's response to the only viable alternatives he considers to the autonomy approach: theological voluntarism, and what he calls “the ontological concept of perfection.”Footnote ¹⁶ The latter amounts to one way we might construe the Platonic proposal. Kant's objection is that the requisite concept of perfection is uselessly indeterminate:

Clearly, Kant believes that a focus on a rationally intuited moral ideal must “turn in a circle”—it must inevitably lead back to the very process he has been engaged in, namely, attempting to identify what principle could govern an “absolutely good will.” But why?

Kant might have in mind something like the following.Footnote ¹⁸ In earlier work, Kant considered how our representations come to “agree with” their objects.Footnote ¹⁹ He thinks there are only two ways this is possible: our intellect is either passive or active with respect to its objects, and we can construe the issue as taking the form of a dilemma. First, consider any representation we might have of this “ontological perfection.” It makes no sense to suppose it could be the result of our being acted upon by this object (viz. that we are passively receptive to it). Kant sees no way to understand such receptivity outside the causal order. He identifies passivity with the “world of sense” and activity with the “intellectual world”;Footnote ²⁰ rationality just is a form of activity, so the proposal that we could passively experience a rational intuition of such an object is unintelligible.Footnote ²¹ And the involvement of our sensible natures would entail that the resulting principles of the will must be heteronomous and thus useless as a source of moral authority.

Suppose, then, that we take our intellect to be active in the apprehension of this object (the Good). What we would need to understand, then, would be the content of the representation such an active intellect could have, as an active intellect. But that is precisely the question Kant has been attempting to answer in the second section of the Groundwork. In other words, if we take the only promising branch of the dilemma, we end up just where Kant had brought us before considering the objection that there could be a recognitional alternative to his construal of the good will and autonomy. This, then, is the “circle” Kant is referring to. The alternative is vacuous because it fails to supply the content of such a representation from an analysis of what the active, practical intelligence must be like. Since the activity of the intellect must somehow be essential to the content of the representation itself, constructivism is inescapable.

Now, if Kant's theory succeeds, it yields a constructivist understanding of normative, practical truths—truths about what we ought to do. In an important sense, however, Kant's constructivism does not go “all the way down”: the overall justificatory structure of his account is foundational, resting on considerations that are not themselves constructed.Footnote ²² The argument for the authority of the moral law in the Groundwork is driven, first, by reflection on common-sense intuitions about moral value. Kant sees himself as developing the concept of the good will, “just as it dwells already in the naturally healthy understanding, which does not need to be taught but rather only to be enlightened.”Footnote ²³ Kant thus takes our recognition of the value of the good will as something like a datum, not itself an article of construction. Further, the reality of the instantiation of this concept in us—the fact that it is not merely a “chimera”—is shown by Kant's argument in Section III of the Groundwork that we must see ourselves as under the “idea of freedom,” and hence as subject to the moral law.Footnote ²⁴ In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant famously reverses the direction of this argument and holds that, since we know that we are subject to the moral law, we know that we are free: “[T]he moral law is given, as an apodictically certain fact, as it were, of pure reason, a fact of which we are a priori conscious.”Footnote ²⁵ Thus, while Kant is a constructivist about normative truth, his argument for the account of that truth seems to depend on cognitions that do not seem to have as their objects constructions, but rather antecedent normative facts about our nature and the nature of value. As Rawls suggests,Footnote ²⁶ this constructivism is built upon principles that are not themselves constructed. This structure, to which I shall develop a contrast below, is also characteristic of Kant's constructivist legacy, in Korsgaard's neo-Kantianism, to which I now turn.

III. Korsgaard's Kantian Constructivism

In her early constructivist work in The Sources of Normativity, Korsgaard understood the essential activity of our practical reason in constructing moral truth as a function of the development of practical identities. Footnote ²⁷ These identities are “descriptions under which you value yourself … find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking.”Footnote ²⁸ We see ourselves in certain ways (as child, teacher, lawyer, neighbor, Lutheran, and so on) that shape our conduct, and from these ways of seeing ourselves—from these “practical identities”—flow our obligations and reasons for action. But the fact that we are so constituted that we need reasons to act, and find such reasons in the various practical identities each of us acts from and is obligated by, gives us a further practical identity, to which reflection on the nature and source of obligation leads us. This is our identity as moral beings, our “moral identity” or “humanity,” which Korsgaard understands as tantamount to seeing ourselves as citizens of the Kingdom of Ends on Kant's conception.Footnote ²⁹ Only the recognition of this identity can afford us the sort of reflective success that, Korsgaard argues, our quest for the source of normativity demands.

As Korsgaard acknowledges, however, this argument alone does not deliver all of what morality involves; in particular, it does not deliver the right story about our obligations to others. For that, an additional bit of argument is required, one which denies that it is possible to have reasons only to value one's own humanity without similarly valuing the humanity of others. Korsgaard chides various forms of “neo-Hobbesian” and “neo-Kantian” theories for attempting to begin with “private” reasons and then argue to conclusions that we are committed, by some sort of rational inference, to recognize the humanity of others as a source of “public” reasons.Footnote ³⁰ Instead, she argues—drawing a parallel to Ludwig Wittgenstein's argument that no private meanings are possible—that reasons must be shareable to be reasons.Footnote ³¹ Because they are shareable, if my humanity is to be reason-giving for me, it must be reason-giving for you as well, and of course, on the same grounds, your humanity must be reason-giving to me. Our most essential practical identity establishes something like the Categorical Imperative understood under Kant's Formula of Humanity.

Thus, our activity as moral agents consists in the reflection upon and adoption of these identities, and in our acting on the reasons that emanate from them. However, we have these obligations only in virtue of the identities we endorse through reflection.Footnote ³² In considering an objection from G. A. Cohen, Korsgaard makes clear that it is our activity in endorsing that does the normative work. What, Cohen asks, is an “idealized Mafioso” obligated to do, given that he takes his identity to be that of a loyal soldier for the family, with a code of strength and honor? If he is asked to murder by his paterfamilias, is he thereby obligated to do so?Footnote ³³ Korsgaard bites the bullet in her reply. The Mafioso's obligation is real, she says: “And this is because it is the endorsement, not the explanations and arguments that provide the material for the endorsement, that does the normative work.”Footnote ³⁴ This is an expression of Korsgaard's constructivism: if she were to hold that it is the “explanations and arguments” that do the work, she would be open to the suggestion that, at bottom, her picture is one of agents discovering through reflection normative facts that are there antecedent to their inquiry. And that is the model she rejects. It is only the constructive activity of moral agents that brings into existence normative truth.

But, surely, having to maintain that the Mafioso has any obligation to carry out his repugnant assignments is a high price to pay to maintain constructivism, and Korsgaard appears to have thought better of it. Her later constructivist work (in particular, her “Locke Lectures”) makes little use of the notions of practical identity or endorsement. The emphasis instead is on self-constitution. Her argument (drawing on threads recognizable from The Sources of Normativity) is that our human predicament is such that we cannot help but act; however, action itself is constituted by certain rational norms. “Principles of practical reason,” she argues, “are principles of the unification of agency.”Footnote ³⁵ The option for us is not whether to will badly or well, relative to Kantian imperatives; it is whether or not to constitute ourselves as agents at all.

Korsgaard argues here (as earlier) that particularistic willing—that is, willing that is intended to bind just in a particular case—is impossible.Footnote ³⁶ Either we identify ourselves with the “principle of choice” in deciding to act, or we are not agents at all—we are merely theaters in which a conflict of causal impulses plays out. But particularistic willing, she argues, amounts to collapsing the distinction between these two alternatives. A particularistic will would be one that simply identified with whatever impulse was decisive in a particular case, and thus really ceased to be a will at all. So agency requires willing in ways that are not particularistic. On Korsgaard's view, that entails willing universally; and thus, to constitute ourselves as agents, we must govern ourselves by the Categorical Imperative.

Like Kant, Korsgaard emphasizes that principles of practical rationality are principles governing activity, not bits of knowledge to be apprehended. In his essay “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles,” Lewis Carroll made the point that there is no reducing rules of inference to mere premises; rules of inference govern something we do, and cannot be taken without remainder as truths that themselves form only premises for further inferences.Footnote ³⁷ Korsgaard deploys just this argument to hold that standards of practical rationality cannot obligate us to act. To think of standards in this way—as things that can be objects of knowledge, and carry with them obligations—is to make just the mistake poor Achilles made. We must instead see these principles as constituting agency; to be an agent just is to be governed by principles of practical rationality, in precisely the same way that to have a mind just is to be governed by rules of inference.Footnote ³⁸ Construction, as activity, is what norms of practical rationality and morality are about. Practical truth is constructed, not discovered, because it is activity in accordance with the norms of practical rationality, which are themselves constitutive of agency.

In Korsgaard's work (both earlier and later), as in Kant's, we can see both constructivism and foundations for the enterprise of construction. In The Sources of Normativity, practical agency is characterized (at times, or when conflicts in motivation arise) by a reflective search for a “source of normativity”—an answer to the question of why I must do what I would rather not do. That search can be terminated only by recognizing that the fact that I am searching for such a reason reflects something important about the kind of creature I am, namely, a creature who craves and acts upon reasons. That recognition is a recognition of my “moral identity,” and that is the source of normativity. As in Kant, the justificatory quest ends with the discovery of a more fundamental fact, though in this case a fact about the sort of creature that could seek justification in the first place. In Korsgaard's “Locke Lectures,” the argument is more nearly Kant's own, though here the grounding argument rests on what is constitutive of agency—namely, governing how one acts by the Categorical Imperative. Once I recognize that I am an agent, and that I act, I recognize that doing so is impossible without doing so on principles, and indeed on principles that are (so it is claimed) universally binding. In both versions of the story, the truth-makers for normative practical claims are the objects of construction rather than recognition: they do not exist except through our rational agency. As in Kant, however, the processes of construction involve rationally mandated procedures of deliberation that are successfully concluded only upon recognizing some fact that gives us reason to acknowledge the truths in question. With that framework as our background, I now turn to sketching a form of constructivism that is, by way of contrast, constructivist “all the way down.”

IV. Aristotelian Constructivism

Aristotelian constructivism (AC), as I shall call it, shares with Kant's and Korsgaard's versions of constructivism a comprehensiveness of ambition: it claims to give a general account of the nature of what is true about what we have reason to do that sees such truth as constructed rather than recognized. It differs from its Kantian cousins in the nature and justification of the method of construction which constitutes the truth-makers for normative practical claims.

Kant's view is constructivist in holding that truths about what we ought to do are constructed through a procedure applied to the maxims or principles upon which we propose to act. Korsgaard amends this story to maintain that the procedure of maxim-testing constitutes us as agents, unifies the diverse parts of our “souls,” and thus constructs the “forms” of our selves as the particular persons we are.

In contrast, on AC the enterprise of construction involves not merely procedures but substantive normative judgments. Truth about what we have reason to do is established in light of the aim of living well, where what counts as living well is an object of construction, though not the upshot of any formal procedure. Part of the Aristotelian legacy drawn upon here is the idea in Aristotle (as in Plato and later Hellenistic philosophies) that eudaimonia (happiness) is the ultimate end for us as human beings, both in the psychological sense that it is, in fact, what people want for themselves, and in the normative sense that it is what we have greatest reason to seek in living and acting. As in Kantian constructivism, the heart of AC is the denial that the truth about how to live and act is out there somehow, waiting for us to recognize and act on it, even in the substantive judgments that are incorporated as part of the enterprise of construction.

The role of such judgments has led some to see Aristotle as exemplifying a recognitionalist view. Gaut maintains that Aristotle begins with “an independent account of the conditions under which actions are good, and [derives] from this an account of practical rationality.”Footnote ³⁹ At some points, Aristotle's language does invite a recognitionalist reading—in particular, his description of practical wisdom as a kind of perception.Footnote ⁴⁰ Aristotle's many claims that virtuous action aims at the fine or noble (to kalon) are also not incompatible with such a reading. Though I shall challenge these textual claims briefly in what follows, my main argument to the contrary draws on what I take to be the broader thrust of Aristotle's view.Footnote ⁴¹

The constructivism of Kantian value theory is closely related to its emphasis on the conditional nature of the value of everything but the good will. Constructivism flows from this thesis about value, since the idea just is that value is established through acts of rational willing. Now, less well-known is the widespread endorsement of a similar but distinct conditionality thesis in ancient eudaimonism, and this is the place to begin grasping the constructivism in it. Plato says that in themselves “both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ things are valueless,”Footnote ⁴² and that all the things commonly called good are “possessions of great value to the just and pious, but … to the unjust they are a curse.”Footnote ⁴³ Aristotle also is explicit that their goodness is conditional upon their deployment in accord with virtue: “to the noble and good man things profitable are also noble; but to the many the profitable and the noble do not coincide, for things absolutely good are not good for them as they are for the good man.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Even starker is the Stoic doctrine that things besides virtue are themselves never good; they are at best “indifferents” that may be “preferred” as the objects of wise or virtuous “selection.”Footnote ⁴⁵ On all these accounts, value depends on virtuous agency, and this conditionality of value leads to constructivism in these accounts just as it does in Kant's.Footnote ⁴⁶

According to AC, value or goodness is constructed in the following sense: the reasons we have for undertaking particular actions, realizing particular aims, etc., are not a matter of recognizing or responding to any sorts of normative properties to be found in the objects of our actions. In outline, the idea is that the goodness of such things is conditional upon their contribution to a good human life. The goodness of (say) a cold beer is not anything one recognizes and responds to. Instead, one recognizes and responds to the beer's natural properties (these, of course, are not constructed), and to the extent that, in virtue of its natural properties, it contributes to one's living well, only in that way does it have value—only in that sense is it good. In turn, the goodness of a good life is crucially dependent on the exercise of practical rationality in the right way (that is, on practical wisdom, or phronêsis). This is true both because good lives require the direction of practical wisdom and because only successful practical rationality can determine which lives are genuinely good. Conversely, the criterion for success in practical rationality—practical wisdom—just is the construction of a good life. Neither eudaimonia nor practical wisdom can be specified without essential reference to the other.

Now this story is patently circular, so there is at least a threat of vacuity here. But that threat is empty, for two reasons. First, the circularity at issue is not conceptual, but metaphysical. The claim is not that our concepts of either living well or practical wisdom are mutually dependent. Instead, the claims of AC are substantive claims about what in the world these concepts should rightly be seen as picking out. In each case, what is picked out makes essential reference to the other.

Second, what is picked out is something about which we can learn in other ways. For example, the considerable work in recent years on theories of well-being can contribute to our understanding of what makes human lives good ones, as can common-sense judgments about successes and failures in living.Footnote ⁴⁷ The eudaimonist insight into that work is that such lives cannot be successful except when they recognize the appropriate place for practical wisdom. And as for practical wisdom, there has been no shortage in human history of reflection on what courses of human conduct are wise. Here eudaimonism gives point and focus to that reflection, and can add what we learn about thinking about virtue more generally. These examples are hardly exhaustive, but I trust their point is clear. While we can fully understand neither what a good life is nor what practical wisdom consists in independently, the way they are interdependent does not leave us with a vacuous circularity. This is not to say that there isn't work to be done in expanding the interdependence between eudaimonia and practical wisdom, but there is no reason to assume at the outset that that task is impossible.

In contrast to the structure of Kantian constructivism, the constructivism in AC goes “all the way down,” in that the fundamental normative elements at work in the account are themselves products of construction. Now this does not mean that everything is constructed; as Rawls points out, every construction needs materials.Footnote ⁴⁸ For AC, those materials are the natural facts that bear on normative judgments and properties. These facts are not themselves constructed, but are straightforwardly objects of recognition. Thus, the sense in which AC's constructivism goes “all the way down” refers to the nature and content of its fundamental normative elements—eudaimonia and practical wisdom—and indicates that AC has no normative “primitive” or base notion on which the normative structure of the account is founded.Footnote ⁴⁹ I will explore this picture by explaining how AC addresses a problem any constructivist view must face. The problem takes the form of a dilemma.Footnote ⁵⁰ One horn of the dilemma is a concern that the construction cannot succeed without appeal to some normative standard that is not itself constructed (so that constructivism is really just window-dressing on recognitionalism). The other horn is the charge that, in avoiding the first horn, constructivism becomes arbitrary or unacceptably relativistic: in repudiating any independent standard of evaluation, it loses the footing necessary to establish the kinds of normative judgments we want to make against noxious practices and beliefs.Footnote ⁵¹ I contend with this second horn in Section VII of this essay; in the next two sections, I undertake a two-part explanation of how AC avoids the first horn, and in doing so try to explain further how its fundamental normative elements are objects of construction. I take up the construction of eudaimonia in Section V, and of practical wisdom in Section VI, with the aim of showing that both elements are constructed, not recognized.

V. Eudaimonia

The ancients agreed that a good human life must be the life of a good specimen of our kind, and that what is distinctive of our kind is the capacity for reflective practical rationality. Our practical reasoning can take as its object any number of things, including its own operation: we can reason not only about what actions to perform, but about how we should reason. Aristotle, like Kant and others, is struck by the fact that we have this capacity; and it is distinctive of us that we characteristically live via its exercise. One implication of this fact is that because we live this way, doing so well establishes normative standards for action for us. That is the basic point of Aristotle's notorious ergon argument in Nicomachean Ethics I.7: while we share nutritive, perceptual, and motor capacities with other living beings, what is distinctive about us is that we reason about how to think and act. So living well as the kind of things we are involves reasoning well, and that is why successful practical rationality—practical wisdom—plays such a crucial role in living well as a human being.

Nonetheless, while the attention to practical rationality is something Aristotle shares with Kant, Aristotelian constructivism departs from the Kantian variety in attending to the deep and complex connection between this rational capacity and our animal natures, and in maintaining in light of this complexity that there is no hope for a merely formal or procedural account of success in practical rationality. I return to the latter point in the next section; at present, I want to attend to the significance of this connection for living well. AC couples the attention to reflective rationality with the recognition that we are organisms and share a biological nature with other animals and plants. We are ourselves animals, with the full suite of nutritive, perceptual, appetitive, and affective systems which suffice for life in simpler organisms. However, in addition we have reflective rationality, as the ergon argument observes, and it is no overstatement to say that this changes everything.

One important effect of this change is captured nicely by Kant, who says:

Kant's point, with which the ancients agree, is that our capacity for reflective rationality opens up a critical distance between the conative states we experience as animals and our eventual response in action.Footnote ⁵³ This effects an important transformation in these conative states: they call into play practical rationality, and can for the first time become reasons for action. John McDowell indicates how this critical distance is manifest in the Aristotelian picture in writing of our need to be trained in the deployment of practical reason:

It is not simply that what would otherwise be merely sources of motivation now have simply become reasons; it is that action has become possible, as an alternative to our being just another link in the extended causal order—patients of prior causes, channeling them to whatever effect natural law dictates. By our nature, then, we are committed to the necessity of some determination of what sorts of lives we will choose to lead by the deployment of our capacities of reflective rationality: how we live and act becomes a matter of choice in a way it is not for other creatures.

A second implication of our having this capacity, emphasized far more by the ancients than in the Kantian tradition, is the transformative effect of this capacity on the rest of our animal natures—on our passions and desires in particular. McDowell calls this rational transformation a sort of “second naturalism,” and it is a theme running throughout the ancients.Footnote ⁵⁵ Aristotle insists that “habituation”—in large part, a training and education of the passions—is essential for virtue. Less well-known, perhaps, are Plato's ways of making the same point. In the Laws, Plato emphasizes what we might call the “plasticity” of the objects of our pleasure and pain—the great degree to which we can learn to experience pleasure or pain in consequence of achieving certain aims:

Just because our experiences of pleasure and pain are plastic in this way, moral education is critical for us. Before our capacity to reflect upon and recognize reasons, we need the benefit of wise guidance to “channel” our affective and conative responses to the right sorts of things. But it is the task of practical rationality to determine what these right sorts of things are, and to establish the canons for moral education. The point is not extirpation of the motivating effects of these other aspects of our animality, nor indeed to bend them to the service of an idealized rationality. Instead, the point is (as so nicely illustrated by the central analogy of the Republic) the thriving of the integrated whole—the good life of a creature that is both essentially animal and essentially rational.

This emphasis marks the significant difference between Aristotelian and Kantian forms of constructivism. Whereas, in the latter view, the focus is the nature and exercise of pure practical reason, “fully cleansed of everything that might be in any way empirical and belong to anthropology,”Footnote ⁵⁷ the focus in the former view is a life: a process (or, better, activity) played out over a span of history, with a concrete beginning, a concrete ending, and an unfolding of successive stages of life in between. We not only have these lives but we live and shape them, and the goal of living well is both informed by the fact that we have the capacity for reflective rationality and the object of practical rationality as we exercise it. Indeed, Aristotle goes so far as to suggest that our selves are constructed through the activity of living our lives deliberatively:

A good human life is the life of one of a certain kind of animal, in which practical reason molds and shapes the natural drives, motives, and passions, and in so doing creates a self. This is what renders Aristotle's use of the locution of “perception” (aesthesis) for wise judgment congruent with the constructivist view I am proposing here: he says the perception in practical judgment is of “another sort” (allos eidos) than perception of objects.Footnote ⁵⁹ He may be suggesting that this capacity for perception is something we are active in shaping; the reflective work of practical wisdom in habituation is a way of coming to see the patterns that are constitutive of living well. Once shaped, the capacities thus formed are capable of detecting, of responding to, the descriptive features of conditions and circumstances that warrant action, and in this sense the capacities engage in perception. What responds is not merely an intellect but a self—the self that is itself the product of construction, through habituation guided by practical wisdom.Footnote ⁶⁰ The result is a life that such a creature can judge to be good in light of the criteria we can best identify for evaluating the kinds of lives of which we are capable. The normative success of that life, its goodness, is a construction of the effective exercise of that very capacity for practical rationality. Both what counts as a good life and the goodness of such a life depend on the exercise of our practical rationality. There are no facts about living well as a human being apart from the wise judgments of human agents about living so.

The constructivist credentials of AC's notion of eudaimonia thus come to rest on its notion of practical wisdom. But the canons for success in practical rationality are themselves objects of construction on AC. Practical wisdom (phronêsis), in Aristotle's own view and in AC, just is practical rationality, exercised in such a way as to live well:

Thus, the standard of success in practical rationality just is eudaimonia—a substantive, not merely procedural, standard.

This is a curious picture, in more ways than one. How exactly is eudaimonia supposed to afford this standard? The challenge for AC is to resist the idea that the norms for success in either living or practical reasoning can be understood in recognitional terms, as normative facts that hold independently of the very processes by which we come to know them. Gaut, for example, maintains that only by understanding effective practical rationality without “ineliminable reference to evaluative content” can a constructivist account avoid collapse into recognitionalism.Footnote ⁶² But the eudaimonist account of success in practical rationality manifestly refers to such content (viz. eudaimonia). If Gaut is right, then, the threat of the first horn of the dilemma described above (at the end of Section IV) is especially acute just when we turn to practical wisdom to explicate the notion of eudaimonia. In the next section, I hope to show how that horn may be averted, and, in Section VII, I hope to show that we are not thereby plunged into relativism.

VI. The Structure of Practical Rationality

The challenge Gaut poses is the worry that, in its account of successful practical rationality, so-called Aristotelian constructivism is just a novel face put on an ultimately recognitionalist view. Many (like Gaut, and perhaps Kant) assume that the only way to avoid this objection is to deploy a purely formal or procedural conception of successful practical rationality. In other words, the canons for successful exercise of practical rationality apply purely to its form or procedure. Constructivism, then, would as a procedural approach be contrasted with recognitionalist approaches that take practical reason to be aimed at some substantive goal, such as the good, and to be assessable in light of that goal.Footnote ⁶³

This contrast is useful enough when it is Kantian constructivism that is under scrutiny. However, this reflects more on the idiosyncrasies of the Kantian conception of practical rationality than on its constructivism. The hallmark of the Kantian conception of practical rationality is that substantive constraints on practical rationality can be derived from correctly specified formal requirements. From the bare idea of a categorical imperative—which Kant construes as the demand to avoid various types of contradiction in willing—Kant thinks we can derive the substantive rational requirements which constitute the moral law. This twist to the Kantian conception of practical rationality is much of its genius, but it is the real target of Gaut's charge. If the Kantian account fails (as Hegel and others have argued) in its attempt to extract substance from form, then, just as Gaut suggests, it must covertly rely on principles that are not constructed.

Moreover, even if it does not rely on such principles, its structure (as we have seen) situates the justification for the procedure (and the method of construction of practical truth) in substantive (and nonconstructed) a priori concepts of the understanding. This is just to say, again, that on the Kantian approach neither the proceduralism nor the constructivism goes all the way down. Korsgaard argues that Kant's philosophy generally (that is, both his practical and his theoretical philosophy) should be understood as a search for the “unconditioned”—the stopper of a justificatory regress that itself stands in need of no justification:

The threat is empty, on the Kantian conception, because we can arrive at the unconditioned. In Kant, it is the value of the good will and our freedom or subjection to the moral law. In Korsgaard, it is the nature of agency, or the experience of valuing, itself. These are each in their own way regress-stoppers, and they afford the justificatory foundation for the enterprises of construction of normative truths that are the projects of these various Kantian theories. The foundation provides the warrant for accepting the output of procedures which, when appropriately executed, produce the normative results we seek, and in that way makes the world safe for constructivism. The foundations themselves are not the objects of construction, and it is this foundational structure which invites Gaut's challenge. Insofar as such a foundation is necessary, the worry that there is an incipient recognitionalism at work gains traction.

By way of contrast, the overall justificatory structure of AC is not foundational but coherentist. There is no normative foundation on which the warrant for other normative claims rests; instead, the normative claims of AC draw their justification from their membership in an overall structure that both fits with and explains our substantive normative and theoretical judgments.Footnote ⁶⁵ The normative crux of the view rests on judgments about concrete, particular good human lives and about the effective exercise of practical rationality. In a fashion similar to the way Rawls claims we build a conception of political justice from the “materials” of antecedent conceptions of citizen and society, on AC truth about how to act is built on the materials afforded by normative conceptions of a good human life and effective practical rationality. However, unlike the Rawlsian picture, on this picture these conceptions are themselves part of the objects of construction, and (unlike the Kantian picture) there is no fundamental normative notion to stop a justificatory regress. In no case do we begin with normative facts that await our recognition, prior to and independent of our cognition of them. True claims about eudaimonia and practical wisdom are not established prior to the judgments of wise human agents that they are true.Footnote ⁶⁶ In this sense, on AC, there is no normative truth that is not the product of construction.Footnote ⁶⁷

This approach requires that AC not invoke a merely formal or procedural conception of practical rationality, but a substantive one. AC maintains that practical rationality is effective when it not only satisfies the procedural requirements commonly applied to practical reasoning, but also delivers substantively correct judgments about how to live well. The judgment that I ought to X is true just insofar as it shapes my activity into living a good life. But we have already seen that the content of eudaimonia is itself constructed. Thus, the short response to Gaut's challenge is the observation that, while on AC practical reason does have a substantive standard, that standard—what we take the good life to be—is itself an object of construction.

By way of a somewhat fuller sketch: on AC, successful practical rationality involves both successful reasoning (in the sense of marking the proper inferential relations among beliefs and other attitudes) and making substantively right choices about how best to live. First, AC can endorse the procedural requirements on practical reasoning accepted not only by Kant but (for example) by formal theories of rational choice. Any formal or procedural constraint on practical reasoning which we take, on reflection, to be a genuine canon of effective rationality is one that will count as such a canon on AC. So AC can embrace canons not only of deductive inference (e.g., consistency) but also of less formal inferential patterns: coherence more broadly construed, canons of successful explanation, and the like. The warrant for accepting these canons is itself the product of the very faculties to which the canons apply (what else could do the warranting?). In this sense, AC requires that practical wisdom “bear its own survey” (to put the point in David Hume's way).Footnote ⁶⁸

The sticky part of the story, obviously, is what it says about the substantive requirements on practical wisdom. These may not be identified merely as the results of the operation of some purely procedural test. It may be helpful to begin by thinking of AC as endorsing something like an Objective List of things that normally belong in a good human life. It is important to note both the ways in which this picture is accurate, and the ways in which it differs from a recognitionalist way of conceiving such a list.

The picture is accurate in according at least prima facie warrant to just those judgments we make about people who do not take the items typically on such a list (e.g., their own health) to be reason-giving; we take such people to be irrational or at least open to rational criticism. Such judgments are part of everyday life and the common-sense exercise of wisdom, and AC endorses such judgments, at least as a starting-point. It is difficult to avoid judgments that health, friendship, knowledge, and so on—the items usually found on an Objective List—typically have such a place in good human lives, and AC embraces them.Footnote ⁶⁹ But it differs from recognitionalism in its account of how things come to be on that list. Gaut maintains that the proper way to understand such a list is on the recognitional model: the contents of the list itself are there to be recognized, prior to our conception of practical rationality, and thus can afford us a canon for assessing which actions are rational and which are not.Footnote ⁷⁰ On AC, however, membership on that list is itself the upshot of effective practical rationality. We can, and do, reflect on putative judgments about the constituents of a good life, and it is success in such reflection that warrants our substantive judgments about living well. In this sense, full (as opposed to prima facie) warrant for something's being on that list is delivered only by broad reflection on living well. A claim that something belongs on that list is established by vindicating to the judgment of practical wisdom that it is an element in a good human life; hence, something is on that list just because it is judged to be. This is the reverse of the order of explanation the recognitionalist offers.

Aristotle himself holds that virtuous action (or wise judgment) always aims at the “fine” or “noble”—to kalon. Footnote ⁷¹ The Greek idea here includes both the ethical force of “noble” and the aesthetic element of being “fine” (or “beautiful”). As Aristotle deploys the idea, both of these elements, as predicates of ethical action, track the degree to which right action is fitting or appropriate (to prepon).Footnote ⁷² We make judgments of fittingness concerning both our own lives (How do I strike a balance between time spent on work and time spent with my family?) and the lives of others (Does this episode of plagiarism deserve failure of the course, or a report to University Judiciaries?). We make these judgments on large-grained questions (Am I a good fit for this job?) and on more finely-grained issues (Should I wear a tie to this party?). We make them in theorizing (“This is the better explanation”) and in practice (“That was uncalled for”). Since judgments of fittingness must be highly contextually dependent, they cannot be codified, and consequently cannot be seen as produced or warranted by any purely procedural rationality. They are substantive—this just is fitting or appropriate, and that just is not—but they are not tasks of recognition of some property of appropriateness in their objects. Instead, they are products of the constructive task of piecing together the right contributory elements to living a good life. That is the major work of practical wisdom on the Aristotelian conception.

This proposal is quite sketchy, but I hope it suggests the picture I have in mind. It is an outline of a different conception of practical rationality than the procedural accounts often on offer. Whereas on the Kantian story, substantive practical and moral truth is supposed to emerge from a pure procedure, the Aristotelian story countenances and embraces substantive judgments and commitments to ends we must have to be practically rational. This is the reply to the concern that AC has shoved recognitionalism out the front door only to usher it in at the back. I have explained that this is not the case, that even the normative foundations (such as they are) of Aristotelian constructivism are themselves products of construction. But that invites just the opposite form of concern: that constructivism allows, or perhaps even just is, a noxious form of relativism. To that concern I now turn.

VII. Objectivity, Subjectivity, and Relativism

Suppose AC is, in fact, constructivist “all the way down.” That runs the account straight into the objection that it has so little structure that it can be used to justify any number of sets of moral principles, each grounded in some agent- or culture-relative set of assumptions and judgments, with no basis for critical engagement among such constructed sets.Footnote ⁷³ The challenge is to show that AC can vindicate a claim to sufficient objectivity to lay these concerns aside.

This is not a novel objection to neo-Aristotelian theories, and the basis for concern is not entirely the constructivism offered in the present account. The view that the judgment of the wise and virtuous agent—the phronimos—is even epistemically indispensable in picking out virtuous attitudes and actions is itself sufficient to raise many of the same questions about the objective credentials of the virtue approach. Much of the virtue ethics literature on (for example) the impossibility of codification of moral judgments, the impossibility of moral rules, and the like, is aimed at meeting this challenge.Footnote ⁷⁴ AC goes beyond the epistemic claims to make such judgments constitutive of what is required by successful practical rationality, so in some respects its problem is more grave.Footnote ⁷⁵ My strategy will be to consider what forms of objectivity we might want, to suggest that the desire for some of these forms is unwarranted, and to argue that AC provides a form of objectivity worth having.

Bernard Williams has argued that questions about objectivity in ethical discourse boil down to what we will say about ethical disagreement—in particular, the possibility or necessity of at least one party being in error.Footnote ⁷⁶ One way to understand the present concern is in this light. For example, there are contrasting beliefs about the moral permissibility of female genital mutilation (“female circumcision”); part of what we want by way of objectivity is a basis for claiming that those who think this practice is permissible have wrong or wicked attitudes, not just different ones, and for defending the thought that such a claim is not merely “chauvinistic,”Footnote ⁷⁷ so that when we disagree with proponents of such a practice we are not merely talking past them. Given the patent objective purport of claims about both morality and practical rationality more generally, Williams is surely right that providing such a basis is a necessary condition for a plausible moral theory. It might be, of course, that no such objective standard can be vindicated, but it will certainly count as an indictment against the objectivity of an approach that it cannot even propose such a standard.

Here, Kantian constructivism has a card to play that AC does not. Consider Kant's aspiration to provide a moral philosophy applicable to all rational beings, considered purely as such. If successful, this aspiration arguably could establish an objectivity drawn from rational necessity. Moral laws, Kant says, “should be taken from pure reason”: we are required, “since moral laws are to be valid for every rational being in general, to derive them from the universal concept of a rational being in general….”Footnote ⁷⁸ If he is right, moral and (in general) practically rational requirements could lay claim to an objectivity which anything known to be true a priori—because necessarily true—must have. Kant virtually equates the objective with what remains after abstraction of everything empirical,Footnote ⁷⁹ and at the same time holds that this amounts to the universal validity of practical laws.

If we think ethical objectivity requires necessity, then Kant's approach may be the only game in town, whether it succeeds or not. However, surely it is odd to think that the most basic truths about how we ought to live our lives must be norms shared with creatures as different from us as other rational beings—considered purely as such—could be. Could it really be that our practical requirements are the same as those would be for creatures that were not mortal? That the principles governing our interactions with others are the same as those that would govern creatures who did not live in characteristic scarcity? Who were not vulnerable to each other? Who reproduced asexually or not viviparously? Though contingent, it is hard to see how the facts about how we differ from such creatures could not be deeply significant for the content of our practical principles.Footnote ⁸⁰ As McDowell says, the thought that such contingencies need not be significant is a “consoling myth” in coming to grips with our need for objectivity,Footnote ⁸¹ and there is a history of worries that a priori principles cannot generate the necessary traction for contingent circumstances.

In contrast, if the contingency of our natures and circumstances need not preclude the objectivity of prescriptions for action, then we are in position to seek objectivity in something about our natures, contingent though they may be. Like its Kantian cousins, the Aristotelian approach focuses on our natures, not as conative subjects, but as rational agents; however, unlike the Kantian approach, it focuses on that rationality, not as abstracted from, but rather as immanent in, our animal natures.Footnote ⁸² We can look to find objectivity in what is called the “publicity of reasons”—the notion that reasons are open to a public discipline, that they are not constrained merely by private and individual attitudes about them.Footnote ⁸³ Our susceptibility to reasons, and (in turn) their publicity, grounds the hope of identifying a standard of correctness in the exercise of practical rationality, and thus a plausible form of objectivity in AC.

This way of establishing a standard has its roots deep in Aristotle. The “mark to which the man who possesses reason looks,” he says, is right reason (orthos logos).Footnote ⁸⁴ Unlike Kantian constructivism, AC does not maintain that this mark can be purely procedural: practical reason must satisfy substantive constraints as well. But because those constraints are subject to the discipline of reason, the standards in question are objective. The normative nature of the enterprise of giving and exchanging reasons for taking a given action or way of living as being conducive to living well both assumes and establishes the standard of correctness for such claims.

On AC, these reasons will depend on truths about living good human lives; reasons for engaging in conduct of one sort or another will come down to claims about the conduciveness of doing so to living well—claims which are subject to an interpersonal discipline. This discipline will be partly procedural: as I have said, AC accepts just those canons for inferences that will be endorsed by any plausible view of rationality. But the justification for particular claims about reasons will depend in addition on substantive judgments as to which putative reasons really are reasons, and which are not. In a crucial sense, these candidate claims are subject to a form of public vindication.

Now, Korsgaard offers a conception of the publicity of reasons in her development of Kantian constructivism, but the picture of the publicity of reasons on the Aristotelian approach differs from Korsgaard's. Her aim in establishing her Kantian account of publicity is to argue that there are no “private reasons”—reasons of the sort that would provide a toehold for rational egoism and, in consequence, a basis for asking for a justification for claims about reasons to respect others. Korsgaard maintains that this approach to reasons is wrongheaded. Because reasons are public by their very nature, she claims, they must be shareable. Footnote ⁸⁵ Since this feature of reasons is supposed to show that rational egoism is impossible, the pertinent sense in which reasons are shareable—hence public—must require that they are in fact shared. Footnote ⁸⁶

The sense in which reasons are shareable and thus public (and thus suitable to ground claims to objectivity) on AC differs from Korsgaard's sense in two ways. First, AC distinguishes between reason-tokens and reason-types. Our reasons fall into indefinitely many types: reasons for prudence, reasons for concern, reasons to come in out of the rain, and so on. Reason-tokens are the particular reasons that fall into these types. One type of reason, for example, may be the reason not to drink to excess. But each of us has a different reason-token in that type. Your reason for not drinking to excess is that it is bad for your health, whereas mine is that doing so is bad for my health. In a recognizable sense, our reasons are similar, though their bases are distinct, and they are reasons for different conduct by different people. The similarity captures the type, while the differences are reflected in the tokens.

Korsgaard does not draw this distinction, and her claims are about reason-tokens; but for AC the publicity of reasons means they are shareable in the sense that their types are in fact shared. On a eudaimonist view, each of us has most reason to make our own life go well. These reason-tokens—reasons for making a particular, contingently-situated human life go well—are not necessarily shared, and thus are not shareable in the sense Korsgaard requires. It is not a requirement on your having reason to make your life go well that I must see myself too as having reason to make your life go well, as Korsgaard maintains. Your reasons are, indeed, shareable in the ordinary and unremarkable sense that I can, in various ways, come to have reason to make your life go well (and thus to take your reasons to be mine as well), and you may well have reason to reciprocate. AC maintains, then, that reason-tokens can be shared, but what makes them reasons is their membership in reason-types that are shared; most fundamentally, the relevant type is reasons to live well, but there are indefinitely many other reason-types as well.Footnote ⁸⁷

What makes a putative reason-token a token of a shared reason-type? The second difference from Korsgaard's view is AC's requirement on such types that they be intelligible. Footnote ⁸⁸ It is difficult to get a precise grip on just what this standard comes to, but that it is a condition on reasons cannot be doubted. Failure of intelligibility is a reason to reject putative reasons.Footnote ⁸⁹ Elizabeth Anscombe cites the unintelligibility of the reply “To get my camera” to the question “Why are you going upstairs?”—in the face of the explicit acknowledgment that the camera is in the basement—as an example of this sort of failure.Footnote ⁹⁰ Anscombe's diagnosis is that such a case represents a failure correctly to pick out an intention as a reason for action, and the conclusion she draws as a result is that “[a] man's intention in acting is not so private and interior a thing that he has absolute authority in saying what it is—as he has absolute authority in saying what he dreamt.”Footnote ⁹¹ While our dreams are private, the reasons to which our intentions respond are not. These two elements of AC's picture of the publicity of reasons are connected. Part of what makes intelligible the reason-tokens that we each derive from our interest in living well is the fact that the type is shared. It is just because I can so readily grasp the reason-giving force of my own eudaimonia that I can appreciate the reason-giving force for you of yours.

AC agrees with Korsgaard that the notion that reasons are public is essential to the claim that there are standards of correctness for practical reason and thus to the case that judgments about what one has reason to do (or not to do) may claim a form of objectivity.Footnote ⁹² AC disagrees with Korsgaard in holding that no purely procedural set of canons for such judgments will suffice, and that substantive judgments—in particular, judgments about what we have reason to do and seek in living a good life as a human being—are necessarily part of those standards.

This is not to deny that there are deep disagreements on such judgments. Mark Timmons argues that a serious problem for moral constructivist views is presented by cases of “moral symmetry.” An example is a case, offered by Hilary Putnam, of deep evaluative disagreement with his colleague Robert Nozick. Here is Putnam's account of the disagreement:

Such disagreements are, of course, not unfamiliar. Putnam uses this example to remark on what sorts of attitudes toward one's interlocutor occur in such disagreements. In this case, he says, the disagreement results in an attitude of contempt: neither for Nozick's mind nor for his character nor for him as a person, but for a “certain complex of emotions and judgments” in him.Footnote ⁹⁴ This contempt (which Putnam takes to be reciprocal) involves a judgment that the other is, in a certain way, failing to be sensitive to reasons—not just any reasons, apparently, but reasons to which it is a kind of moral failing to be insensitive.

The point Timmons draws from the case is quite different: it is a textbook example of the problem of moral symmetry for constructivism. The features he takes the case to exemplify, which make it problematic, are the following:

The stability of these views under this sort of wide equilibrium, Timmons believes, compels constructivists either to see the interlocutors as simply talking past each other (in only apparent disagreement) or to construe both views as true for the respective sensibilities involved; either way, constructivism is committed to an objectionable relativism.

However, I think AC makes perfect sense of disagreements of this sort, and accounts for just the attitudes Putnam cites as flowing from them. If AC is right, there is no reason to accept that the Putnam-Nozick case exemplifies Timmons's features (3), (4), or (5). Cast in a eudaimonist light, part of the disagreement is due to the differences between Putnam's and Nozick's conceptions of what human well-being involves, and in particular their conceptions of the roles of governmental as opposed to other social institutions for the provision of education.Footnote ⁹⁶ But the facts—both the purely empirical facts, and the way these facts fit with other facts in constituting good lives and good relations between persons as parts of those lives—are exceedingly complex. These facts involve substantive judgments about what we have reason to do, and AC need not accept that either party has gotten these judgments right.

Furthermore, the way in which AC takes reasons to be public means that the mere fact of this sort of disagreement must result in a degree of disequilibrium. Neither Nozick nor Putnam would be justified in seeing his own position as beyond reasonable doubt; by hypothesis, each is perfectly aware that there is reasonable doubt about his position. That does not mean that Nozick and Putnam may hold their positions only tentatively; given their best assessments of things, they see the conclusions they have reached as irresistible. Still, a considerable degree of epistemic humility is appropriate. Just as Anscombe suggested, claims about what one has most reason to do are always corrigible. If AC is true, then in the dispute between Putnam and Nozick, at most one of them is right; perhaps both are wrong and there is some third position that represents the facts about how human beings may best organize themselves so that they educate their young in a way most conducive to human flourishing. The present point is that both Putnam and Nozick see those facts as objective, and the contempt they feel for the pattern of responses in the other is a reflection of that presumption of objectivity. Those attitudes are perfectly consistent with the claims of AC. Moreover, AC can explain why the disagreement is so deep: it is just because each sees the reasons for his own view as so deeply tied to what is necessary for human welfare that each has the attitude he does toward the other's insensitivity. But since on AC there is no reason to think that either Putnam or Nozick is in possession of the facts as practical wisdom would see them, AC is not committed to the pernicious relativism that Timmons deplores. AC neither sees them as talking past each other, nor maintains that each may be fully vindicated by his own lights. Instead, it holds that there is a standard of correctness to be applied—the truth about what conduces to good human lives—and that that standard can be vindicated only by the best exercise of reason and judgment of which we are capable.

VIII. Conclusion

The promise of constructivism about practical rationality is the hope it holds of avoiding both the metaphysical and epistemological problems of recognitionalism and the lack of fidelity to the experience of responding to reasons which is characteristic of views that doubt that there is practical truth, or that our practical judgments aspire to track a normative reality. The Kantian version of the constructivist enterprise lives or dies on its ability to precipitate substantive reasons for action from a conception of rationality as procedural and suitable for rational beings considered purely as such. The viability of Aristotelian constructivism, in contrast, depends on there being truth about how to live well, and on that truth's being something that is constructed by human judgments about what a good life is. Such truth (if it exists) would be the most hard-won of human intellectual and moral accomplishments, and my aim here has not been to set it out. Instead, in the framework of practical truth constructed from a substantive conception of successful practical rationality, directed at the goal of living good human lives, I hope to have sketched an approach appropriate for understanding objectively wise practical rationality and objectively good human lives.