A Third Version of Constructivism: Rethinking Spinoza’s

Metaethics

Peter D. Zuk

Rice University

(Penultimate draft; please cite the published final version.)

Abstract: In this essay, I claim that certain passages in Book IVof Benedict de Spinoza’s Ethics suggest a novel version of what istoday known as metaethical constructivism. The constructivistinterpretation emerges in the course of attempting to resolve atension between Spinoza’s apparent ethical egoism and someremarks he makes about the efficacy of collaborating with theright partners when attempting to promote our individual self-interest (§1). Though Spinoza maintains that individualsnecessarily aim to promote their self-interest, I argue thatSpinoza has an atypical conception of self (and hence of self-interest) that allows the interests of other people to bepartially constitutive of our own self-interest. In this way,Spinoza can account for other-regarding concern (§2). Thisinterpretation attributes to Spinoza a form of constructivismthat differs in important ways from contemporary Humean andKantian constructivisms and which can in principle be detachedfrom Spinoza’s particular metaphysical commitments in order toyield a third general category of constructivist view (§3).Though my treatment is necessarily brief, it is my hope that itcan serve both to motivate a constructivist reading of Spinozaand, perhaps even more crucially, to suggest a Spinozisticvariety of constructivism as a live theoretical option inmetaethics.1

1 Special thanks are due to Baruch Brody, Dan Burkett, Carl Feierabend, NyssaJuneau, Mark Kulstad, Jacob Mills, George Sher, Ericka Tucker, Graham Valenta,Brandon Williams, and audiences at the Rice-UH-UST Works in Progress seriesand the 2014 Pacific APA for helpful comments on previous drafts of thispaper.

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I

Spinoza is often read as an ethical egoist, albeit a

sophisticated one.2 The trouble with this reading is that we

typically think of genuinely moral conduct as aiming at more than

just the maximization of our individual self-interest. Many of us

believe that people sometimes act from genuine concern for

others, where this kind of concern is grounded in taking others

to matter for their own sake rather than mattering merely as

means with which to improve our own situation. If we are looking

for an interpretation of Spinoza that allows him to account for

moral behavior in this sense, we will need to move beyond ethical

egoism. Fortunately, Spinoza likely intended his work to be an

improvement on the egoistic moral psychology of Hobbes (Curley

1988, pp. 106-107). But can we justifiably interpret him as

having succeeded?

We may initially be inclined to answer in the negative.

Consider first Spinoza’s way of accounting for the reason-giving

2 See, e.g., Nadler (2014).

2

status of one’s own interests. His conatus (“striving”) doctrine

claims that it is in the nature or essence of every being to

(necessarily) endeavor to keep itself in existence (Spinoza 1985,

IIIP6, p. 498)3, and human beings are no exception on this score

(IVP20S, p. 556).4 This doctrine appears at first blush to amount

to psychological egoism—the view that we always act for the sake

of our own self-interest—and metaphysically necessary psychological

egoism at that. If this is right, we may think that the question

is settled given the close connection between psychological

egoism and ethical egoism. But Spinoza offers at least a glimmer

of hope when he asserts that collaborating with the right

partners necessarily promotes one’s self-interest. Like the conatus

doctrine, this claim draws heavily upon the notion of an

individual’s nature. Just as there can be nothing in a person’s

own nature that entails her destruction, her destruction also

cannot be entailed by anything in the nature of another person so

long as the other person’s nature bears the right kind of

3 All references to Spinoza’s work are to Curley’s 1985 translation of theEthics unless otherwise noted. I confine my discussion to the Ethics; for atreatment of similar themes in some of Spinoza’s other works, see Collier(1991), Ravven (1998), and Armstrong (2009).4 For a detailed reconstruction of Spinoza’s complex argument for the conatusdoctrine, see Garrett (2002).

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similarity to her own (IVP31C, p. 561). The modal strength of

this doctrine may well imply that when we act for our own sake,

we are always in some sense acting for the sake of others as

well.

There are certainly grounds on which to criticize the

conatus doctrine, but we can set those concerns aside and focus

instead on Spinoza’s claim about the necessary efficacy of

collaboration.5 As Bennett (1984) points out, Spinoza’s claim

faces obvious counterexamples. Bennett asks us to suppose, for

example, that we have two human beings and only enough food for

one of them (p. 301). In this case, having similar natures is

actually detrimental to at least one of the parties involved

because their common need for food will leave at least one of

them with an empty stomach. Bennett concludes from this and

similar cases that the efficacy of collaboration “must depend on

contingent facts about human nature and perhaps about human

societies” rather than on “basic, abstract metaphysics” (p. 306).

5 I argue in §III of this paper that what makes Spinoza’s approach mostinteresting is his general strategy of appealing to (necessary) metaphysicalfacts. Spinoza’s view, I claim, is one token of a distinctive type ofconstructivist metaethical view that can in principle be decoupled from hisparticular metaphysics.

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But rather than charge Spinoza with subscribing to an obviously

false view, we might instead rethink our interpretation of his

remarks on collaboration. A key passage (IVP18S) may well provide

the resources for such a rethinking.

Before we turn to this passage, though, there is another

aspect of Spinoza’s thought that we must take into account: his

brief but telling claims about the meaning of certain moral

terms. He seems in various places (especially the preface to Part

IV of the Ethics) to break with classical accounts of teleology by

situating final causation within the attitudes of human beings

themselves rather than in the general natural order (McDonough

2011, pp. 191-193). Spinoza tells us that “[w]hat is called a

final cause is nothing but a human appetite” (IVPref, p. 544).6

He offers the following definitions soon after:

By good I shall understand what we certainly know to beuseful to us (IVDef1, p. 546).

By evil, however, I shall understand what we certainlyknow prevents us from being masters of some good(IVDef2, p. 546).

6 The Elwes translation of the same passage renders “appetite” as “desire”(Spinoza 1955, IVPref, p. 188), making the connection with our conative endsmore obvious.

5

Whether something is useful to us is for Spinoza determined by

how it accords with our ends (of which persevering our being is

the foundational one to which all others are subservient). Curley

(1988, p. 120) argues that, for Spinoza, moral claims are not

ascriptions of mind-independent moral properties, but rather

recognitions that some object or state stands in a certain

relation to our desires. So on the face of things, Spinoza

endorses a kind of moral relativism. Yet Curley also points out

that later passages in the Ethics are full of what sound like

objective (or at least universal) value claims (pp. 120-121).

Curley briefly discusses his favored interpretive solution, which

involves our having (or at least potentially coming to have) a

common notion of “a model human being,” that is, “the kind of

person we would necessarily desire to be if only we could form a

clear conception of that kind of person” (p. 123). This is a good

start, but we need an explanation of the necessary connection

between having a clear conception of such a person and desiring

to be like that person. In my view, IVP18S and some associated

passages can be taken to suggest a particular kind of answer on

Spinoza’s part.

6

II

The primary passage in question appears in the scholium of P18 in

Book IV of the Ethics. It occurs in the course of a discussion of

what reason demands of us, and goes as follows:

Of these [things which are useful to us], we can thinkof none more excellent than those that agree entirelywith our nature. For if, for example, two individualsof entirely the same nature are joined to one another,they compose an individual twice as powerful as eachone. To man, then, there is nothing more useful thanman. Man, I say, can wish for nothing more helpful tothe preservation of his being than that all should soagree in all things that the Minds and Bodies of all wouldcompose, as it were, one Mind and one Body; that all shouldstrive together, as far as they can, to preserve theirbeing; and that all, together, should seek for themselves the commonadvantage of all.

From this it follows that men who are governed byreason—i.e., men who, from the guidance of reason, seektheir own advantage—want nothing for themselves thatthey do not desire for other men. Hence, they are just,honest, and honorable (IVP18S, p. 556, my emphasis).

Admittedly, the two paragraphs immediately preceding these ones

have ostensibly egoistic upshots. But they also contain an

explicit reference to IIPost4, which goes as follows:

The human Body, to be preserved, requires a great manyother bodies, by which it is, as it were, continuallyregenerated (IIPost4, p. 462).

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There can be little doubt that Spinoza is attempting to provide

via IVP18S a principled way of extending concern for one’s own

interests to the interests of others. Steinberg (2009, §5)

suggests that the passage “delineates a picture of composite,

higher-order individuals,” a reading that seems to comport with

Spinoza’s more general metaphysical picture; immediately

following IIP13, for example, Spinoza lays out several axioms,

lemmas, and postulates that together entail the existence of

higher-order entities of many varieties. The question we face is

how concern for the interests of others is extended and what

sort of role is played by the suggested higher-order individual,

with Spinoza’s explicit reference to IIPost4 likely serving as an

important clue. At least three interpretive possibilities present

themselves.

Ethical Egoism

One interpretation of the passage simply construes it as

additional evidence that Spinoza was an ethical egoist. The

passage ostensibly locates the importance of other people in

8

their usefulness, so perhaps it is merely an exhortation to work

with others toward a common goal when the opportunity presents

itself. But this interpretation sheds no additional light on

Spinoza’s claim that collaboration is necessarily beneficial to

appropriately situated collaborative partners and so forces us to

attribute to him a highly implausible view. Another difficulty is

that this interpretation must take Spinoza’s words about “one

Mind and one Body” as entirely metaphorical. The trouble with

doing so is that Spinoza explicitly affirms elsewhere (e.g. the

digression following IIP13) that there really are higher-order

entities. We should therefore dig deeper for a more suitable

interpretation.

Retentive Super-Individuation

Perhaps Spinoza can say that, while the individuals that compose

the higher-order individual composed of all discrete persons

still retain their ontological separateness from one another, the

higher-order individual is metaphysically real and is,

furthermore, the true object of (proper) moral concern. In that

case, moral concern would need to expand to all persons insofar

9

as they are constituent parts of the higher-order individual. The

trouble with interpreting Spinoza in this way is that each

individual that composes the higher-order individual would still

presumably retain its own conatus. The higher-order individual

would have its own unique conatus, and it is that conatus alone

which would strive toward the preservation of the whole. Each

individual human person would still strive only toward its own

preservation, so there would be no genuinely moral action on the

part of any individual person, but rather only on the part of the

higher-order individual. This brings us no closer to overcoming

egoism with respect to individual moral agents, nor does it

easily sidestep Bennett’s counterexamples. It also has trouble

making sense of IIPost4, which (along with various other passages

in Spinoza’s work) seems to imply a strong ontological

interdependence of human beings to the point of a breakdown of

the traditional boundaries of the atomistic self (Collier 1991

pp. 82-83, Ravven 1998 pp. 271-272, Armstrong 2009, pp. 50-53).

That Spinoza references IIPost4 in IVP18S suggests that the

entities he has in mind in IIPost4 are none other than our fellow

human beings.

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Subsumptive Super-Individuation

Earlier in the Ethics, Spinoza famously argues in favor of

substance monism, the metaphysical doctrine that there is one and

only one substance. Kulstad (1996, p. 313) claims that one

premise of Spinoza’s argument goes as follows: “There are no two

numerically distinct substances of one attribute having the same

attribute.” Though Spinoza does not explicitly say so in the

text, perhaps something similar applies to modes of the one

substance, and hence to individual persons.7 In other words,

perhaps it is the case that two numerically distinct individuals

cannot have the same nature because two individuals with

identical natures constitute not two individuals, but one. If we

postulate this state of affairs in not merely two people but in

all people, it yields the higher-order individual described in

IVP18S. From this it might be thought to follow that “the true

interests of all human beings must always coincide because in

some sense their being or nature is one” (Steinberg 1984, p.

306). Spinoza himself explicitly suggests as much when he writes

7 Thanks to Mark Kulstad for the suggestion here.

11

that “insofar as men live according to the guidance of reason,

they must do only those things that are good for human nature,

and hence, for each man” (IVP35Dem, p. 563).8

This picture is supported by an interpretive claim that Rice

(1975, p. 201) makes about Spinoza’s overall metaphysical system,

namely that “the distinction between complex and simple bodies

[is] one which is relative to the purposes at hand… order (ordo)

is a product of imagination in the first place; and simplicity is

certainly an ordering relation.” What this implies is that the

distinctness of persons is (in some crucial sense) subjectively

imposed by us rather than actually obtaining as an objective or

ultimate feature of the world. Perhaps what Spinoza is suggesting

in IVP18S, then, is a shift in perspective. Rather than conceiving

of ourselves as discreet, atomistic entities, we ought (at least

for the purposes of regulating our conduct) to conceive of

ourselves as mutually interdependent parts of a collective, as

acting in light of our common nature for the benefit of all who

share that nature. Indeed, Spinoza seems to maintain that if we

come to conceive of ourselves in this way, we will necessarily

8 See also Steinberg (1984, pp. 313-315)’s discussion of this passage.

12

desire to benefit other human beings for their own sake because

we will see that they are, in some crucial sense, partially

constitutive of our own being. If this is correct, Spinoza has

parlayed prudence into other-directed moral concern.

It would take a more detailed examination than can be

provided here to establish this interpretation definitively, but

it seems at the very least to make sense of important features of

the text. We can therefore turn our attention to the following

question: If this interpretation could be established, what would

follow from it? What kind of view would it attribute to Spinoza?

III

Frankena (1977, esp. at pp. 15-16) catalogues a number of

considerations that make Spinoza’s metaethical view difficult to

classify. He shows that Spinoza seems at some points to endorse

metaethical expressivism, the view that moral utterances 1)

express non-propositional attitudes such as approval or emotions

(on Frankena’s reading of Spinoza’s case, the latter) rather than

making truth-evaluable claims about the way things are, and hence

2) lack truth conditions—and at other points seems to endorse

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metaethical naturalism—the view that moral utterances 1) make

claims about objective reality, and hence 2) possess truth

conditions that are 3) determined solely with reference to

natural properties. Frankena ultimately opts for a naturalist

interpretation, but he continues to express at least some degree

of hesitation as to whether this classification truly captures

Spinoza’s position (p. 44). Intriguingly, that Frankena and other

commentators of his time would struggle to classify Spinoza’s

view might tell in favor of a certain way of classifying it. For

it might be that the metaethical classification that best

captures Spinoza’s view was not yet clearly formulated in

Frankena’s time. And one metaethical classification in particular

presents itself as a candidate here: metaethical constructivism.9

Perhaps Frankena and his contemporaries had difficulty

identifying which metaethical classification Spinoza’s view falls

under because Spinoza is best categorized as a constructivist,

9 A constructivist interpretation is also defended by Jarrett (2014), thoughhis account of what a distinctively Spinozistic constructivism amounts todiffers in important ways from the one I will propose. Jarrett denies thatSpinoza’s constructivism rests upon the actual nature or essence of humanbeings (p. 68-69), relies heavily upon parallels with mathematicalconstructivism (p. 79) and the social construction of things like money andproperty (p. 80), and claims that Spinoza’s constructivism is ultimately self-effacing insofar as it “advocates or recommends that we take a perspectivefrom which good and evil cannot be conceived” (p. 84).

14

and as Bagnoli (2014, §1) observes, constructivism became widely

recognized as a distinctive metaethical option only in the wake

of Rawls (1980).

That Spinoza’s view seems to contain aspects of both

expressivism and naturalism is unsurprising if he is properly

categorized as a metaethical constructivist. As Street (2010, p.

371) observes, the upshot of constructivism is that it

“understands reason-giving status as conferred upon things by us…

there are no facts about what is valuable apart from facts about

a certain point of view on the world and what is entailed from

within that point of view.” Constructivism thus combines the

metaethical anti-realism of expressivism with the cognitivism and

claim as to the compatibility of moral truth with metaphysical

naturalism that we find in metaethical naturalism.10 We find this

very combination in Spinoza’s view, which attempts to build up

from the conatus doctrine and subsumptive super-individuation a

10 I understand by anti-realism the denial that there are objective moral truths,where objectivity is understood in terms of mind-independent reality. Iunderstand by cognitivism the view that moral utterances make claims and hencehave truth values. Cognitivism is often paired with realism, but a key tenet ofconstructivism is that it need not be: one can coherently affirm the existenceof mind-dependent moral truths, as Spinoza seems to. For an overview of recentanti-realist interpretations of Spinoza’s metaethics, see Kisner and Youpa(2014, pp. 5-7).

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set of relative principles that turn out to have normative force

for all of us because of the kind of beings that we are.

Street distinguishes between two forms of metaethical

constructivism, one with roots in the work of Hume and the other

with roots in the work of Kant. On the Kantian version, we begin

“with a purely formal understanding of the attitude of valuing,

and demonstrate that recognizably moral values are entailed from

within the standpoint of any valuer as such” (p. 369). In other

words, the mere fact of being a valuer at all commits one (even

if one does not realize it) to valuing certain things no matter

where one begins evaluative deliberations because of certain

formal features of the attitude of valuing.11 The Humean version

of constructivism denies this. “[T]he substantive content of a

given agent’s reasons,” Street says, is on this view “a function

of his or her particular, contingently given, evaluative starting

points” (p. 370). On the Humean view, ostensibly moral values may

happen to follow from the standpoint of a given valuer, but that

this is so will be a matter of contingent fact.12

11 For a contemporary defense of Kantian constructivism, see Korsgaard (1996a,1996b, 2009).12 Contemporary statements of Humean constructivism include Street (2009),Velleman (2009) and Lenman (2010).

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In order to illustrate the difference between the two

versions of constructivism, Street asks us to imagine “an ideally

coherent Caligula” who most strongly values torturing others for

fun (p. 371). The evaluative attitudes that make up Caligula’s

normative point of view are stipulated to be consistent with one

another. According to the Humean constructivist, such a person is

possible. The Kantian constructivist denies this, maintaining

instead that such a person is not possible because it is not

possible to have a consistent set of evaluative attitudes the

strongest of which is torturing people for fun. Contrast both of

these positions with that of the moral realist, who asserts that

there is an objective truth to the effect that torturing people

for fun is not valuable (and indeed, is of great disvalue).

According to our interpretation, Spinoza breaks with all

three of these views. He disagrees with the moral realist because

he denies that there is ever a mind-independent moral fact of the

matter. He disagrees with the Humean constructivist because he

would not admit the possibility of an ideally coherent Caligula.

And he disagrees with the Kantian constructivist as to why there

cannot be an ideally coherent Caligula. As Street notes, the

17

Kantian strategy relies on the claim that “the rabbit of

substantive reasons can be pulled out of a formalist hat,”

thereby implying a denial of the claim that “to get substance

out, we need to put substance in” (p. 370). But on our

interpretation of Spinoza, he does put substance in: the

necessary truth of the conatus doctrine, the common nature of

human beings (with its concomitant doctrine of subsumptive super-

individuation), and the perspectival shift that necessarily

follows when we recognize these facts. A Spinozistic variety of

constructivism therefore enjoys at least one advantage each over

its Humean and Kantian cousins. It grounds a moral system that is

universal by relying upon necessary metaphysical and psychological

doctrines that are (modally) stronger than the mere contingencies

relied upon by Humean constructivism, and it does so in a way

that avoids the potential pitfalls of Kantian formalism. If this

analysis is correct, Spinoza’s work represents a third variety of

constructivism that is not only of historical interest

(representing as it does an earlier formulation of the view than

its Humean and Kantian counterparts) but may well deserve a place

in contemporary metaethical debates as well.

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Of course, the tenability of the metaphysical and

psychological doctrines with which Spinoza undergirds his

metaethics might well be questioned. After all, are not the far-

reaching claims of Spinoza’s philosophical system wildly

implausible to our modern sensibilities? One might wonder about

that.13 But even if Spinoza’s particular metaphysical doctrines

are implausible, there may be contemporary ones that could be

substituted for them while still preserving the overall schema of

the view. One potential candidate is the view of Clark and

Chalmers (1998, esp. pp. 17-18) that the mind extends well beyond

the body and into the world. Another is Kriegel (2012)’s Kantian

monism, which is strikingly similar to Spinoza’s view of the

imagination in its claim that divisions between objects are

reflective not of any actual metaphysical fact of the matter, but

rather of the distinctions that would be made by the cognitive

faculties of an ideal observer. Finally, Parfit (1987, pp. 199-

347)’s claims about personal identity are particularly well

suited to the task, especially in light of his assertion that

13 Della Rocca (2008, p. 305), for example, claims to no longer find Spinoza’sphilosophical system implausible, though he admits that it can often seem thatway.

19

accepting certain views of personal identity may have

consequences for the plausibility of various moral principles

(pp. 318-320, 329-347). Insofar as these contemporary

metaphysical doctrines might be leveraged against an atomistic

conception of the self, they can potentially be substituted for

Spinoza’s subsumptive super-individuation in order to yield other

subvarieties of Spinozistic constructivism. Spinoza picks out the

metaphysics of individuation and personal identity as key

ingredients for a metaethically constructivist view, and this

insight is compatible with a wide variety of substantive

metaphysical commitments. This is perhaps his most crucial

insight of all.

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