Realism and Constructivism in Kantian Metaethics (1): Realism and Constructivism in a Kantian Context1

Karl SchaferForthcoming in Philosophy Compass

Metaethical constructivism is one of the main movements within contemporary metaethics – especially among those with Kantian inclinations. But both the philosophical coherence and the Kantian pedigree of constructivism are hotly contested. In what follows, I first explore the sense in which Kant’s own views might be described as constructivist, and then use the resulting understanding as a guide to how we might think about Kantian constructivism today. Along the way, I hope to suggest that a fairly diverse range of views within contemporary metaethics – including some without any explicit allegiance to Kant - may be thought of as pursuing a version of the resulting strategy. Thus, I hope this discussion will provide a useful lens for thinking about a variety of central issues in contemporary metaethics.

As I’ll understand it here, metaethical constructivism is motivated by two basic convictions. First, like normative realists, the constructivist believes that there are genuine normative or moral truths. But at the same time, she rejects thecharacteristically realist conviction that these truths are part of the fabric of wholly mind- or judgment-independent reality, waiting “out there” to be discovered by us.

The acceptance of this second claim, according to the constructivist, conflates the sort of objectivity possessed by empirical facts with the sort possessed by normative or moral truths. This, for the constructivist, is what leads to many of the familiar epistemological and metaphysical challenges to normative realism. In short, the constructivist complains that if the fundamental normative truths are wholly independent of ourjudgments and faculties, there is no reason why we might not be alienated from these facts in ways that seem metaphysically, epistemologically, and ethically unacceptable.2 Contrary to suchviews, the constructivist insists that there must be an essentialconnection between the truth about normative matters and the 1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.2 In section 5 of this essay, I discuss some of these issues in more detail.

nature of our practical or rational faculties, such that this truth is essentially graspable by those it applies to, at least insofar as they are rational.

This thought, it is important to stress, is by no means limited to those with anti-realist inclinations. For example, in discussing these issues, Thomas Nagel writes:

The connection between objectivity and truth is therefore closer in ethics than it is in science. I do not believe that the truth about how we should live could extend radically beyond any capacity we might have to discover it (apart from its dependence on nonevaluative facts we might beunable to discover). (139)

But whereas realists with quietist leanings, like Nagel, accept that the sort of objectivity characteristic of normative truths is importantly different from that characteristic of empirical truths, they also tend to resist attempts to offer an explanationof this difference.3 Not unreasonably, the constructivist findsthis refusal unsatisfying. Rather, she insists that if normative truths have a different metaphysical or epistemological status than other facts, this is something that requires explanation.4 As I understand it, this is the fundamental challenge constructivism aspires to meet: to explain how the truth about normative matters is different from the truth about matters of empirical fact.

To meet this challenge, the constructivist claims that the truth or falsity of normative claims or judgments is somehow grounded in our normative points of view. As Sharon Street puts the point:

According to thoroughgoing or metaethical constructivist views, the truth of a normative claim consists in that

3 Something similar is true of T.M. Scanlon’s discussion of these issues in his Being Realistic about Reasons. Much like Nagel, Scanlon’s discussion sometimes suggests a view of the sort outlined below. But, in the end, Scanlon’s form of “reasons fundamentalism” resists the priority of rationality-facts over reasons-facts described below.

4 In characterizing the project of constructivism in these terms, I amvery close to Aaron James’s excellent discussion of these issues in “Constructing Protagorean Objectivity”.

claim’s being entailed from within the practical point of view, where the practical point of view is given a formal characterization (“What is constructivism”).5

Thus, like familiar forms of subjectivism, constructivism begins with the normative attitudes and capacities of actual or possibleagents – that is, with their various actual or possible “normative points of view”. But unlike crude forms of subjectivism, it does not simply take these “materials” as it finds them. Rather, it transforms them via some “procedure of construction”, thereby arriving at what we might call the “metaethically authoritative” normative points of view.6 Thus, the core claim of the metaethical constructivist is that the truth about normative matters is grounded in some way in these metaethically authoritative normative points of view.7 As such, while the constructivist remains committed to the existence of genuine normative truths, they also believe that these truths aregrounded in some way in our practical faculties or attitudes.

1. The Proper Ambitions of Kantian Constructivism (and Constitutivism)

When characterized in this way, constructivism has enough subgenres to please the most determined proponent of the cult of cultural individuation.8 But it is perhaps most closely

5 Compare Carla Bagnoli’s characterization of “Constructivism in Metaethics” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “As a ‘metaethical account’ ... constructivism holds that there are normative truths. These truths are not fixed by facts that are independent of the practical standpoint, however characterized; rather, they are constituted by what agents would agree to under some specified conditions of choice.”

6 The role of the “procedure of construction” on such views means that the “constructed facts” are not a simple product of our contingent choices and attitudes in the way the metaphor of “construction” mightsuggest. But this does not mean that our contingent choices and attitudes are irrelevant, it is simply that their relevance is filtered through the relevant procedure of construction.

7 As I discuss below at the close of section 2, the sort of grounding here can be understood in either metaphysical or semantic terms.

8 For Hobbesian constructivism, see David Gauthier; for Humean constructivism, see Sharon Street’s “Constructivism about Reasons” and James Lenman's "Humean Constructivism in Moral Theory"; for Smithean constructivism, see Remy Debes and Karsten Stueber’s

associated with the Kantian tradition – and my primary focus herewill be on forms of constructivism with a broadly Kantian orientation.9

Two features have often been taken to be essential to a distinctively Kantian form of constructivism. First, the Kantian constructivist grounds the constructive procedure just described in facts about the nature of agency, with the aim of uncovering an ultimately indisputable foundation for metaethical theorizing– one that is free of controversial normative assumptions. It is this aspect of their views, for example, that leads some Kantiansto claim that they can “answer skeptical challenges with ease” orthat their view provides us with a sort of metaethical "Archimedean point".10 But, second, unlike so-called Humean constructivists, the Kantian takes it to be possible to vindicatethe existence of objective, universal moral norms via a constructive procedure of this sort.

This is what makes constructivism and constitutivism such natural bedfellows – especially for the Kantian. In order for a constructivist account to be plausible, it must be subject to certain constraints – constraints which themselves cannot be given a constructivist justification, on pain of regress. Thus, any constructivist faces the question of how these basic constraints are justified. In order to fill this gap, it is natural for constructivists in general – and Kantian constructivists in particular – to turn to the idea that the acceptance of these constraints is somehow constitutive of the very nature of agency itself. For this, it might be thought,

respective contributions to their forthcoming volume on sentimentalism. For a Hegelian form of constructivism with clear connections to the Kantian views discussed below, see Kenny Walden. For a form of constructivism with Aristotelian inspiration, see Valerie Tiberius.

9 Contemporary Kantian constructivism begins with John Rawls’s “KantianConstructivism” – although Rawls was primarily concerned with political philosophy as opposed to metaethics proper. For the most prominent contemporary version of this view, see Christine Korsgaard’s The Sources of Normativity. For another important neo-Kantian view, see David Velleman’s The Possibility of Practical Reason – which raises many of the same issues, although Velleman’s current views are closerto forms of constructivism that focus on the point of view of the judger as opposed to the subject; see his Foundations of Moral Relativism.

10 Compare Korsgaard’s Self-Constitution.

would secure the status of these constraints in a manner that makes them invulnerable to serious dispute.

At least as it is often interpreted, Christine Korsgaard’s form of constructivism provides us with an important example of this version of Kantian constructivism. Korsgaard’s constructivism seems to begin only with those commitments that are constitutive of agency in a quite minimal sense – commitments that, as such, no one could intelligibly call into question. And yet, Korsgaardargues that these minimal commitments constrain any agent’s normative point of view so that they are implicitly committed to some form of “Enlightenment morality”. Thus, despite this minimal starting place, Korsgaard believes that she can provide anon-question-begging constructive vindication of much of ordinarymoral thought.

Whether this is the best way of understanding Korsgaard’s views is a complicated question.11 But if we do read Korsgaard in this way, I think it is fair to say that relatively few philosophers have been convinced that this sort of constructive vindication of morality is possible.12 In particular, this project appears to face the following dilemma.13 On the one hand, it may begin with a conception of agency that is robust enough to deliver the desired vindication of objective moral norms. But if it starts with a robust conception of agency, we can ask why it is agency in this sense that is the proper starting point of metaethical theorizing.14 Unfortunately, given a robust enough conception of agency, it is difficult to justify any such choice without makinga tacit appeal to certain quite controversial normative assumptions. Thus, on this horn of the dilemma, the constructivist’s preferred understanding of “agency” appears to be poorly suited to play the role of a shared and indisputable

11 Interpretative questions aside, she is often read in this way – and it is this reading that forms the touchstone for much of the contemporary discussion of her views. That said, her comments about the necessity of pursuing metaethical questions from a normatively engaged perspective suggest a view more like the one discussed below.See, for example, her “The Normative Conception of Agency.”

12 For some worries about these arguments, see Street’s work on these issues, as well as David Enoch’s “Agency, Shmagency,” William Fitzpatrick, R. Jay Wallace, and Kieran Setiya’s “Explaining Action.”

13 Compare Evan Tiffany.14 Compare Enoch’s “Agency, Shmagency.”

metaethical “Archimedean point”.

It is important to stress that this is true even if it is also truethat, simply by asking a normative question, one commits oneself to the validity of the norms that are implicit in this conceptionof agency. For at least if we begin with a robust enough conception of agency, this claim will be a thoroughly non-trivial normative claim. Thus, in citing it, we will have done little toescape the dilemma facing the constructivist.15

In response to such concerns, the constructivist may retreat to amore minimal conception of agency – one that has a better claim to be inescapable from the practical point of view in a sense that would render the normative assumptions implicit in it beyondserious dispute. This may be sufficient to avoid the worries in the previous paragraph, but it makes it difficult to see how the resulting view could possibly deliver a vindication of anything like substantive, universal moral norms. Rather, once we retreatto such a starting point, the procedure of construction seems likely to deliver similarly minimal results. Thus, on this horn of the dilemma, the Kantian constructivist’s view threatens to collapse into a merely “Humean” form of constructivism, which abandons its ambitions to moral objectivity.16

To be clear, this does not mean that the combination of constitutivism and constructivism cannot do important metaethicalwork. Nor does it mean that there are not interesting constitutive connections between belief, intention, and action and the norms of rationality. But it does suggest that the constructivist should be cautious about claiming that the constitution of agency is capable of rendering the foundational norms she appeals to beyond serious dispute. Crucially, this does not mean that the idea that certain norms are constitutive of agency (or rationality) cannot play an explanatory role in one’saccount of the normative domain. After all, an account that began with a conception of agency (or rationality) that intuitively has normative significance, and then showed how this conception could ground an account of the rest of normative

15 For further debate about these questions, see Velleman’s response to Enoch in How We Get Along, Enoch’s reply, “Shmagency Revisited”, and Luca Ferrero.

16 It is precisely this dynamic that pushes Street to her version of the Humean view.

domain, would be nothing to sneeze at. Indeed, it is just this sort of view that will be my focus below.

2. Kant and Kantian Constructivism: The Priority of Reason

Thus, the attractiveness of Kantian forms of constructivism need not depend on their ability to successfully accomplish the most ambitious aims associated with them. It is not surprising, then,that the possibility of more modest forms of constitutivism and constructivism with this character has been the focus of a good deal of recent philosophical attention.17 In a moment, I’ll discuss these views in more detail. But before turning to that debate, I want to say something about Kant’s own understanding ofthese issues.

As described above, Kantian constructivism is characterized by the idea that the nature of agency can provide us with a basis for metaethical theorizing that is free of weighty normative assumptions. But despite the association of such a view with Kant, there is good reason to question whether Kant accepted it. For far from beginning with a shared and uncontroversial conception of agency, Kant’s account of the normative domain appears to begin with a controversial and non-trivial conception of the nature of reason or rationality – one that builds into it quite controversial normative requirements.18

17 In addition to my "Rationalist Kantian Constructivism", see the workby Smith and Markovits discussed below. Much of this work is informed by Onora O’Neill’s groundbreaking Constructions of Reason. For further work in this spirit, see Carla Bagnoli’s and Stephen Engstrom’s contributions to Constructivism in Ethics. For a related view in the Kantian tradition that resists easy classification, see John Skorupski. Also compare Mark Schroeder, which incorporates recognizably Kantian elements within its theory of how reasons are tobe weighed against each other and James Lenman, whose view includes some elements that I associate with Kant below. Something similar also seems to me to be true of Kate Manne, although she would prefer to stress the Hegelian aspects of her views.

18 For a survey of the recent debate about these issues, see Patrick Kain. Compare the influential discussion in Allen Wood and Karl Ameriks, as well as Stephen Engstrom's The Form of Practical Knowledge, Sonny Elizondo, and Robert Stern.As I discuss below, in making these claims, I do not mean to deny that Kant's conception of practical reason is also a conception of autonomy. I am simply insisting that both of these conceptions are

In particular, an essential component of Kant’s conception of reason or rationality is a commitment to the various formulationsof the categorical imperative.19 And, sadly or not, many philosophers regard these formulations as indefensible. Thus, itseems strained to suggest that they involve normative commitmentsthat are beyond dispute.20

Moreover, Kant does not generally seem to have regarded the normative authority of practical reason in this sense to either require or permit further defense from a first person point of view.21 Rather, his considered opinion appears to have been that our awareness of the status of these rational requirements constitutes a Faktum der Vernuft for which no further proof or

robust and controversial enough to be poorly suited to play the role many constructivists seem to have in mind.

19 Korsgaard would, I think, challenge this point by arguing that the categorical imperative arises out of a prior need of reason or agencyto constitute ourselves as unified agents. But this does not affect the basic point being made here. For either this need is itself demanding enough to be controversial, or it is too weak to deliver the desired results.

20 Against this one might point to the Discipline of Reason in the first Critique, where Kant seems to begin with the thought that reason must be free, and then develops his conception of reason from this fact. (Compare O'Neill.) But what I am saying here shouldn't be taken to conflict with the thought that the laws of practical reason are ultimately grounded (metaphysically speaking) in facts about autonomy. The important point is that this does not change the fact that (at least in the second Critique) Kant believes that our understanding of ourselves as free is derived from our understanding of the moral law. And, more importantly, the conception of autonomy that is relevant in this context – like Kant's conception of practical reason – is robust and controversial enough that it is poorly placed to render serious debate about its normative significance moot.

21 An exception to this might be thought to be Kant’s discussion of these issues in Groundwork III. There is no space here to enter into the extensive interpretative debate about the relationship between the Groundwork on the second Critique. Many interpretations hold that Kant's views on these issues shift significantly between the Groundwork and the second Critique. (Ameriks) Personally, I am not convinced that this is the case. But I will focus on the discussion in the second Critique here, and leave the debate about Groundwork III to the side.

argument can be given. Thus, he writes that:

We can become aware of practical laws just as we are aware ofpure theoretical principles, by attending to the necessity with which reason prescribes them to us and to the setting aside of all empirical conditions to which reason directs us.(Critique of Practical Reason, 5:30)

Thus, to gain a consciousness of the moral law, we must simply reflect on the operations of our own rational faculty – and, in particular, to the manner in which this faculty determines us independently of empirical constraint. In this way, our consciousness of the moral law can be seen as the self-consciousness of pure practical reason – a consciousness that provides us with what Kant famously calls a "fact of reason":

Consciousness of this fundamental law may be called a fact ofreason because one cannot reason it out from antecedent data of reason, for example, from consciousness of freedom (since this is not antecedently given to us) and because it instead forces itself upon us as a synthetic a priori proposition that is not based any intuition, either pure or empirical (5:31)

Of course, the interpretation of these passages is the subject ofendless controversy, so nothing I say about them will be uncontroversial.22 But on a natural reading, far from beginning with a shared and uncontroversial conception of agency, Kant’s account of the foundations of morality (at least in the second Critique) begins with a conception of rationality (or reason) that does not require first-personal justification from any other source, while also involving quite non-trivial normative requirements.23

That said, it is important to stress that these claims relate to what Kant calls the ratio cognoscendi as opposed to the ratio essendi of the moral law. Thus, Kant’s point in these passages concerns our

22 For a helpful survey of the interpretative debate on these issues, see Patrick Kain.

23 I take these points to be independent of the long-standing debate about whether Faktum in this context is best translated as "fact" or "act" or "deed". Personally I think that all of these translations capture something important about the line of thought in these passages.

justification for accepting this law as valid and not the ultimate metaphysical foundations of its validity. As such, nothing I sayhere is meant to conflict with the plausible idea that the ultimate metaphysical foundation of the validity of the moral lawlies in the fact that we are autonomous.24 Rather, all I mean to be stressing is that Kant's considered view appears to be that itis impossible to justify the moral law to oneself via any independent appeal to the idea of oneself as free or autonomous. As I discuss below in Section 5, this is wholly compatible with the claim that there may be more to be said about the facts in virtue of which the moral law is valid.

In this way, Kant appears to have been much more skeptical than many contemporary Kantians of the search for a metaethical “Archimedean point” that would be free from non-trivial normativeassumptions. Of course, even Archimedes only claimed that he could lift the world from such a point given a lever of sufficientlength. So it might be more accurate to think of Kant’s conception of reason or rationality as providing us with such a lever – one that would be sufficient to introduce moral objectivity into any normative point of view, no matter its contingent features. But however we think of this metaphor, the basic point remains.

Before moving on, there is a further aspect of Kant’s account that is important for what follows. This account begins – not with a specifically practical conception of the relevant form of reason or rationality – but instead with a conception of reason as unified across the theoretical/practical divide.25 Thus, at least insofar as the contemporary focus on agency as the constructivist’s starting point suggests that the constructive procedure begins with and is constrained by something that is distinctively practical in character, Kant would have been skepticalabout this starting point.

24 As has been suggested by Allen Wood, Onora O'Neill, and Barbara Herman, albeit in very different ways.

25 See, for example: “I require that the critique of pure practical reason, if it is to be carried through completely, be able at the same time to present the unity of practical with speculative reason in a common principle, since there can, in the end, be only one and the same reason, which must be distinguished merely in its application” (4:391).

Given these two points, Kant’s own views suggest a different way of pursuing the constructivist project: one that begins with an attractive, but nonetheless non-trivial conception of reason or rationality and then builds upon this conception in order to explain how the remaining normative facts are grounded in it. Sucha view would abandon the idea that a satisfactory constructivist account must begin with a conception of agency whose normative significance is beyond serious dispute. And it would shift our focus from views that begin with a distinctly practical starting place to views that make a foundational appeal to a form of reason that is both practical and theoretical.26

Of course, so long as we understand “agency” or "autonomy" in sufficiently robust terms, we could continue to put these points in terms of the principles or norms that are constitutive of rational agency. But this way of putting things tends to (falsely) suggest that our account of these issues should be held hostage to questions in the philosophy of action that are independent of our understanding of the nature of rationality and the sort of autonomy that is characteristic of rationality as such. Thus, it seems to me much clearer to describe such views as beginning witha conception of reason or rationality.

In this way, through reflection on Kant’s own views, we arrive ata form of “reason-first” or “rationality-first” constructivism which attempts to ground the normative truth in the nature of ourvarious normative points of view through application of the “Archimedean lever” that is provided by the nature of rationality:

General Rationalist Constructivism: The truth or falsity of anormative judgment is grounded in facts about the relevant normative point of view – where this point of view is taken to be metaethically authoritative only insofar as it has beenmade to conform to the requirements of reason or rationality. 27

26 Compare again James’s discussion of these issues. Of course, one might challenge one of these lessons but not the other.

27 The nature of rational requirements has been the subject of much recent debate. See, for example, John Broome and Nico Kolodny. For our purposes, we can remain neutral about whether these requirements are, to use Nico Kolodny’s terminology, “state” requirements, “process” requirements, or both. In addition, note that Kolodny’s “skepticism” about the “normativity”

Any such view raises a series of important questions, only some of which I will be able to address here. One of the most important of these is exactly which normative point of view is relevant to a particular normative judgment’s truth or falsity. For example, many familiar forms of constructivism assume that the truth of a particular normative judgment should depend upon the normative point of view of its subject. But the truth of such a judgment might also be thought to be dependent on the point of view of the person making the judgment or the person assessing its truth.28 And any of these claims may be understood either in straightforwardly metaphysical terms, or in terms that avert to the semantic or pragmatic properties of normative thought and talk.

There are important costs and benefits to each of these options, which have important implications of how we think about constructivism. For example, if we choose to think of a judgment’s truth or falsity as grounded in the normative point ofview of the person assessing its truth, the structure of the constructivist’s view will begin to resemble contemporary forms of quasi-realist expressivism.29 Thus, the basic framework of General Rationalist Constructivism is flexible along a number of dimensions.

Unfortunately there is no space here to explore these options in detail. Thus, both for the sake of simplicity, and because such views have been the focus of the contemporary debate, I will limit my remaining discussion to views that take the truth or falsity of normative judgments to be grounded in the normative

of rational requirements is compatible with Rationalist Constructivism – since this project only requires an appeal to rationality as an evaluative notion. Nonetheless, the Rationalist Constructivist is likely to be skeptical of the terms of the Kolodny-Broome debate – which generally assumes that rational requirements can only be shown to be normative insofar as we can be shown to have reason to comply with them. For the Rationalist Constructivist, this way of setting up these issues goes wrong at the start, by inverting the true relationship between facts about reasons and facts about rationality.

28 For further discussion of this question, see my "Constructivism and Three Forms of Perspective-Dependence in Metaethics".

29 Compare Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard.

point of view of these judgments’ subjects. And I will focus on such claims as applied to facts about reasons in particular:

Rationalist Constructivism: What someone has reason to believe and do is grounded in facts about their normative point of view – where this point of view is taken to be metaethically authoritative only insofar as it has been made to conform to the requirements of reason or rationality.

Of course, in proceeding in this manner, the Rationalist Constructivist of course takes on certain philosophical burdens. First, she must defend the conception of rationality with which her account begins. And, perhaps more importantly, she must alsoexplain why this form of constructivism has genuine metaethical interest. After all, given that it begins with certain non-trivial rational principles, one may wonder whether it really matters if the constructivist is able to construct the other normative facts out of these. Or does the “small tincture of realism” that is involved in such a starting point expose the constructivist to all of the worries about realism that she hopedto avoid?

3. The Relationship between Rationality and Reasons

The beginnings of an answer to this question might be provided bythe observation that what one is a “realist” about on this account is a certain picture of the proper functioning of our rational faculties. Thus, while Rationalist Constructivism begins with certain foundational claims about rationality, these claims need not be seen as characterizing any sort of “robustly” mind-independent normative reality. Unfortunately, it will only be possible to develop this thought further by considering the costs and benefits associated with Rationalist Constructivism in detail. And in order to consider this, we need to first say moreabout how this view is best developed by someone with Kantian sympathies.

In this regard, we can begin by stressing that such views need not claim that the relevant facts about rationality are themselves reasons for belief or action. Rather, on this view, what rationality provides us with is the basic structure of the space of reasons-facts – something that does not require that facts about rationality themselves be reasons. Thus, developing a

rationality-first form of constructivism does not require one to take facts about rationality to be reasons in the manner that hasbeen the target of sustained attack by Kolodny and others. In short, although there is a quite abstract conception of rationality at the heart of these views, this conception merely provides us with a “formal characterization” of the domain of normative facts. In order to arrive at more determinate facts about various agents’ reasons, we must apply this form to the “matter” that is provided by the details of their emotional and social context.30

This should at least lessen the natural worry that such a view will involve a fundamentally "dogmatic" attitude towards the requirements of rationality at its heart. For, as we will see, while such a view does begin with a non-trivial conception of rationality, this conception only generates determinate constraints on an agent's beliefs or actions in virtue of the other elements of that agent's state of mind, together with the states of mind of those around her. Thus, while this very basic conception of rationality is not itself "constructed", it's primary role in this account is to provide an abstract structure for the procedure of construction, which in turn generates determinate facts about our reasons.31

30 An additional source of such specificity is our own understanding of the possibilities for action that are available to us as human beings. But, on this view, the normative significance of such natural facts about human beings is dependent upon the normative significance of rationality in general, as opposed to visa versa.For some discussion of how to think of the role of emotion or sensible desire in this context, see Sergio Tenenbaum, Tamar Shapiro,and my "Perception and the Rational Force of Desire".

31 Here it is helpful to reflect on what Kant took to be a problematically "dogmatic" attitude towards a principle. For Kant, dogmatism is opposed most fundamentally to the critical acceptance of some principle - where the latter requires a systematic investigationinto the nature of our faculties and their limits: "Dogmatism is therefore the dogmatic procedure of pure reason, without an antecedent critique of its own capacity." (Bxxxv) But this is completely compatible with the result of this investigation being a conception of these faculties on which they are characterized by the acceptance of certain non-trivial principles or aims. Indeed, for Kant, this is almost the normal result of such critical reflection. So a non-dogmatic attitude towards some principle need not, for Kant at least, imply that we can explain the status of this principle via

In keeping with this thought, the present focus on rationality byno means implies that rationality is something that individual agents are capable of achieving in isolation from one another. Thus, the ideal of rationality here is not that of a “sovereign” autonomous individual agent, ruling over limited sphere of Cartesian mental states – but rather that of an ideal, which may only be realizable for creatures like us through the development of a well-organized social community. As such, while it is crucial to this view that the seeds of this sort of rational capacity lie within all of us, it is not essential to it that this ideal be realizable (even in principle) by any human individualconsidered on their own. In this way, what is most important here is not the normative significance of my individual rationality,but rather the normative significance of rationality as such – however it is realized.32

But how does this “form” combine with the relevant “matter” to generate more determinate facts about reasons? To understand this, we need to answer two further questions. First, how exactly are facts about reasons grounded in facts about rationality? And, second, what exactly is the conception of rationality that this view appeals to, and how is it motivated?

The first of these issues relates to what it means when the constructivist speaks of the ability of a normative judgment to "withstand the scrutiny" of a normative perspective. This is an intuitive idea, but also an imprecise one. Indeed, there are a number of principles that the constructivist might appeal to to ground facts about reasons in facts about rationality.

some further "constructive" account of its origins. Rather, the mostbasic principles will have the status they do simply because their acceptance is constitutive of our basic faculties - faculties whose use is itself a necessary condition on (say) genuine empirical knowledge or genuine moral action. Also note that Kant sometimes speaks of the "moral law" as enabling a "dogmatic" presentation of certain principles. (5:67, 8:362)

32 Thus, as O’Neill has stressed, what matters most here is the “autonomy of reason” in general as opposed to the autonomy of this orthat particular rational individual. As should be obvious, these ideas allow the Kantian to take advantage of many of the insights associated with Hegelian work on the social character of rationality as a human achievement, as well as Habermas's work on these topics.

The most familiar of these connect together what an agent has reason to believe and do with what their ideally rational alter egowould believe or desire. Such accounts face worries generated bythe so-called “conditional fallacy” – i.e. by the fact that idealization often changes what an agent has reason to do or believe. (Shope) The standard response to such concerns involves moving to what Michael Smith has called the “advice model” of idealization. Thus, such views are generally phrased – not in terms of what one’s ideally rational alter ego would do or desireto do – but rather in terms of what they would desire or judge about one’s non-idealized self’s actions or desires:

Ideal Desire Rationalist Constructivism: What an individual has reason to believe and do is grounded in what that individual’s ideally rational alter ego would desire that theunidealized individual believe and do, given all the relevantknowledge of their non-normative circumstances.33

This is, perhaps, the most familiar version of such principles, but some have found the appeal to desire in this context troublesome, so the constructivist might also attempt to develop this idea via a principle which focuses on the judgments of one’s ideally rational alter ego:

Ideal Judgment Rationalist Constructivism: What an individual has reason to believe and do is grounded in what that individual’s ideally rational alter ego would judge about the unidealized individual’s reasons, given all the relevant knowledge of their non-normative circumstances.34

33 Compare Smith’s discussion in The Moral Problem.34 Pursuing this project requires a grasp of what it is to judge that

someone has a reason that is prior to a full specification of the reasons facts. Only then will we be able to understand how facts about reasons are grounded in facts about the judgments individuals would make about reasons. But provided that we can make sense of theFregean sense associated with the concept of a reason without providing a full account of its reference or extension, there is no reason to think that this will be impossible. Indeed, given some suchaccount, we can simply regard this principle as providing us with a picture of how sense determines truth-conditions in the special case of normative judgment. Such a story should remind readers of the account of these matters presented in Ralph Wedgwood’s The Nature of Normativity. Thus, while Wedgwood is himself a realist, there is much

Alternatively, one might try to avoid any reference to an idealized alter ego in this context by appealing to a connection between facts about reasons and the dispositions of thought or reasoning that are constitutive of good theoretical and practicalreasoning:

Good Reasoning Rationalist Constructivism: What an individualhas reason to believe and do is grounded in whether the disposition to be moved by some consideration is a good disposition of theoretical and practical reasoning.35

Or one might try to put this general idea in terms of generic claims about rational beings:

Generic Rationalist Constructivism: What an individual has reason to believe and do is grounded in whether a rational being would be moved by some consideration to believe or act.

Such views at least seems to dodge the concerns about the role ofidealization noted above, but brings with it other concerns in their stead.36 Finally, one might also try to spell out such a view by appealing to a notion of a “fitting response”, which is, in turn, explained by the nature of belief and action, together with the requirements of rationality:

Fittingness Rationalist Constructivism: What an individual has reason to believe and do is grounded in what it would be fitting for them to believe or do, given all the relevant facts about their non-normative circumstances and the

in his discussion that a constructivist could adapt to her purposes.35 See Kieran Setiya’s anti-rationalist account of reasons in terms of

virtuous dispositions of thought in Reasons without Rationalism.36 Most serious of these is the question of how we come up with the

relevant list of good dispositions of reasoning, given that the rationality of any local pattern of inference can be defeated by further aspects of an agent’s overall state of mind. If this is true, any account of the dispositions of good reasoning will have to describe these dispositions in terms that at least implicitly appeal to an agent’s global mental state. And once we take this step, it becomes unclear that this view can avoid the appeal to ideally rational agents that is characteristic of the first two views. (Compare Michael Smith’s review of Reasons without Rationalism).

standards of fittingness that follow from the nature of belief and action, when paired with the requirements of rationality.37

Each of these views has important costs and benefits, so I will not adjudicate between them here. Rather, I simply want to note that there are a variety of ways for a constructivist to establish a connection between reasons and rationality in a manner that is responsive to the context of particular agents. In the second section of this essay, I’ll turn to the conception of rationality at the core of Rationalist Constructivism, and then discuss some potential advantages of such an account.

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