The simple constitutivist move

Abstract

A common feature of all versions of constitutivism is the “simple constitutivist move” to the effect that engagement in any enterprise requires respecting the constitutive standards of the enterprise on pain of failing to engage in it. The move is both trivial and powerful in addressing skeptical challenges. I argue that this move only helps transmitting the robust authority of standards that are externally grounded, even when applied to functional items or constitutive aims. This is not a problem for modest versions of constitutivism, but more ambitious constitutivists seems to require supplementation to ground robust or authoritative normativity. Unfortunately, the usual appeal to inescapability is at best a defensive move. Ambitious constitutivism needs to look elsewhere in its search for a positive explanation of the source of robust normativity. The simple constitutivist move, even when combined with inescapability, is indeed too simple.

Keywords:

• constitutivism
• normativity
• constitutive aim
• inescapability
• shmagency

Acknowledgements

Previous versions of this paper were presented at the University of Bologna, Italy, University of Modena, Italy, SIFA, Modena, Italy, University of Campinas, Brazil and University of Bochum, Germany. Thanks to the audiences and organizers. Special thanks to Zachary Bachman, Carla Bagnoli, Christoph Bambauer, Jeremy Fix, Amy Flowerree, Matthias Haase, David Horst, Kathryn Lindeman, Eric Marcus, Erasmus Mayr, Michael Nelson, Scott Sehon, Matthew Silverstein, Sergio Tenenbaum, Luca Zanetti.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Luca Ferrero http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5316-6942

Notes

1 In Ferrero (2018) I used the expression “basic move” of constitutivism to refer to a different move: the appeal to inescapability for ambitious meta-normative constitutivism, which I discuss later in this paper. The SCM is more general in application than the “basic” move I discussed in previous work.

2 Notice that many enterprises are centered around distinctive ways of dealing with specific kinds of items, such as certain physical objects, organisms, or mental states. In these cases, the CS of the enterprise usually derive from what is constitutive of the items in question. When so, what is ultimately constitutive of these items can usually be characterized in descriptive rather than normative terms. For instance, consider a natural substance like gold. What is constitutive of gold is its chemical composition. This descriptive constitutive feature of gold can, in turn, set constraints and standards, and thus become part of the constitutive standards of those enterprises that, by their very nature, deal with gold as such (like gold-panning, the making of gold jewelry, or alchemy). I will discuss more extensively the relation between constitutive features of items and the constitutive standards of enterprises later in the paper.

3 The different interpretations of what “respecting” CS amounts to bear on the solution to the so-called “bad-action problem.” That is, the worry that constitutivism might be unable to allow for defective items or enterprises. In order for these defective entities to exist, it seems that either a constitutive feature must be missing or a constitutive standard must be violated. But how could these defective entities exist in violation of their own constitutive features or standards? (This is called the “bad-action problem” because it is usually raised when dealing with the application of constitutivism to agency.) If there are different ways in which one can be said to “respect” constitutive features or standards, depending on the nature of the items or enterprises in question, then it is possible that there is no unique answer to the bad-action problem but rather a set of different solutions that might apply to different kinds of items and enterprises (conversely, it might also be that there is no single version of the “bad-action” problem). For an example of an important discussion of defectiveness for constitutivism applied to functional entities, see Lindeman (2017).

4 For the distinction between formal and authoritative normativity, see Baker (2017). The distinction is often presented using different terms, see Côté-Bouchard (2016, footnote 4), some of which—especially “good” and “reason”—can be used ambiguously to characterize either kind.

5 The concern with the whence-question and its potential to ground normativity is what differentiates, to use Fix (n.d.)’s terminology, nature-constitutivism from norm-constitutivism.

6 Katsafanas (2018) acknowledges the controversial character of (Success), something that was not apparent in Katsafanas’ (2013) original elaboration of the view and for which he was rightly criticized, most prominently by Huddleston (2016), Ridge (2018, 2956) and Paakkunainen (2018, 448). Katsafanas has attempted to offer a fix by suggesting that constitutivist might rely either on the wide-scope requirement or on the inescapability of the aim. But neither solution works. As I said above, the wide-scope requirement is no more helpful than SCM. As for inescapability, see my discussion below.

7 An additional worry with a constitutivism centered around the threat of self-loss is that a genuinely threatening self-loss might only come with extreme violations of one’s own constitutive features and standards. If so, constitutivism might be unable to explain the authority of pressures to respect CS in the face of more moderate violations, see Kolodny (2005, 545) and Baker (2017).

8 In the most well-known versions, at stake is full-fledged intentional agency but my discussion here can be applied to all versions of what we might call “agency-constitutivism”—including those that appeal to less robust forms of agency. For a discussion of the relation between constitutivism and various kinds of agency, see Millgram (2010) and Lavin (2017).

9 Here I am only focusing on the ambitious aspiration in addressing the why-question. But this usually goes together with an equally ambitious aspiration in addressing the what-question, that is, with the aspiration to derive at least the most fundamental substantive norms of a large normative domain, such as morality or practical reason.

10 See for instance Bratman’s (2018, 14–17) account of how planning agency is constitutively related to our sociality and self-governance, and how it might enjoy a sort of inescapability on account of the combination of its deep entrenchment, its integration with much of what we take to be important to us, and its stability under rational reflection.

11 See also Velleman (2009); Tubert (2010); Walden’s (2012) “reflective closure;” Sussman (2015); Ferrero (2018); Flowerree (2018). See also Leech (2015) for a similar proposal about the “rational indubitability” of logical principles. In this discussion, I am offering dialectical inescapability as an illustration of standpoint inescapability. Nothing precludes that standpoint inescapability might be produced by other features of our agency, including the kind of “centered” and “non-absolutist” inescapability (my terminology) suggested by Lavin (2017, 188).

12 See also Zanetti (forthcoming)’s defense of a constitutivism based on the dialectical inescapability of cognition rather than rational agency.