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Abstract
Constitutivists about moral norms are often suspected of providing an overly “self-centered” account of morality which does not take seriously enough morality’s interpersonal nature. This worry seems particularly pressing in the light of recent debates about the relational character of many moral norms. In this paper, I discuss one aspect of this worry, which concerns the special standing to complain which the victims of wrongdoing have. I argue that, contrary to appearances, Kantian constitutivism can explain this latter feature, since there is a special need for remedying the denial of equal moral standing of the victim and the impairment of the victim’s agency which any wrongdoing involves.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Erasmus Mayr is professor of philosophy at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg (chair for practical philosophy).
Notes
1 The self-centeredness worry has also been raised with regard to Aristotelian versions of constitutivism which try to trace back moral rules to considerations about what it is so lead a good human life. Here, too, the suspicion arises that these considerations are ultimately self-centered and that failing to meet moral rules does not turn out to be a distinctively moral failure. (See Wallace [Citation2019, 64].)
2 One might think that such a worry is misguided from the start since the constitutivist account is only meant to tell us why we should be bound by the rules of morality, but not (by itself) what these rules are and whether they express directed duties or not. (A similar point is made by Thompson in defence of Rawls on the question of whether Rawls can capture the relational duties arising from promising, Thompson [Citation2004, 339 fn. 14].) But constitutivists like Korsgaard cannot so easily avoid the challenge from relationality. After all, they want to derive at least general moral duties including their content from considerations of self-constitution. Furthermore, the story that they tell about the fault in failing to meet moral demands had better not be one which makes this failure a self-regarding one – and the worry is that this is exactly what they end up with. To meet this worry, they have to show why (at least many of) our moral duties should have a relational character.
3 It would be unfair to claim that Korsgaard herself is unaware of the following features. In (Citation1996, ch. 10), she explicitly discusses the special relationship between agents and (prospective) victims and argues that recognition of reasons requires acknowledging the claims of others on you (Citation1996, 298 and 301). But the worry is that these features are no longer recoverable within her constitutivist project in (Citation2009).
4 The failure is not merely other-related in some way or other, but specifically related to a particular other, i.e. the victim. It is therefore not enough to show that the failure concerns my relationship with the moral community as a whole or with each of its members.
5 This is a natural way to read the criticism of the Kantian project raised in Nozick (Citation1982, 550 f.).
6 Walden (Citation2018) draws on Wittgenstein and Davidson to argue that interpretability by others is a condition of agency.
7 Even though it may still have a moral character outside this domain as well: Even in theoretical discussions, others can demand of me that I give a justification.
8 This line of argument is suggested by Korsgaard herself in (Citation1996, 196 f.), where she draws on Strawson ([Citation1962] Citation2003), though she does not use this to solve the problem we are discussing here.
9 I am grateful to audiences in Oslo and Bern, as well as to Christian Kietzmann, for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of the paper.