Carla Bagnoli

In symmetrical moral dilemmas, the agent faces a choice between two incompatible actions, which are equally justified on the basis of the same value. These cases are generally discounted as spurious or irrelevant on the assumption that, when there is no failure of commensurability, choice between symmetrical requirements is indifferent and can be determined by randomization. Alternatively, this article argues that the appeal to randomization allows the agent to overcome a deliberative impasse, but it does not really resolve the moral dilemma. This is because randomization fails to provide the agent with a genuine reason for action. The argument is based on an account of arbitrariness as a threat to the agent’s authorship on action. By focusing on lack of authorship, rather than on failure of commensurability, we gain the adequate perspective to assess the philosophical significance of moral dilemmas, their impact on the agential integrity, and their consequences for ethical theory.

In this book, I consider whether the hypothesis of moral dilemmas undermines ethics' pretensions to objectivity. I argue against the view that moral dilemmas challenge the very possibility of ethical theory, as a practical and theoretical enterprise. By examining Kantian, Intuitionist and Utilitarian arguments about moral dilemmas, I show that no ethical theory is capable of avoiding them. I further argue that an adequate ethical theory should admit dilemmas. Dilemmas do not reveal a logical or normative flaw in the theory that permits them to arise, nor are they necessarily generated by subjective mistakes. Rather, dilemmas are a sign of the deliberative capacity of an agent who operates in non-ideal conditions of rationality and cooperation. The inevitability of moral dilemmas shows that we should reconsider the bounds of deliberation, and the purposes of ethical theory. My argument for the philosophical significance of moral dilemmas rests on the claim that an adequate ethical theory should make sense of moral phenomenology, and that moral phenomenology should to be understood from the perspective of an agent who conceives of herself as an agent. The view of moral dilemmas I advocate does not invite skepticism about ethical theory, but suggests that we redefine its scope and its many practical aims.

An agent is faced with the prospect of saving a few thousand persons by sacrificing his life. Is he morally obligated to do so? To sacrifice oneself in order to save the many is morally admirable, but whether it is morally obligatory depends on how numbers are supposed to matter. There is a large agreement that whenever the agent must choose between helping a larger or a smaller number of people facing the same harm, he is morally required to help the larger number. This claim is supported by our ordinary intuitions, and its philosophical justification rests on two seemingly plausible presumptions: that human life is valuable and that disproportion in numbers is relevant. The basic argument for the conclusion that there is a moral obligation to save the many is that numbers are tiebreakers when persons are assigned the same value. The case at hand is complicated by the fact that the agent’s own life is at stake. The puzzle is this. On the one hand, if each person is assigned the same value, and moral claims of different persons add up, the agent is in no special position to plea for his life against the lives of the many; hence, his self-sacrifice is not only admirable but also morally obligatory. On the other hand, as Robert Nozick puts it, “to use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has.” I argue that this “puzzle of altruism” is a genuine moral dilemma, where there are conflicting grounds for obligation, but no determined obligation is justified. To establish this case, I introduce some stipulations that help characterize the puzzle more precisely. First, I stipulate that the agent had no part in originating the predicament: the puzzle is a case of moral perplexity simpliciter rather than perplexity secundum quid. Had the agent originated the predicament, he could be expected to fulfill a moral obligation to save the many. Second, the agent cannot reasonably expect or anticipate that somebody else would intervene on his behalf or in his place. Third, the agent occupies no institutional role and therefore his self-sacrifice is not required on the basis of special responsibilities associated with his position. Fourth, only the agent knows of the predicament and no one else does, so he is not subjected to external social pressure or exposed to blame. Finally, the agent’s ordinary psychological capacities are intact, e.g. he is not depressed, anti-social, self-destructive, or self-loathing.

In his original essay, The Form of Practical Knowledge, Stephen Engstrom argues for placing Kant’s ethics in the tradition of practical cognitivism. My remarks are intended to highlight the merits of his interpretation in contrast to intuitionism and constructivism, understood as ways of appropriating Kant’s legacy. In particular, I will focus on two issues: first, the special character of practical knowledge—as opposed to theoretical knowledge and craft expertise; and second, the apparent tension between the demands of morality and the requirements of instrumental reason, when this is understood as driven by concerns for happiness, prudence, and personal integrity.

Se è un difetto della ragione essere incapaci di adottare certi mezzi, allo stesso modo è un difetto della ragione essere incapaci di adottare certi fini, dicono i kantiani. Secondo Blackburn questa tesi non-strumentalista deve la sua apparente validità ad una fallacia modale. Dal condizionale «Se si adotta il fine X, è necessario adottare il mezzo Y», si deriva il conseguente «Si deve adottare il mezzo Y», ci si interroga sulla natura del modale che occorre nel conseguente, poi si ricostruisce l’antecedente come «E’ necessario adottare il fine X» e infine si ricostruisce il condizionale come «Se è necessario adottare il fine X, è necessario adottare il mezzo Y». Il non-strumentalista è così portato a credere che la stessa normatività che è contenuta nel principio strumentalista deve essere derivata dalla normatività dei fini (p. 242).

G. A. Cohen and J. Raz object that Constructivism is incoherent because it crucially deploys unconstructed elements in the structure of justification. This paper offers a response on behalf of constructivism, by reassessing the role of such unconstructed elements. First, it argues that a shared conception of rational agency works as a starting point for the justification, but it does not play a foundational role. Second, it accounts for the unconstructed norms that constrains the activity of construction as constitutive norms. Finally, on this basis, it draws a contrast between constructivist and foundational methods of ethics, such as deontology and teleology.

My purpose in this paper is to challenge this account of the nature of ethical judgments, and suggest that the reconciliation of their practicality and objectivity is not a genuine philosophical problem. The real issue is rather how to account for the fact that we consider our moral judgments important, authoritative, expressive of our moral personality and of our moral vision, and in this sense both objective and practical. The argument that supports this proposal is phe- nomenological. It starts with the phenomenological consideration that the agent experiences ethical judg- ments as normative: they are conceived and experienced as authoritative and as such as to inform one’s life in a special way. To take phenomenology at face value is to make the experience of the agent intelligible. My conclusion will be that neither realism nor non- cognitivism in their crudest versions engage in the search for the intelligibility of our moral experience, and for that reason they are not appealing alternatives. In their softer and sophisticated versions, both realism and non-cognitivism purport to explain moral phenom- enology, but employ inadequate explanatory devices that seriously compromise their account. As I will argue, the phenomenological argument leads toward a construc- tivist account of ethical judgments. The conception of constructivism I advance is a form of cognitivist irrealism, thus opposed both to realism and non- cognitivism. Here is how my argument will proceed. In section 1, I characterize the debate on ethical objectivity as exploiting the realist image of discovery and the non- cognitivist image of invention. With Wiggins I argue that these alternative metaphors fail to account for moral phenomenology. In section 2, I examine Simon Blackburn’s non-cognitivist reply that utilizes the image of projection, and argue that while more sophisticated than the previous ones, this solution does not account for the authority of ethical judgments. In section 3, I take into consideration McDowell’s analogy between values and secondary qualities and the metaphor of vision. My claim is that his argument succeeds in ruling out realism and non-cognitivism on phenomenological grounds, but it is insufficient as an account of values. My point is not simply that the analogy with percep- tion is limited and incomplete, but that it is inadequate to account for the normative relations that the agent establishes with her surroundings. In section 4, I argue that the appeal to phenomenology supports construc- tivism about normative relations and expose its features. Finally, in section 5, I show the merits of construction as an explanatory device.

Constructivism in ethics is the view that insofar as there are normative truths, for example, truths about what we ought to do, they are in some sense determined by an idealized process of rational deliberation, choice, or agreement. As a “first-order moral account”--an account of which moral principles are correct-- constructivism is the view that the moral principles we ought to accept or follow are the ones that agents would agree to or endorse were they to engage in a hypothetical or idealized process of rational deliberation. As a “metaethical account” – an account of whether there are any normative truths and, if so, what they are like – 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. In working to provide a more precise definition of constructivism in metaethics, the focus of this entry, one faces two main difficulties. The first difficulty is that constructivism comes in several varieties, each of which claims a different niche within metaethics, and some claim no space at all. The second difficulty concerns where to place constructivism on the metaethical map in relation to realism and anti-realism. These are terms of art, and it is highly contested which views count as realist and which as antirealist. These two difficulties will be addressed in what follows by focusing on the distinctive questions that constructivist theories are designed to answer. Section §1 defines the scope of constructivism in ethics, in contrast to constructivism in political theory. Sections §§2-5 illustrate the main varieties of metaethical constructivism, which are designed to account for the nature of normative truths and practical reasons. Section §6 presents the main varieties of constructivist accounts of the justification of moral judgments of right and wrong. Section §7 discusses the metaethical status of constructivism, and its distinctive import.

This paper situates the problem of defeaters in a larger debate about the source of normative authority. It argues in favour of a constructivist account of defeasibility, which appeals to the justificatory role of moral principles. The argument builds upon the critique of two recent attempts to deal with defeasibility: first, a particularist account, which disposes of moral principles on the ground that reasons are holistic; and second, a proceduralist view, which addresses the problem of defeaters by distinguishing between provisional and strictly universal principles. The particularist view fails to establish that moral principles have no epistemological import, but it raises important questions about their role in practical reasoning. The proceduralist view fails to distinguish between reasoning by default and reasoning by principles, but it shows that moral principles have a structural justificatory role. The constructivist view recognizes that the moral valence of normative claims vary across contexts, but denies that this is because of holism about reasons. Rather, it defends defeasibility within a constructivist account of reasoning where universality serves as the matrix of judgment. The constructivist view vindicates the justificatory role of universal moral principles, and makes room for some ordinary sources of defeasibility.

This chapter aims to situate Kant’s account of practical reason in metaethical debates. First, it explains the reasons why it is legitimate and instructive to discuss Kant’s relevance in contemporary metaethics, hence addressing some issues about the intended scope of metaethics and its relation to practical reason and psychology. Second, it defends an interpretation of Kant’s conception of autonomy, which avoids some paradoxes traditionally associated with self-legislation. Third, it shows that constructivism best captures Kant’s conception of practical reason and of its authority. Kantian constructivism is defended as a self-standing metaethical theory, which is designed to account for the objectivity and unconditional authority of practical knowledge, on the basis of standards congruent with shared subjective experience. This version of constructivism, adopting a “dialogical” interpretation of the autonomy of rational will, explains how finite rational agents are obligated and bound by the moral law.

It is largely agreed that if constructivism contributes anything to meta-ethics it is by proposing that we understand ethical objectivity “in terms of a suitably constructed point of view that all can accept” (Rawls 1980/1999: 307). Constructivists defend this “practical” conception of objectivity in contrast to the realist or “ontological” conception of objectivity, understood as an accurate representation of an independent metaphysical order. Because of their objectivist but not realist commitments, Kantian constructivists place their theory “somewhere in the space between realist and relativist accounts of ethics” (O’Neill 1988: 1). Furthermore, they argue that their practical conception of objectivity succeeds in making sense of certain features of morality, such as its categorical authority and its relation to rational agency, which escape rival theories (Korsgaard 1996b, Korsgaard 2003b). To this extent, constructivism claims a privileged place in meta-ethics. The legitimacy of this claim is widely challenged. Precisely because of its practical conception of objectivity, many – including some constructivists — regard constructivism as a first-order normative theory, rather than as a meta-ethical position, hence not on a par with realism. Some critics object that constructivism fails to offer a distinct meta-ethics because it is structurally incomplete and thus must be combined with a fully-fledged meta-ethics (Hussain and Shah 2006); others argue that it tacitly relies on realism (Timmons 2003; Shafer-Landau 2003; Larmore 2008). Thus far, the debate about the prospects of constructivism as a meta-ethical theory has been driven by the conviction that the case for or against constructivism depends on its ontological commitments. In this chapter, I propose a change in perspective. My aim is to defend constructivism as an objectivist account of practical knowledge. Its defining feature is the claim that practical knowledge is knowledge by principles. Its task is to establish a constitutive relation between knowledge of oneself as a practical subject and knowledge about what one ought to do. By focusing on the issue of practical knowledge I hope to show that the difficulty in situating Kantian constructivism firmly on the meta-ethical map, along with other meta-ethical theories, reflects ambiguities and oscillations about the practical significance of ethics. Even though the term is ambiguous, I retain the qualification “Kantian” for the constructivist theory I outline, and for two reasons. First, while the theory I outline differs from current agnostic or anti-realist variants, it is closer to its origins, since Kant treats practical reason as a cognitive capacity and takes moral judgments to be objective moral cognitions, which importantly differ from other sorts of rational cognitions because they bind us in the first person. Practical cognitions are common knowledge because they are such that all subjects endowed with rationality can arrive at them by reasoning and find them authoritative. Thus understood, Kantian constructivism carves a distinct logical space in the meta-ethical debate that other sorts of constructivism fail to identify. This is the second reason for keeping the qualification “Kantian”. On this formulation, constructivism is antagonistic to non-cognitivist theories denying that moral judgments have cognitive contents, because they deny that there is something to be known; but it is also a rival to cognitivist theories denying that knowledge can be practical in itself. How constructivism differs over the realist theories of practical reason is the least understood aspect of this debate. This essay aims to make the case that practical reason is both discursive and emotional. In contrast to foundational and anti-realist accounts of practical reasoning, it attempts to show that the moral feeling of respect plays a cognitive but non-evidential role in the account of the cognitive and practical powers of reason. The argument proceeds as follows. In section 1, I consider some prominent constructivist arguments against the model of applied knowledge and show that they are driven by non-cognitivist assumptions about the practicality of ethics and the legitimacy of epistemological claims. In section 2, I argue that these arguments do not succeed in disposing of the idea of practical knowledge as incoherent, because they trade on an ambiguity regarding the proper object of practical knowledge. To solve this ambiguity, I turn to Anscombe’s contrast between “practical” and “speculative” knowledge as models for understanding action. I thus suggest that Anscombe’s account of practical knowledge as knowledge of oneself as an agent is an important resource for Kantian constructivism. This finding prompts us to reset the current dispute about the ontological and epistemological commitments of Kantian constructivism, as illustrated in section 3. While constructivism does not postulate any moral ontology prior to reasoning, it attributes to reasoning the cognitive powers to establish a distinctive relation between the agent and her action. The task of sections 4-7 is to account for the distinctive features of Kantian constructivism understood as an objectivist account of practical knowledge. In section 4, I argue that in order for reasoning to accomplish its normative tasks, it should be conceived as a self-legislating activity. I respond to some objections to the idea of self-legislation as the form of rational willing by offering a dialogical view of practical reason. In section 5, I propose a non-standard interpretation of Kant’s argument of “the fact of reason” to show that the constructivist account of self-legislation does not build on realism about value, as its detractors claim. The “basis of construction” is the subjective experience of respect for the self-legislative capacity itself. This moral feeling conveys our awareness of rational agency and shows our responsiveness to the demands of practical reason. It is an emotional mode of practical knowledge of oneself as an agent (in the sense specified in section 2), but not as a mode of moral discernment. In section 6, I show how practical knowledge of oneself as an agent relates to practical knowledge about what one ought to do. I thus account for the relation between respect as emotional moral consciousness and respect as a deliberative constraint. Finally, in section 7, I reply to the objection of subjectivism. I explain how the complex sort of objectivity that Kantian constructivism affords is at the same time more ambitious and more modest than is generally assumed.

This article argues that immoralists do not fully enjoy autonomous agency because they are not capable of engaging in the proper form of practical reflection, which requires relating to others as having equal standing. An adequate diagnosis of the immoralist’s failure of agential authority requires a relational account of reflexivity and autonomy. This account has the distinctive merit of identifying the cost of disregarding moral obligations and of showing how immoralists may become susceptible to practical reason. The compelling quality of reason should not be represented as the capacity to force them to abide by morality on pain of incoherence. Rather, its authority (and objectivity) is shown when it presents them with the prospect of a transition that makes sense for them to undertake.

This paper takes a constitutivist approach to self-deception, and argues that this phenomenon should be evaluated under several dimensions of rationality. The constitutivist approach has the merit of explaining the selective nature of self-deception as well as its being subject to moral sanction. Self-deception is a pragmatic strategy for maintaining the stability of the self, hence continuous with other rational activities of self-constitution. However, its success is limited, and it costs are high: it protects the agent’s self by undermining the authority she has on her mental life. To this extent, self-deception is akin to alienation and estrangement. Its morally disturbing feature is its self-serving partiality. The self-deceptive agent settles on standards of justification that are lower than any rational agent would adopt, and thus loses grip on her agency. To capture the moral dimension of self-deception, I defend a Kantian account of the constraints that bear on self-constitution, and argue that it warrants more discriminating standards of agential autonomy than other contemporary minimalist views of self-government.

In this chapter, I compare and contrast Kant’s and Sidgwick’s arguments in defense of moral cognition as objective practical knowledge. Kant focuses on practical truths in terms of practical laws governing the mind in action, while Sidgwick is concerned with practical truths about action. I argue that this is a crucial difference in the understanding of practical knowledge, which is matched by a different understanding of moral phenomenology and of the significance of subjective experience in accounting for the authority of moral obligations. Key to these differences is a more fundamental divergence regarding the nature of reflection, its dynamics, and its impact on agency.

According to a traditional account, moral cognition is an achievement gained over time by sharing a practice under the guidance and the example of the wise, in analogy with craft and apprenticeship. This model captures an important feature of practical reason, that is, its incompleteness, and highlights our dependence on others in obtaining moral knowledge, coherently with the socially extended mind agenda and recent findings in empirical psychology. Insofar as it accords to exemplars decisive authority to determine the standard of correctness for moral cognition, however, the model does not offer protection against arbitrariness and discrimination. The article argues that to understand the socially distributed nature of practical knowledge, we have to discard the notion of exemplars and reconceive of others as peers, i.e. having equal normative standing. This claim allows us to revisit the conception of autonomy as key to distributed practical knowledge. While autonomy does not amount to self-sufficiency and self-reliance, it does demand independence of judgment and stands in contrast to servility, submission, and other sorts of defective ways of relying on others. The requirement of equal standing provides the basis or distinguishing between proper and improper reliance on others.

In this chapter, I examine the concept of vulnerability as a complex constitutive feature of human agency and argue that it is both a constraint on and a resource for practical reasoning. When discussed as an ontological feature of human agency, vulnerability is primarily understood as an aspect of embodiment, which is problematic in different respects. First, in relation to the situatedness of human agency, vulnerability indicates that human agents are subjected to contextual contingencies. Second, in relation to temporality, vulnerability indicates that agents act in time and under the pressure of time. They are finite and produce finite and perishable actions, even though the longlasting effects of an action may survive the action itself. Third, in relation to corporal feature of agency, vulnerability is associated to suffering and frailty, insofar as bodily needs and desires represent both springs of and hindrances to rational action. Finally, in relation to the social nature of human animals, vulnerability indicates the susceptibility to be harmed, obstructed, undercut or manipulated by other agents These varieties of vulnerability are constituive features of human agency, which cannot be removed without removing what is peculiar and specific to human agency. Theories of practical reason are primarily concerned with constitutive vulnerability as a defect, and presume to offer normative guidance by adopting an idealized account of rational agency, which corrects or merely cancels the defective features of human agency. By contrast, theories of bounded rationality understand practical reasoning instrumentally, and thus are concerned with cognitive limitations of practical rationality, in particular with partial and perspectival information. However, the notion of “partial information” is inadequate to capture the complexities and significance of vulnerability, even in its restricted cognitive sense, which has to do with the agent’s situatedness. On the view I propose, instead, vulnerability is declined as a constitutive constraint on practical reasoning. Susceptibility to time constraints makes sense of the agents’ engagement in action and of their distinctive deliberative perspective. Susceptibility to bodily needs and desires tracks the normative relation between motivations and reasons for action, as well as the corporal roots of the agents’ efficacy in a perceived context. Susceptibility to others makes possible to broaden the scope and the modes of individual agency, by way of inter-action and shared agency. Rather than the source of problems and issues for rational agency, I take vulnerability to name the cluster of constitutive constraints that shape practical reasoning. According to the distinctive variety of Kantian constructivism I defend, practical reason is incomplete, rather than imperfect or defective. The completion of practical reason does not aim to correct or dissolve vulnerability, but deploys vulnerability as a resource to build up autonomy. This view accounts for autonomy as a normative relation among vulnerable agents, which develops in time.

According to an anti-realist argument, realist accounts of supervenience face the following dilemma: either they accept naturalistic reduction, an ontological claim about the nature of normative properties that is incoherent with their defining agenda, or they recognize that their agenda is based on a queer ontology, which is at risk of being unintelligible. In a recent defense of robust moral realism, David Enoch recognizes that this is a serious challenge but argues that it is not a conclusive argument against to moral realism because queerness is after all tolerable. His strategy is to minimize the costs of admitting queerness by focusing on the explanatory role of moral principles, in analogy with law. This is a promising approach to the problem of supervenience, but it is doubtful as strategy. I will show that in favor of moral realism. In fact, if all the explanatory work is done by normative principles, there is nothing for the realist account of supervenience to do. In this paper, I argue that this debate about normative supervenience rests on a misunderstanding of the role of normative principles. As an alternative, I offer a constructivist explication of the epistemic and ontological role of normative principles, which proves the notion of supervenience to be redundant. The advantage of this constructivist approach to supervenience is that it directly addresses a legitimate demand for an explanation of the function of normative discourse, which is often kept in the background. In providing a response to this demand, this constructivist argument also shows – pace Enoch and others – that an account of practical reasoning is not only pertinent but also essential to successfully address the meta-ethical issue of supervenience.