O’Neill and Korsgaard on the Construction of Normativity

Over the past two decades it has become standard to construe Kant’s ethics as a paradigm of constructivism, standing in stark opposition to realism. Under such an interpretation, Kant’s ethics is based on constructive procedures that yield normative practical principles for us, rather than on facts about goodness that might ground such principles. While there is, no doubt, textual support for taking Kant to be specially concerned with such procedures, the motive for construing his ethical theory as constructivist is largely philosophical. Adopting such a constructivist interpretation would allow us to avoid the metaphysical commitments of realism, thus side-stepping the need to provide a metaphysical defense of the values in question, not to mention the difficulties of trying to explain how objective, non-constructed values fit into the metaphysics of the modern world and are consistent with the modern scientific worldview. Onora O’Neill and Christine Korsgaard have developed detailed constructivist interpretations of Kantian ethics, which they believe are more satisfactory than realist alternatives. However, both versions of constructivism encounter significant philosophical difficulties, making it worthwhile to consider what a more realist approach to Kant’s ethics might look like.2