Agency and Action in Aristotle
Introduction
Recent literature in ethics has seen the emergence of a position now labeled
‘constitutivism’. Various forms of this, most notably Kantian and Nietzschean1, have
been advanced as viable candidates to answer several challenges normally raised.
Alongside this development there appears to be a significant area of convergence
between the Aristotelian model and the constitutivist model. This paper will aim to
explore the nature of this convergence and establish whether an Aristotelian stripe of
constitutivism might provide the means for a useful synthesis. I will begin the paper by
outlining the story concerned with the grounding of norms and discuss how the
Aristotelian model might successfully map onto this, constitutivist, account.2 I will then
go on to look at some objections to constitutivism and show how this Aristotelian
version can provide good answers to the problems raised.
Section One: Three Challenges and the Constitutivist/Aristotelian Response
In his book Agency and the Foundation of Ethics: Nietzschean Constitutivism (Katsafanas, 2013)
Paul Katsafanas proposes three criteria an ethical theory must meet if it is to be viable.
These challenges are as follows:
1. The Epistemological Challenge:
A theory has to be able to account for
discontinuities in the evaluations moral agents hold and should also be able to
provide the tools to privilege one ‘evaluative schema’ over another. An ethical
theory must give us an account as to why we should have confidence in our current
moral judgments/beliefs.
1
For exemplars of recent work on constitutivism see Katsafanas (2013), Korsgaard
(2009, 2011), and Velleman (2009).
2 Christine Korsgaard, of course, claims that her version of constitutivism is a KantianPlatonic-Aristotelian model. It would appear, however, that there is serious reason to
doubt that Korsgaard’s Aristotle is compatible with Aristotle proper (and not just
another Kant in disguise). Much has been written on this topic, and a good place to
begin might be The Concept of Moral Obligation: Anscombe contra Korsgaard (Alvarez and
Ridley, 2007).
1
2. The Metaphysical Challenge: A theory should not rely on mysterious entities to
provide the authority for our judgments – we should not have to accept the
existence of mysterious properties to ground our ethical theory. An ethical
theory must be robust in the sense of ‘completeness’ – there must be no
unexplained/unexplainable elements of our theory.
3. The Practical Challenge: An ethical theory should be motivating. When there
are competing inclinations (self-interest, greed, altruism, sex, glory &c.) our moral
theory should be able to tell us why we should Φ and not ψ – that is, a moral
theory must be able to “explain why and how morality has this grip on us”
(2013:19)
Constitutivists argue that they can meet the three challenges by making a plea to the
nature of agency and action. They claim that an examination into the nature of action
will reveal a necessarily present component all actions share.
This component, or
‘constitutive aim’ is, according to the constitutivist, sufficiently determinate to be norm
generating.
The strategy usually adopted by the constitutivist is to provide a clear and define limit on
what counts as an action and offer good reasons for accepting the limitation as set.
Constitutivists argue for a distinction between actions and events (or actions and ‘mere
behaviours’). Korsgaard provides a helpful outline:
To regard some movement of my mind or my body as my action, I must see it as an
expression of my self as a whole, rather than as a product of some force that is at
work on me or in me. Movements that result from forces working on me or in me
constitute things that happen to me. To call a movement a twitch, or a slip, is at
once to deny that it is an action and to assign it to some part of you that is less
than whole.
(Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity, Pg. 18)
Actions are those happenings we ‘will’. Behaviours are those happenings we do not will
- the constitutivist is intending only to provide an account of those happenings you have
brought about, which is to say that the constitutivist is only aiming to give an account of
intentional action, and, therefore, only those things you can be held accountable for.
2
Some argue for the stronger claim that one can be held accountable for instances of
quasi-willed actions
–
these
are actions where
the
agent
is
not
acting
habitually/unreflectively, but has instead simply acted on a ‘rule’ or the dictates/demands
of some external authority, presumably under the illusion that the responsibility is nolonger their own. One can be held accountable for these quasi willed actions in virtue of
the fact that the agent should have known better than (attempt) to parcel-off the
ownership of their act. Indeed, this attempt is itself blameworthy in some (perhaps all)
cases. Doing something because a religious leader/therapist/politician told you to is no
less absurd than driving into the sea because the ‘sat-nav’ told you to ‘keep going
straight’. John McDowell (2009), discussing a theme analogous to ours, notes that
Aristotle’s ‘character-based’ ethics might be a conscious attempt to remove the
temptation for ‘rule-following’, when those rules are generated heteronomously, that is,
from some external authority:
Doing well is acting in the sort of way that is characteristic of people such as he
[Aristotle] describes. This indirection is just what we ought to expect, if he thinks
the content of a correct conception of doing well cannot be captured in a
deductively applicable blueprint for a life.
(The Engaged Intellect, Pg. 46)
This stronger ‘no moral sat-nav’ (or, ‘no moral blueprint’) claim is held implicitly and
explicitly by many constitutivists under the term ‘inescapability’, again, Korsgaard is very
clear that constitutivism will be concerned with denying these sorts of ethical systems:
Human beings are condemned to choice and action. Maybe you think you can avoid
it, by resolutely standing still, refusing to act, refusing to move. But it’s no use, for
that will be something you have chosen to do, and then you will have acted after
all. Choosing not to act makes not acting a kind of action, makes it something that
you do.
This is not to say that you cannot fail to act. Of course you can. You can fall
asleep at the wheel, you can faint dead away, you can be paralyzed with terror, you
can be helpless with pain, or grief can turn you to stone. And then you will fail to
act. But you can’t undertake to be in those conditions – if you did, you’d be faking,
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and what’s more, you’d be acting in a wonderfully double sense of that word. So
as long as you’re in charge, so long as nothing happens to derail you, you must act.
You have no choice but to choose, and to act on your choice.
(Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity, Pg. 1)
One cannot, by definition, intentionally fail to act.
Nor can one absolve oneself of
responsibility. If we grant the inescapability of action, the constitutivist’s next move is to
couple this with the idea that each action has a constitutive aim – with this development
the constitutivist project begins to take a more determinate shape:
(Constitutive Aim) Let A be a type of attitude or event. Let G be a goal. A
constitutively aims at G iff
(i)
each token of A aims at G, and
(ii)
aiming at G is part of what constitutes an attitude or event as a token of A.
(AFE, Pg. 39)
This is simply a definition of what it means to have a constitutive aim. Constitutivists
argue that actions are a sort of event that have an inescapable constitutive aim. The
claim is that if you are not aiming at ‘G’, you are not acting. Katsafanas provides a clear
definition of a constitutive aim (above), the application of which is easily drawn out: for
example each token of chess-playing aims to be resolved by checkmate – each player is
necessarily trying to force checkmate upon the other (if you are not aiming to checkmate,
or perhaps force a draw/stalemate, you are simply not playing chess) and aiming at
checkmate is what characterizes an instance of chess playing. Using this ‘constitutive
aim’, Katsafanas goes on to specify an outline of how we can evaluate the competence,
or ‘success’ of an instance:
(Success) If X aims at G, then G is a standard of success for X, such that G
generates normative reasons for action.
(AFE, Pg. 39)
If you are aiming to checkmate your opponent, then your ability to attain checkmate is
the standard of success. Further, if moving my knight to c4 is conducive to my end of
achieving checkmate, then moving my knight to c4 is something I should to do. Given
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(Success) we are now in a position to evaluate actions – an action is good iff it
attains/aides in the attainment of the goal, bad if it fails to attain/hampers the attainment
of the goal. Constitutivists transfer the ‘game model’ to agency: All actions aim at G,
aiming at G is what characterizes an event as an action. An agent is successful (qua
agent) if he/she is successful at achieving G/achieves G sufficiently frequently,
unsuccessful if he/she does not achieve G/achieves G sufficiently infrequently.
Compare this to what Aristotle says in the Eudemian Ethics:
[…] a shoe is the work of the shoemaker’s art and also of his shoemaking; and if
there is such a thing as the virtue of the shoemaker’s art, then the work of a good
shoemaker is a good shoe. So too in other cases.
(Eudemian Ethics, Bk II.1.20)
Presumably, a good (good) shoemaker is one who produces good shoes more frequently
than not. Discussions of the success of a shoemaker qua shoemaker can be expanded to
a discussion of an agent qua agent (and indeed, Aristotle does develop his discussion in
this way) – this discussion seems to not only resonate well with discussions of
‘flourishing’ (eudaimonia) and ‘function’ (ergon) in Aristotle, but seems to be actually the
same discussion. To establish the goodness or ‘success’ of an object, a detailed study will
– according to Aristotle – have to be undertaken to establish the relevant measure of
excellence for that object. Just so for the constitutivist who wants to measure the
success of an action in relation to what standard of excellence the nature of action itself
has.
Man (or ‘human agents’, henceforth ‘agents’), Aristotle claims, can be assessed in a way
similar to our chess player above – that is, through an investigation of how well he
performs his function. We can, according to Aristotle, ascertain what standard to hold a
thing to by looking at what [unique] function it performs. Agents, Aristotle argues, have
the unique function of engaging in rational activity:
Now if the function of man is an activity of soul which follows or implies a
rational principle, and if we say ‘a so-and-so’ and ‘a good so-and-so’ have a
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function which is the same in kind […] human good turns out to be activity of soul
exhibiting excellence […].
(Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. I.7, 1098a15)
This seems to hold against the epistemological challenge: our moral facts are given
authority in virtue of our capacity to assess a thing’s excellence in relation to a defined
function – we do not rely on the moral sensitivities of an agent, or the cultural ‘fashions’
of a society, to offer us an authoritative foundation. Further, Aristotle is able to satisfy
the metaphysical requirement – moral facts can be accounted for in a naturalistic fashion.
Normative ‘facts’ are derived from facts about the function of objects, not supernatural
entities.
Thus, to use Rosalind Hursthouse’s overview: “Virtue ethics […] [is the]
enterprise of basing ethics in some way on considerations of human nature, on what is
involved in being good qua human being […].” (Hursthouse 1999, Pg. 192.) This leads
us to the practical challenge, which Katsafanas argues is problematic for the Aristotelian:
Suppose I accept that human beings have a function, or that “human being” is a
normative kind. Why should this matter to me? Why should I care whether I am a
defective instance of my kind?
(AFE, Pg. 31)
This is a version of the ‘bindingness challenge’ to be discussed later, but for now the
charge is clear: ‘agent-centred’ virtue ethics is unable to give an account of why we should
aim to be the sort of thing Aristotle claims we ought to be. We can, perhaps, accept a
complete list of excellences ‘to cultivate’ in order to be a virtuous person – but why be a
virtuous person?3
Aristotle’s ‘ergon’ (function) argument is far from being exhaustive – his discussion is
made plausible by being tethered to discussions of eudaimonia and the virtues. The
question, ‘what is required for one to live well’, is answered by Aristotle through an
analysis of the necessary conditions one requires to flourish as a token of one’s type.
3
Katsafanas’s argument against Aristotle (that one has no reason to aim at being the
‘best token of one’s type’), is remarkably similar to his argument against Korsgaard’s
version of constitutivism (to be discussed below), indeed, I see no difference. So if
Katsafanas is prepared to accept Korsgaard as a constitutivist, it is not obvious that he
can hold these grounds against accepting Aristotle as a constitutivist.
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Aristotle argues that a virtuous character (that is, a character which displays the relevant
excellences) is the necessary and sufficient condition required for one to ‘live well’, or
achieve eudaimonia. Some may argue, ‘well, why care about achieving eudaimonia?’ – but it
could be at least plausible to suggest that eudaimonia is the goal at which all actions aim.
So, to answer Katsafanas’s criticism one should care if one is ‘defective’ because one
cannot escape aiming for one’s eudaimonia – which is attained, according to Aristotle, by
acting in accordance with excellences conducive to your functional type, and which,
hopefully, you have acquired, developed, cultivated and intuited. I will later argue that if
one does not care about ‘acting excellently’ – one is not an agent at all. The argument,
expressed briefly, would run thus:
P1. All agents aim for eudaimonia
P2. The virtues are the excellences required to achieve eudaimonia
C. One should develop one’s virtue.
The following offers an argument for premises one and two.
Aristotle categorizes the various forms of life in De Anima (indeed, this is a recurring
feature of several works, most notably including De Partibus Animalium and the Parva
Naturalia generally) along the principle of necessary and sufficient conditions; each ‘mode
of being’ (‘soul’) on the ‘hierarchy’ contains all the properties of the preceding stage.
What is necessary for man is that he is able to feed, move, and grow (the necessary and
sufficient criteria for vegetation), experience sensations (combined with feeding (&c.)
constitutes the necessary and sufficient condition to be classified as an animal).
However, the capacity to feed, move, grow, and experience do not make a man – for this
we need ‘reason’. Aristotle summarizes this argument in the Nicomachean Ethics:
Life seems to belong even to plants, but we are seeking what is peculiar to man.
Let us exclude, therefore, the life of nutrition and growth. Next there would be a
life of perception, but it also seems to be shared even by the horse, the ox, and
every animal. There remains, then, an active life of the element that has a rational
principle; of this, one part has such a principle in the sense of being obedient to
one, the other in the sense of possessing one and exercising thought. And, as ‘life
of the rational element’ also has two meanings, we must state that life in the sense
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of activity is what we mean; for this seems to be the more proper sense of the
term.
(Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. I.7, 1098a15)
If a soul hasn’t reason, it isn’t a person. That is to say, possessing reason is a constitutive
element of being human. Using our reason, Aristotle could claim (and does), is a
constitutive element of what we are as human agents. If we are not ‘reasoning’ 4 or
‘acting in accordance with some organizing, rational principle’ we are not agents. So,
Katsafanas’s charge that one has no reason to care if one is a ‘defective instance of one’s
kind’ is a non-starter: if ‘defective’ is taken to mean something like:
Defective: ‘a defective instance [of an agent] is one who is unable to act in
accordance with a rational principle’.
Defective ‘people’ are not people (for Aristotle) – which is clearly a nonsense. If,
however, ‘defective’ is taken to mean something like:
Defective*: ‘a defective instance [of agent] always aims to act in accordance with a
rational principle, but attains this goal to varying (sometimes negligible) degrees
(e.g. because of the akrasia problem)’
then this is a non-starter as a criticism from Katsafanas of Aristotle’s position (on both
defective and non-defective agents) as it seems to cohere completely with Katsafanas’s
outline of constitutivism.
Compare defective* with Katsafanas’s own outline of a
‘constitutive aim’:
(Constitutive Aim) Let A be a type of attitude or event. Let G be a goal. A
constitutively aims at G iff
(i) each token of A aims at G, and
(ii) aiming at G is part of what constitutes an attitude or event as a token of A.
(AFE, Pg. 39)
4
‘Reasoning’ takes on a technical meaning in Aristotle, a discussion of which will not be
embarked upon here.
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If Aristotle would hold defective* then it follows that he can accept both (i) and (ii) –
where, then, lies the disagreement?
Thus, the dispute between Katsafanas and the virtue ethic ‘position’5 is illusory, or, at
least, ‘dissolvable’, and it is unclear why Katsafanas would want to alienate such a,
potentially powerful (and useful), set of allies.
While Katsafanas provides an insightful analysis of why other ethical theories, including
Non-reductive Realism, Humeanism and Kantianism, do not satisfy the conditions
necessary to be a fully functioning ethical theory, I think I have shown that he fails to
show that Aristotelian accounts are also to be discounted, and certainly not discounted
for the reasons offered. However, I believe only that I have shown this to be the case in
virtue of the fact that Aristotle is more closely aligned with Katsafanas’s position than
Katsafanas himself considered. Aristotle offers a success condition (all actions aim at
eudaimonia), from this success condition norms can be generated (if one is faced with
doing either Φ or ψ, but Φ attains success to a higher degree than ψ, then Φ is
something I should to do). Aristotle can even give an account of how we might fail to Φ
and act ‘defectively’ (the problem of Akrasia).
This account seems to be highly
constitutivist.
Section Two: Problems for (Aristotelian) Constitutivism
While the constitutivist project has been well-outlined and well-defended by those who
hold it, it is certainly true that there remains a significant amount of scepticism. The
most prominent critic has been David Enoch. In this section I will examine Enoch’s
concerns and show that they are based on a misunderstanding of the constitutivist
position. In so doing, I also hope to bring out some of the more desirable features of
constitutivism.
Criticism One: ‘Bindingness’
5
I do not mean to suggest that virtue ethicists all converge in opinion. I just mean to say
that there is a ‘family resemblance’ in terms of the overall project embarked upon.
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David Enoch’s papers Agency Shmagency and Shmagency Revisited (2006, 2011) argue that
normativity cannot be derived from facts about agency. Enoch claims that the chess
analogy breaks down when we accept (which we have to) that the rules of chess apply to
an agent iff they are playing a game of chess – is it not entirely within the scope of the
player to simply stand up and say ‘I’ve had it with this game!’ and walk away?
But the game analogy, I think, is more complex. In order to have a reason to
checkmate your opponent, it seems to me it is not sufficient that you do in fact
play chess. Rather, it is also necessary that you have a reason to play chess […].
Suppose you somehow find yourself playing chess […], but you do not care about
the game and about who wins, nor do you have any reason so to care. It seems
rather clear to me that you have no reason whatsoever to attempt to checkmate
your opponent. And if a metanormative (or metachess) theorist then comes along,
explaining to you that attempting to checkmate your opponent is constitutive of
the game of chess, so that unless you engage in such attempts your activity will not
be classifiable as chess playing, it seems to me you are perfectly justified in treating
this information as normatively irrelevant. After all, what is it to you how your
activity is best classified? If you have no reason to be playing chess, then that
some aim is constitutive of playing chess gives you no reason at all, it seems to me
to pursue it, and this whether or not you are in fact playing chess.
If a constitutive-aim or constitutive-motives theory is going to work for agency,
then, it is not sufficient to show that some aims or motives or capacities are
constitutive of agency. Rather, it is also necessary to show that the “game” of
agency is one we have reason to play […].
(2006:185,186)
The norms generated by participation would evaporate as soon as the game finished. We
do not want to say, surely, that the bonds of morality evaporate as soon as an agent
decides to not participate in the ‘morality game’ anymore. To reduce the force of this
criticism Katsafanas distinguishes two ways in which constitutivism is reason providing:
(1) Constitutive Aims as Originative of Reasons: If you participate in an activity A,
then the constitutive aim of A is reason-providing.
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(2) Constitutive Aims as Transferring Reasons: If you have reason to participate in A,
then the constitutive aim of A is reason-providing.
(AFE, Pgs.48-49)
Enoch is assuming that the constitutivist is making recourse to the second, ‘transferring
reasons’, position. This version is a ‘bad fit’ for the constitutivist – the constitutivist is
not claiming that norms are binding iff you have a reason to be an agent; being an agent
is something you are not something you have a reason to be. This relates us back to
Korsgaard’s point above regarding the inescapability of action. You simply do participate
in activity. So the constitutivist has to hold, contra Enoch’s mischaracterization, position
one – Constitutive Aims as Originative of Reasons. The rest of Enoch’s paper, in which
he discusses variations of chess (called ‘schmess’), simply does not get off the ground as
there is no such thing as a variation of action that would not amount to action itself:
One can decide to play schmess instead of chess, but one cannot decide to
perform a schmaction instead of an action. For the very process of deciding or trying
to produce a schmaction would itself be an action, and would therefore manifest
action’s constitutive aim. After all, as I noted above, by “action” the constitutivist
just means intentional activity. Any intentional activity that the agent performs will
count as an action.
Thus, the idea that there could be a schmaction – an
intentional activity that is not an action – is self-contradictory.
(AFE, Pg. 54)
Criticism Two: Deriving ‘Ought’ from ‘Is’
The constitutivist aims to provide a naturalistic, descriptive, account of agency and the
nature of action then moves to provide a model for evaluating each action in light of
some success condition (derived from the descriptive account). Isn’t this a blatant
violation of the ‘Is/Ought’ fallacy? In many cases, such a move from description, e.g.
‘gay matrimony changes the definition of marriage’, to evaluation ‘therefore, gays should
not be allowed to wed’, is (in this case, vindictive) a blatant instance of poor reasoning.
Is the constitutivist guilty of reasoning poorly? In response, it is not obvious that the
constitutivist is making any sort of value claim by describing aims.
Consider the
following (bad) argument:
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1. Action aims at flourishing
2. Flourishing is valuable
The second position is, for the constitutivist, simply irrelevant.
Flourishing is the
measure of success for an action, if it is also of value to the person then that’s all well
and good, but this does not matter for the constitutivist. That flourishing, for the sake of
argument, is pursued is all that is required for the constitutivist.
All, however, is not well for the constitutivist – if all actions aim at, and attain (to widely
varying degrees), success, can the constitutivist give an account of why some actions are
bad actions? The constitutivist has to have a further claim that good actions are those
that attain, or come close to attaining (depending on one’s version of constitutivism) the
success condition to the maximal degree. Doesn’t the ‘Is/Ought’ problem slip back in?
Let’s revisit our chess example. If moving our knight to c4 (Nc4) is conducive to my
achieving checkmate (say, checkmate will be attained in four moves), then moving Nc4 is
something I ought to do, unless moving my knight to b5 (Nb5) is even more conducive to
my achieving checkmate (for example, if checkmate will be achieved fewer than four
moves). If it is the case that I aim to satisfy my success condition to the maximum
degree6, and Φ and ψ both attain success well, but Φ attains success to a higher degree
than ψ, then Φ is something I should (that is, ‘ought’) to do. It seems two options are
open to the constitutivist. Firstly, the constitutivist can deny that deriving ‘is’ from
‘ought’ is a fallacy in relation to hypothetical imperatives - isn’t this simply the form of
every goal directed behaviour? If running a marathon in under three hours is something
(after deliberation) you want to do, then going to the gym, eating healthily, investing in a
decent set of trainers (&c.) is something you ought to do. Secondly, while this is simply a
description of hypothetical imperatives it seems that categorical imperatives also mightn’t
succumb to the ‘Is/Ought’ concern; Searle claims (Searle, 1964) that there are cases in
which deriving ‘ought’ from ‘is’ is unproblematic, and offers the following example as
evidence:
1. Jones uttered the words “I hereby promise to pay you, Smith, five dollars.”
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This ‘maximum degree’ condition will/should be provided by whatever the
constitutivist substitutes in (success) for ‘G’. Korsgaard’s variety of constitutivism, the
‘self-constitution’ model, does not provide a good account of this.
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2. Jones promised to pay Smith five dollars.
3. Jones placed himself under (undertook) an obligation to pay Smith five dollars.
4. Jones is under an obligation to pay Smith five dollars.
5. So, Jones ought to pay Smith five dollars.
(Searle, Pg. 44)
I think the cases Searle discusses share the same category as the constitutivist cases of
deriving ‘ought’ from ‘is’. While it is obviously wrong to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’ in many
cases (the sky is blue, therefore I ought to eat cake demonstrates no obvious connection),
it is far from obvious, given Searle’s example, that ‘ought’ can never be derived from ‘is’.
Understanding the nature of what you are as an agent, and understanding your
commitments (which really amounts to the same thing for constitutivists) will necessarily
place you under obligations and direct your behaviour.
Problem Three: The Moral Sceptic/The ‘Psychopath Challenge’
This ‘necessity’, that is, the norms you are inescapably bound to in virtue of being an agent,
also helps with the problem of moral scepticism. This problem synthesizes concern one
and concern two. Consider a person who utters the following claim:
Morality is a consequence of evolution. The norms we accept as ‘moral law’ are a
product of natural selection. Those behaviours/actions that were/are helpful for
our survival (as a species) were called ‘morally good’, those that prevented or
hampered our survival were/are called ‘morally bad’. I can accept that this is the
case, but I have no reason to participate in the ‘evolution game’ anymore (I’m not
going to evolve further, I don’t plan on having children and I don’t care two hoots
for what happens to other people) so morality has no claim on me.
This is sometimes raised as the ‘psychopath’ challenge (in one variant of this story or
another) – what do we say to someone who recognizes that the ‘good’ thing to do is x,
but they see no reason to, or are not compelled to, x. Trying to tie our evaluative
statements to some other ‘natural’ fact (e.g. evolution/social cohesion/economic
flourishing &c.) has traditionally been seen as a potentially fruitful way to answer the
psychopath – however, each ‘natural grounding’ (so-called ‘non-moral’ grounding) we
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supply to motivate the psychopath runs into inevitable problems (‘sure, I accept that E is
based on N, but I don’t care about N either’ – the problem stated above). By trying to
ground ethics (E) on the nature of agency/action (N), isn’t the constitutivist doomed to
fail in the same way? Not if we remember that the project is supposed to provide good
reasons to accept that agency is inescapable (and, therefore, moral norms are inescapable
too). This necessity, or inescapability, of agency still (at first glance) takes the form E is
grounded on N, but it is far from obvious that the psychopath can remove the bonds of
morality in the same way. It is not within her scope to say, ‘sure, I accept that norms are
based on agency, but I’m not an agent so I’m not bound by the norms that follow’.
Removing the ‘Transferring Reasons’ (above) account of norms reduces the force of the
psychopath challenge. It does so, not by finding non-moral grounds for our moral
theory7, but by claiming that the distinction between non-moral and moral is, in this
sense at least, illusory. The above claim, that E is grounded on N, can be (must be)
altered by the Aristotelian constitutivist – there is no difference between some
descriptive and evaluative claims. To see a certain event is to automatically see what we
ought to do. Agency and action are both descriptive and (at the same time) evaluative.
The latter is the former, not merely derived from the former. Agency is a sort of ‘moral
fact’. Such sentiments have been held by the neo-Aristotelians generally, perhaps most
forcefully by Elizabeth Anscombe: ‘So far, in spite of their strong associations, I
conceive ‘bilking’, ‘injustice’, and dishonesty’ in a merely ‘factual’ way.’ More recently
John McDowell has defended a similar thesis8
Some may hear a language and fail to understand what is being said (this is the case if I
am in a room exclusively populated with people speaking Russian), others may hear the
same conversation and be able to make sense of the sounds.
My fellow (active)
conversant and I have access to the exact same ‘facts’ (sounds), but she is a superior
‘listener’ (agent) to me in virtue of having the relevant/correct engagement with what is
going on. Two people may observe an elderly gentleman struggle to find a seat on a bus
7
Robert Stern in his paper Moral Scepticism and Agency, argues that Korsgaard (and
constituvists generally) are guilty of trying to find non-moral grounds to base morals on.
While this strategy would obviously fail (for the reasons discussed), I think I have shown
that the distinction this rests on (and especially the claim that agency is non-moral)
means Stern’s criticism is a non-starter.
8
See ‘Autonomy and its Burdens’, and ‘Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical
Imperatives’.
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– one who is not compelled to offer their seat has, like the person ignorant of Russian,
simply failed to understand the facts.
While this line may open the paper up to cries of elitism – I’m not convinced this is a
problem as such. To say that some agents do not have a sufficient sensitivity relative to
the facts is not to claim that they could not develop this sensitivity. It is simply a sad truth
that many do not. Some people just fail to be good moral agents.
Conclusion
To conclude, I have shown that Aristotle, and the neo-Aristotelians, can be brought
under the umbrella of the constitutivist project. Further, I have offered reasons that it
may be desirable to do so. The first set of reasons I offered a negative account and was
concerned how the Aristotelian constitutivism manages to avoid impalement upon one
of the criticisms (usually) offered. The second set of reasons offered concerned offering
a positive account and was concerned with how the constitutivist can helpfully deal with
concerns that have plagued ethics hitherto. Specifically, I focused on the psychopath
objection and the fact/value distinction. Hopefully, this discussion will show how these
objections can be dealt with – it is important to notice that the psychopath objection
does not require us to participate with the objector on his level (that is, we do not need
to ground our moral theory on non-moral grounds) and so we avoid incurring even more
problems.
William Sharkey
Southampton
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