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Neo-Kantian Constructivism and Metaethics NEO-KANTIAN CONSTRUCTIVISM AND METAETHICS by KIRK SURGENER A thesis submitted to the University Of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of Philosophy College of Arts and Laws The University of Birmingham September 2011 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. I’d like to thank Alex Miller for giving me all the arguments in this; Joe Morrison and Darragh Byrne for printing it; Iain Law and Hallvard Lillehammer for examining it; and Naomi Maria Callas Thompson and Natalie Ashton for proof-reading it. I’d also like to thank all the people who have argued with me about the contents over the years, including but not limited to: Jussi Suikkanen, Ben Matheson, Ben (II) Bessey, Roxanne Harmony Green, Paul ‘The Broadbean’ Broadbent, Khai Wager, Callum Hood, Anna Brown, Damian ‘John’ Lewis, Helen Louise Crane, David Papineau, Philip Goff, ‘Nikk’ Effingham, Helen Beebee, Joss Walker, Max Kölbel, Sarah-Louise Johnson, Gis Infield-Solar, Mihaela Popa, Sarah Gancarczyk, John Gingell, Kate Major, Pegah Lashgarlou, Sorana ‘Piggy’ Vieru, Melanie Parker and Emma Cecilia Bullock. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: THE NORMATIVE QUESTION AND MORAL REALISM 5 ñ 1.1 The Normative Question 6 ñ 1.2 Substantive vs. Procedural Realism 13 ñ 1.3 Korsgaard Against Moral Realism 18 ñ 1.4 Korsgaard’s Rejection of Realism and the Distinction between Normative Ethics and Metaethics 23 CHAPTER TWO: INTERNALISM 37 ñ 2.1 The Normative Question: Moore, Mackie and Internalism 38 - 2.11 The Normative Question and Moore’s Open-Question Argument 39 - 2.12 The Normative Question and Mackie’s Argument from Queerness 42 - 2.13 Judgement Internalism 46 - 2.14 Internalism and the Open-Question Argument 49 - 2.15 Internalism and the Argument from Queerness 52 - 2.16 The Normative Question, Internalism, the Argument from Queerness and the Open-Question Argument 54 ñ 2.2 Internalism vs. Externalism 60 - 2.21 The Amoralist and the Inverted-Commas Response 62 - 2.22 Smith’s Response to the Amoralist Challenge 63 - 2.23 The Strength of the Amoralist Challenge 67 - 2.24 The Argument from Fetishism 71 - 2.25 van Roojen on Rational Amoralism 85 - 2.26 Rationalism, Internalism, Relativised Rightness and Frege’s Puzzle 87 - 2.27 Internalism and Rational Amoralism 96 CHAPTER THREE: THE GENERALISED ANTI-VOLUNTARISM ARGUMENT AND MORAL REALISMS 115 ñ 3.1 Voluntarism 119 ñ 3.2 Voluntarism Reconsidered 121 ñ 3.3 Externalist Moral Realism 130 - 3.31 Analytic Naturalism 131 - 3.32 Cornell Realism 147 - 3.33Moral Properties and Ontological Commitment 147 - 3.34 Program Explanation 153 - 3.35 Cornell Realism’s Semantic Programme 164 CHAPTER FOUR: THE NEO-KANTIAN AND EXPRESSIVISM 184 ñ 4.1 Expressivism 185 ñ 4.2 The Neo-Kantian Rejection of Expressivism 189 ñ 4.3 The Frege-Geach Problem 198 - 4.31 Higher-Order Attitudes 202 - 4.32 Inconsistency in Content 204 - 4.33 Hierarchy of Attitudes 206 - 4.34 Adding Structure to the Attitude 207 ñ 4.4 Hybrid-Expressivism 213 - 4.41 Ecumenical Cognitivism v Ecumenical Expressivism 214 - 4.42 Ecumenical Cognitivism and Judgement Internalism 219 - 4.43 Ecumenical Expressivism and the Frege-Geach Problem 222 - 4.44 Ecumenical Expressivism does not Solve the Frege-Geach Problem 226 - 4.45 Ecumenical Cognitivism does not Capture Judgement Internalism 235 - 4.46 Diagnosis 239 ñ 4.5 Realist-Expressivism and Neo-Expressivism 242 ñ 4.6 Hybrid-Expressivism and Neo-Kantianism 252 CHAPTER FIVE: NEO-KANTIAN CONSTRUCTIVISM 255 ñ 5.1 Neo-Kantian Constructivism and Judgement-Dependence 256 ñ 5.2 The Derivation of the Categorical Imperative 272 ñ 5.3 Constitutivism 282 ñ 5.4 The Inescapability of Agency 286 ñ 5.5 The Standard Objection to Kant 293 CONCLUSION 301 BIBLIOGRAPHY 304 INTRODUCTION Why should I be moral? This question gets to the heart of the normative problem, that is, the problem of grounding the normative force of moral obligations. People who take the normative problem seriously think that even once we have determined which actions are right or which objects are good there is still a question to be raised – why should we perform right actions? Why should we pursue good objects? In some cases what morality asks of us can be hard and the normative problem there seems particularly pressing. Christine Korsgaard has used the normative problem to launch arguments against two of the most popular metaethical accounts – moral realism and expressivism. She argues that reflection on the normative problem forces us to reject moral realism and expressivism, and adopt a position which ‘transcends’ or ‘goes beyond’ metaethics as it is traditionally conceived. We can call this positive view neo-Kantian constructivism. This thesis is a sustained examination of both of these parts of Korsgaard’s work – the negative attacks on moral realism and expressivism; and her own neo-Kantian constructivism. I have two ambitions for it. First, I want to get clear formulations of and evaluate Korsgaard’s arguments against her metaethical competitors and for her own position. Second, by engaging in the first task I hope to offer some results that will be independently interesting to people who are interested in metaethics. 1 Views similar to the ones Korsgaard defends have been advocated by other philosophers. In this thesis I have concentrated almost exclusively on Korsgaard’s own view. This is in part because extracting a clear formulation of Korsgaard’s arguments from her work is not always easy, and requires some amount of space. Also, I am more interested in how a view like neo-Kantian constructivism contrasts with completely different views in metaethics than in the details of different types of neo-Kantian constructivism (This is, of course, to some extent a false dichotomy. One way to explore how neo-Kantian constructivism hooks up with the rest of metaethics is to explore differences within the constructivist camp. I can only say this: it is only to some extent a false dichotomy – I have felt that the best way to pursue the issues I’m interested in is to concentrate on a single view. I hope that the things that I say about metaethics are sufficiently independently interesting to compensate for this somewhat narrow focus). My conclusion will be that Korsgaard’s position, although worth engaging with, ultimately fails. Her arguments against moral realism can be resisted if we formulate the right type of moral realism. However, her complaints about expressivism, when charitably interpreted, do cause problems for the expressivist. I give a new way of interpreting her own metaethical position, but argue that it ultimately fails in its ambitions. I begin in chapter one with an examination of attempts to dismiss the normative problem and the questions stemming from it as confused and thus safely ignored. I argue there that such attempts rely upon an overly austere conception of the tasks of metaethics, and a questionable thesis about the relationship of metaethics to normative ethics. I also begin to outline Korsgaard’s argument against realism. 2 In chapter 2 I argue that we can get a clearer grip on Korsgaard’s argument against realism if we construe it as a problem to do with the alleged motivational import of moral judgements. Variations of the claim that moral judgements are inherently motivating are often made (a claim we can call ‘internalism’), and this claim causes problems for realism (against suitable background assumptions). Seeing Korsgaard’s argument this way allows us to explain the affinities she claims her argument has with G.E. Moore’s open question argument and J.L. Mackie’s argument from queerness. I argue that the lesson we should draw is that internalism is a troubling claim for moral realism, and that we should investigate whether there are compelling reasons to accept it. I first argue that Michael Smith’s two-pronged manoeuvre in favour of internalism fails, before going on to consider Mark van Roojen’s more recent case for internalism – again arguing that it fails. What moral realists need to do, I claim, is establish a viable form of externalist realism, and hence they will be able to dodge Korsgaard’s argument when it is construed in this manner. I then go on (chapter 3) to offer a second interpretation of Korsgaard’s argument where she ends up offering what we can call, following Mark Schroeder, a generalised anti-voluntarist argument. The upshot of this argument is that moral realism, to avoid the argument, should be reductionist. I then go on to consider two versions of moral realism: one externalist and non-reductionist (Cornell realism); and the other externalist and reductionist (Stephen Finlay’s analytic reductivism). If either of these views is viable then moral realism is able to dodge one or both of the construals of Korsgaard’s argument. I argue that Finlay’s position does well along a number of dimensions, but that it invokes a methodology that is not licensed by the account of analyticity he adverts to. Cornell realism can resist two of the major lines of attack typically launched against its semantic programme and its ontological claims. Both views, I think, offer us ways to circumvent Korsgaard’s arguments.
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