Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-01T06:27:03.408Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

ARISTOTELIAN CONSTRUCTIVISM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2007

Mark LeBar
Mark LeBar
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Ohio University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Constructivism about practical judgments, as I understand it, is the notion that our true normative judgments represent a normative reality, while denying that that reality is independent of our exer-cise of moral and practical judgment. The Kantian strain of practical constructivism (through Kant himself, John Rawls, Christine Korsgaard, and others) has been so influential that it is tempting to identify the constructivist approach in practical domains with the Kantian development of the out-look. In this essay I explore a somewhat different variety of practical constructivism, which I call Aristotelian Constructivism. My aim is to establish conceptual space for this form of constructivism by indicating both in what ways it agrees with its Kantian counterparts and in what ways it differs. I argue that Aristotelian Constructivism is on one sense more faithful to the constructivist enterprise than the Kantian varieties, in that its understanding of both the establishment of practical truth and the vindication of the theory itself is constructivist.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , January 2008 , pp. 182 - 213
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 There are other kinds of accounts, such as ideal observer theories, which may also plausibly be made out as “constructivist”; however, they typically do not lay claim to the label, and I shall have little to say about them. One which does self-identify as constructivist is the account in Milo, Ronald's essay “Contractarian Constructivism,” Journal of Philosophy 92 (1995): 181–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Like Rawls, Milo is concerned only with “social norms,” not with a comprehensive account of practical truth, and I shall not address his view.

2 The significance for constructivism of Rawls's work—both in political theory and in interpreting Kantian themes for the purposes of that work—cannot be overstated. Here, however, I will mostly set aside his deployment of constructivism for the defense of justice as fairness, for several reasons. The most important is that Rawls's positive view makes no claims to be a “comprehensive moral doctrine.” Rawls sets out his theory of justice not only as more limited than a complete moral theory, but with a focus on the basic structure of society which falls short even of specifying a full social ideal; see Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, sec. 2, esp. p. 9. Elsewhere, Rawls explicitly distinguishes the aims and content of that view from “comprehensive doctrines,” including, specifically, Kant's “moral constructivism”; see Rawls, , Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 12ff., 99ff., 125Google Scholar. My aim, by way of contrast, is to consider constructivism as a more comprehensive doctrine about the nature and content of normative practical truth.

3 This identification is suggested by Darwall, Stephen, Gibbard, Allan, and Railton,, Peter in “Toward Fin de Siècle Ethics: Some Trends,” in Darwall, , Gibbard, , and Railton, , eds., Moral Discourse and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 12–15Google Scholar. See also Sharon Street, “Constructivism about Reasons” (manuscript). This is also suggested by Christine Korsgaard's contrast between “substantive realism” and “procedural realism”; see Korsgaard, Christine, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, Korsgaard drops this terminology in later work, and I believe her considered view is that it is most useful to understand constructivism as a thesis about ontological priority, as I suggest here.

4 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Beck, Lewis White (New York: Macmillan, 1956), Ak. pp. 62–63Google Scholar. (“Ak.” refers to the pagination of the standard Prussian Academy edition.)

5 Rawls, John, “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” in John Rawls: Collected Papers, ed. Freeman, Samuel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 343Google Scholar; see also Rawls, “Themes in Kant's Moral Philosophy,” in ibid., 510.

6 Gaut, Berys, “The Structure of Practical Reason,” in Ethics and Practical Reason, ed. Cullity, Garrett and Gaut, Berys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 183Google Scholar.

7 Korsgaard, Christine, “Realism and Constructivism in Twentieth-Century Moral Philosophy,” in Journal of Philosophical Research, APA Centenary Supplement (Charlottesville, VA: Philosophy Documentation Center, 2003), 115Google Scholar. In this work, Korsgaard refers to what I am calling “recognitionalism” as “realism”; this is somewhat confusing because in The Sources of Normativity she refers to it as “substantive realism.” However, my concern is the question of order of explanation between recognitionalists and constructivists, both of whom think practical judgments bear representational content, so I will not concern myself further with these taxonomic questions.

8 Kant, Immanuel, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Wood, Allen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), Ak. pp. 440, 452Google Scholar.

9 Ibid., Ak. p. 396.

10 In addition to Korsgaard's well-known readings of Kant as constructivist, Andrews Reath offers a carefully-worked-out interpretation in Reath, , “Legislating the Moral Law,” Noûs 28 (1994): 435–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Thomas Hill offers a more limited constructivist conception in Hill, , “Hypothetical Consent in Kantian Constructivism,” Social Philosophy and Policy 18, no. 2 (2001): 300–329CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is certainly not beyond controversy that Kant should be read as constructivist. For an argument that he should not, see Kain, Patrick, “Self-Legislation in Kant's Moral Philosophy,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 86 (2004): 257–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Barbara Herman also argues for limits on the extent of “creation” in Kant's constructivism: see Herman, , “Justification and Objectivity: Comments on Rawls and Allison,” in Kant's Transcendental Deductions, ed. Förster, E. (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 131–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Kant, Groundwork, Ak. p. 412.

12 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Ak. p. 120.

13 Some care is required here. The content of the moral law holds not only for all human beings, but for rational beings generally, and necessarily so (Kant, Groundwork, Ak. pp. 389, 408, 411–12). So the sense in which we might see ourselves as constructing practical and moral truth can be only that we are “legislating” this universal law for ourselves: we are imposing it, making it authoritative, determining our wills by it, or (as Kant puts it) authoring not the law itself but its “obligation” (Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary J. Gregor [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], Ak. p. 227). I owe this way of thinking about the limitations on autonomy to Patrick Kain.

14 I make no claim that this proposal is Plato's own considered view; I offer reason for thinking otherwise in Section IV below.

15 Cf. Plato, Republic 517c.

16 Kant, Groundwork, Ak. p. 443. Rawls offers a somewhat different account of Kant's reasons for rejecting “rational intuitionism” in Rawls, “Themes in Kant's Moral Philosophy,” 520. “Theological voluntarism” makes value depend on divine will. Kant rejects that approach, and I will not attend to it.

17 Kant, Groundwork, Ak. p. 443.

18 Here I am grateful to James Petrik for helpful discussion.

19 See his letter to Marcus Herz, reprinted in Lewis White Beck, ed., Kant: Selections (New York: Macmillan, 1988), 81–33 (Ak. X:130–31).

20 Kant, Groundwork, Ak. p. 451.

21 Kant says that Plato “assumed a previous intuition of Divinity as the primary source of the pure concepts of the understanding,” which makes no sense: “the deus ex machina in the determination of the origin and validity of our knowledge is the greatest absurdity one could hit upon and has—besides its deceptive circle in the series of inferences from our human perceptions—also the additional disadvantage that it provokes all sorts of fancy ideas and every pious and speculative sort of brainstorm” (Kant, letter to Herz, 131). While Kant is referring here to theoretical rather than practical knowledge, I take the proposal that knowledge of the Good could give us reason to act to be an unholy synthesis of the two.

22 Larry Krasnoff is, so far as I know, the only person to have explicitly distinguished these structural features of Kant's theory. See Krasnoff, , “How Kantian Is Constructivism?” Kant-Studien 90 (1999): 385–409CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, Hill also argues that Kant's constructivism is limited in ways similar to those I will suggest, in Hill, “Hypothetical Consent in Kantian Constructivism.”

23 Kant, Groundwork, Ak. p. 397.

24 Ibid., Ak. pp. 445, 448.

25 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Ak. p. 47.

26 Rawls maintained that the facts pertaining to just basic social institutions and the persons that realize them were a subset of all the moral facts there are, and denied that the proposal that constructivism could go “all the way down” was even intelligible: “Thus, we don't say that the conceptions of persons and society are constructed. It is unclear what that could mean…. We should not say that the moral facts are constructed, since the idea of constructing the facts seems odd and may be incoherent….” (Rawls, “Themes in Kant's Moral Philosophy,” 514, 516; reiterated in Political Liberalism, 104, 121–22). See also Political Liberalism, 108: “The conceptions of society and person as ideas of reason are not, certainly, constructed any more than the [procedural] principles of practical reason are constructed.”

27 Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, lectures 3, 4, and 9.

28 Ibid., 101.

29 Ibid., 115. Korsgaard also thinks her argument for the grounding work performed by the moral identity is “a fancy new model” of Kant's Formula of Humanity (which requires us to treat the “humanity” in ourselves and others always as an end, never merely as a means; ibid., 122). Since Kant thinks his formulations of the Categorical Imperative are equivalent, it is hardly surprising that Korsgaard sees elements of both in her conception.

30 Ibid., 133.

31 Ibid., 135.

32 Ibid., 252.

33 Ibid., 183.

34 Ibid., 257.

35 Christine Korsgaard, “Locke Lectures,” 1.3.4 (http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/∼korsgaar/5Publications).

36 Korsgaard, “Locke Lectures,” 2.5.2.

37 Carroll, Lewis, “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles,” Mind 4 (1895): 278–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Achilles tries to persuade the Tortoise (in effect) that, given P and P → Q, he must conclude Q. Tortoise asks why, and Achilles responds that it is logically necessary that he do so. Tortoise then asks why a skeptic must accept the inference, and Achilles unwisely suggests that it is because of the truth of the proposition that P, P → Q, and (P & P → Q) → Q. When Tortoise asks why that inference must be accepted, Achilles even more unwisely suggests that that is due to the truth of a further proposition, and an infinite regress has begun. The moral: no number of premises can substitute for a rule of inference.

38 Korsgaard, “Locke Lectures,” 2.4.1ff.

39 Gaut, “The Structure of Practical Reason,” 13. See also Wedgwood, Ralph, “Practical Reasoning as Figuring Out What Is Best: Against Constructivism,” Topoi 21 (2002): 139–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (EN) VI.8.1142a25–32. Quotations are from the translation, Ross/Urmson, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Barnes, Jonathan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

41 Still, I do not claim to be offering an interpretation of Aristotle; instead, I believe the view is one naturally congruent with major themes in his ethics.

42 Plato, Euthydemus 281d.

43 Plato, Laws II.661b; see also Gorgias 470e. It is not easy to reconcile the metaethical outlook expressed in these passages with the sort of robust realism that the theory of the Forms in, e.g., the Republic is taken to exhibit. But the fact that these passages are drawn from both what are taken to be some of Plato's earliest dialogues, and what is without a doubt his last, suggests that it is an outlook from which he likely never departed.

44 Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics VII.15.1249a10–12. Should a constructivist worry about the notion of “absolute good” here? No. Elsewhere (EN V.1.1129b2–7), Aristotle holds that the goodness of such goods is conditional, and (EN III.4.1113a32) that the good man is the “norm and measure” of good.

45 Cf. Cicero, De Finibus III.53–55. The Stoic value theory on which nothing but virtue can properly be called “good” is the clearest case of an account of conditional value in the ancient world. However, as the text indicates, I think different versions of the notion that value is conditional (and thus that it is not some nonrelational property of things, waiting for us to recognize it) are found in Plato and Aristotle as well; and, in fact, Aristotle's view offers the best overall understanding of the tacit value theory at work in the other accounts. I thank Fred Miller for pressing this point.

46 In this way, the ancient accounts are vulnerable to the objections Gaut offers against Kant's conditionality thesis just as Kant's account is (Gaut, “The Structure of Practical Reason,” 165–170). I do not believe these arguments are telling against conditionality in either case, but I do not have space to address these questions here.

47 The history of Greek ethics is itself a lively debate over exactly what lives are good lives, and why. I think it is useful to see the enterprise of answering these questions as one of establishing reflective equilibrium between judgments about particular cases and abstract principles attempting to unify and harmonize those judgments.

48 Rawls, “Themes in Kant's Moral Philosophy,” 514; see also Rawls, Political Liberalism, 103–4.

49 I thank David Wong for pressing for clarity on this point.

50 Various Euthyphro-style dilemmas have been posed as problems for constructivism; for two recent examples, see Shafer-Landau, Russ, Moral Realism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Timmons, Mark, “The Limits of Moral Constructivism,” Ratio 16 (2003): 400ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar. The version I set out here differs somewhat from both these formulations, but I think it is the natural concern given the species of constructivism I offer.

51 We might understand Cohen's Mafioso objection to Korsgaard to take this form: Korsgaard's practical-identities account is impaled on this second horn in virtue of its “content-neutral” emphasis on reflective endorsement. Cohen presses his objection in these terms in Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, 184.

52 Kant, Immanuel, “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,” in Religion and Rational Theology, trans. Wood, Allen and di Giovanni, George (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Ak. p. 24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; emphasis in original. Henry Allison calls this Kant's “Incorporation Thesis,” and claims that it “underlies virtually everything that Kant has to say about rational agency.” See Allison, Henry, Kant's Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Cf. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, 93, 223; Korsgaard, “Locke Lectures,” 4.2.4.

54 McDowell, John, “Two Sorts of Naturalism,” in Virtues and Reasons, ed. Hursthouse, Rosalind, Lawrence, Gavin, and Quinn, Warren (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 170Google Scholar.

55 This form of “naturalism” differs from that developed by some Aristotelian “naturalists”—such as Foot, Philippa, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and, to a lesser degree, Hursthouse, Rosalind, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar, esp. chap. 9—in recognizing that our rationality makes an essential contribution to the normative properties of anything that is good. Cf. McDowell, “Two Sorts of Naturalism,” 166ff.

56 Plato, , Laws II.653a–b (Saunders, translation), in Complete Works of Plato, ed. Cooper, John (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997)Google Scholar.

57 Kant, Groundwork, Ak. p. 389.

58 Aristotle, EN IX.7.

59 Aristotle, EN VI.8.1142a30.

60 For more on the idea of construction of self in this way, see my “Eudaimonist Autonomy,” American Philosophical Quarterly 42 (2005): 171–84.

61 Aristotle, EN VI.5.

62 Gaut, “The Structure of Practical Reason,” 177–78.

63 Cf. ibid., 163; Wedgwood, “Practical Reasoning,” 139–41; and Street, “Constructivism about Reasons.”

64 Korsgaard, Christine, “Motivation, Metaphysics, and the Value of Self,” Ethics 109 (1998): 61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65 On Scott MacDonald's reading of Aquinas (in his essay “Foundations in Aquinas's Ethics,” elsewhere in this volume), Thomistic eudaimonism takes a “thin foundationalist” form. As I understand MacDonald's reading, Aquinas is committed to the view that we have happiness (or eudaimonia) given to us as an ultimate end by nature (in virtue of our desire for it), but in only a formal and indeterminate form; and it is the task of practical reasoning (deliberation) to arrive at determinate content for that end. As I read the ancients, they agree that in general we have such a desire, but they offer no claim that it is not, at least in principle, capable of being rejected as reason-giving, just as any other desire is. That is to say, we can step back even from the desire for happiness and ask whether or not we have reason to try to satisfy it (as well as to make it determinate). Because of the reflexive nature of our rational capacities, there is no brute motivational state that can escape this sort of justificatory scrutiny. In this sense, even Aquinas's “thin” foundations are too thick for the sort of coherentism I am envisioning here.

One might imagine an even thinner foundationalism, in which, rather than a desire for happiness, one had a sort of intuition as to its reason-giving nature—an intuition that was nevertheless corrigible and defeasible, as I have insisted, but which carried a sort of prima facie justificatory force nonetheless—which then features (alone or with other intuitions) in a justificatory system for normative practical judgments. Such a foundationalism is getting vanishingly less distant from the coherentism I espouse, and I am unsure what rests on insisting on categorizing either view one way or another. The key point, in my view, is the in-principle defeasibility and corrigibility of any motivational state or apprehension that some course of conduct is right, or of any judgment that something is good. I am uncertain what concerns (apart from epistemological ones) might lie beyond that point. I thank Mike Huemer for discussion of this issue.

66 In this sense, though it is true that multiple agents, equipped with the same knowledge and equally wise, would all arrive at the same judgments for particular cases, the explanation for this is not that they are each discovering an antecedent fact about what practical rationality requires. Instead, that fact just consists in the fact that practically wise agents would see that course of action as the thing to do. There would be no such fact except through the deliberations of practically wise agents. I thank Christopher Gowans for pressing this point.

67 Tom Hill has suggested (in private conversation) that the regress-stoppers in Kant's account, anyway, might well be seen as the objects of construction. Perhaps a similar case might be made for Rawls's and Korsgaard's accounts too. It is striking, however, that in none of these theories is there any account of that constructive process. Certainly it cannot be the same sort of constructive procedure that yields normative truth on those accounts. However, my aim here is less to attack the various Kantian positions than to show how one inviting reading of their structure lays their constructivism open to Gaut's objection. If their structure is, implicitly, more like the structure of the Aristotelian picture I give here, all the better for them. The point remains: the coherentist structure is the sort of structure that enables this particular recognitionalist objection to be avoided, and it is central to the Aristotelian picture.

68 Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 620Google Scholar.

69 This way of putting things breezes past a considerable complication for eudaimonism, taking as it does a “formally egoistic” form: Can the view give the right account of the way that other persons afford us reasons for acting? There are, I believe, two distinct sub-questions here, one pertaining to (roughly) the welfare or well-being of others (perhaps: the demands of beneficence), and the other pertaining to something like their rights and the corresponding obligations of respect we owe them. Both are important issues, but I cannot take them up here. I address the latter question explicitly in “Virtue Ethics and Deontic Constraints” (manuscript). On the former question, see Annas, Julia, “The Good Life and the Good Lives of Others,” Social Philosophy and Policy 9, no. 2 (1992): 133–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I thank Tibor Machan for pressing this point.

70 Gaut, “The Structure of Practical Reason,” 183.

71 See, e.g., Aristotle, EN III.7.1115b12–13; III.8.1117a8; III.11.1119b15–16; and many others. This is a dominant theme in Aristotle's account of virtue and virtuous action.

72 See Rogers, Kelly, “Aristotle's Conception of To Kalon,” Ancient Philosophy 13 (1993): 355–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 What this horn of the dilemma looks like in the formulations of Shafer-Landau and Timmons is not clear. Both think the dilemma is between characterizing the constraints on construction in moral terms and eschewing the use of such terms. On the latter horn (what Timmons calls “thin” characterizations), Timmons takes the problem to be indeterminacy among the principles constructed, while Shafer-Landau is concerned that the resulting construction may not even be recognizable as a set of moral principles. On the former horn (what Timmons calls “thick” characterizations), Shafer-Landau holds that the approach is no longer constructivist, since there are moral principles at work prior to the construction, while Timmons worries about “conceptual chauvinism” and “relativism,” in that different sets of moral assumptions will yield different constructed outputs. Both of these formulations seem to me to assume a foundationalist structure to the enterprise of construction, so neither quite fits the structure of the account I have set out here. I hope I have met Shafer-Landau's argument that the approach has the problems of the “thick” characterization; this leaves the concern that the result is no longer recognizable as moral. As I observe in the text, this is a problem for any ancient ethical account, and fully meeting this charge is possible only in a successful defense of a normative, eudaimonist, virtue ethic. Yet the success of such a broad normative theory would set Timmons's charge of indeterminacy to rest, only to run into his worry about relativism; a similar concern is formulated by Cullity and Gaut (“Introduction,” in Cullity and Gaut, eds., Ethics and Practical Reason, 16). My argument here is directed at the concerns about relativism, though I hope it speaks to Shafer-Landau's worries as well.

74 In particular, Rosalind Hursthouse considers these points at length in On Virtue Ethics; see esp. chaps. 1, 8–11.

75 Nevertheless, it is Aristotle's problem as well: “Excellence, then, is a state concerned with choice … this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it” (EN II.6.1107a1–2).

76 Williams, Bernard, “Saint-Just's Illusion,” in Williams, , Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 145CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This passage is central to Rosalind Hursthouse's discussion of objectivity in virtue theory (On Virtue Ethics, chap. 11), to which I am deeply indebted.

77 Timmons calls “chauvinistic” those versions of relativism which maintain that moral concepts are such that “where two individuals or groups really do seem to be thinking or uttering contradictory judgments employing those terms and concepts, the judgments in question are not really contradictory at all” (Timmons, “The Limits of Moral Constructivism,” 406).

78 Kant, Groundwork, Ak. pp. 411–12.

79 Ibid., Ak. p. 427.

80 An excellent exploration of some of these contingencies, and their bearing on our ethical life and practice, may be found in Hursthouse, Rosalind, Beginning Lives (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 247–59Google Scholar.

81 McDowell, John, “Virtue and Reason,” Monist 62 (1979): 339CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also his “Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following,” in Steven H. Holtzman and Christopher M. Leich, eds., Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 155, where he criticizes the thought that, if rationality is present, it should be recognizable from an “external standpoint.”

82 The fact that we have reflective practical rationality, and characteristically live by deploying it, is a natural fact about us, and thus is unobjectionable as one of the “materials” to be used in a constructivism that goes “all the way down,” as I claim. I thank Dan Layman for raising this issue.

83 Korsgaard has explored this idea at great length in a number of places, including The Sources of Normativity, lecture 4. I shall indicate the ways in which I understand this “publicity” differently than she does.

84 Aristotle, EN VI.1.1138b25.

85 Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, 135.

86 However, at some points, Korsgaard indicates that by saying that reasons are shareable she means merely to deny the claim that they cannot be shared (e.g., The Sources of Normativity, 135, 141). I argue that this ambiguity is fatal to her account of reasons for respecting others in my essay “Korsgaard, Wittgenstein, and the Mafioso,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 39 (2001): 261–71.

87 Access to shared reason-types and processes of reasoning is the counterpart in this view, I believe, to the way that Kant thinks we can grasp the nature of practical rationality in a completely abstract way, so as to arrive at a “universal concept of a rational being in general” (Kant, Groundwork, Ak. p. 412). On what I am calling the Aristotelian approach, we have no confidence that we can apprehend what such rationality might consist in. The only rationality we know is embodied and shaped by a variety of contingencies. We can distinguish it in kind from our experience of the causal order, but we have no grasp on it independently of our cognition within that order. I thank Tom Hill for pressing this point.

88 Cf. McDowell: “[I]t is our common human nature that limits what we can find intelligible in the way of theses about how human beings should conduct their lives….” McDowell, John, “The Role of Eudaimonia in Aristotle's Ethics,” in Essays on Aristotle's Ethics, ed. Rorty, Amélie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 371Google Scholar.

89 Intelligibility cannot plausibly be thought of as a sufficient condition on reasons. We can make perfect sense of a wide range of things people (including ourselves) do out of errors in judging what they have reason to do, or even in the absence of reasons at all. Rosalind Hursthouse characterizes actions of the latter sort in her essay, “Arational Actions,” Journal of Philosophy 88 (1991): 57–68. The point I would make here is that it is in virtue of the intelligibility of such actions that we classify them as actions (as the expression of intentions of agents like ourselves) at all.

90 Anscombe, G. E. M., Intention (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1957), 36Google Scholar.

91 Ibid. (emphasis in the original).

92 From the standpoint of any individual agent, the publicity of reasons entails that he or she may be mistaken about considerations taken to be reasons. That, in turn, opens the possibility that the acquisition of wisdom can be a procedure of discovery for particular agents. The constructive enterprise establishes norms governing eudaimonia and practical wisdom, as a matter of a shared and public enterprise of the exercise of reflective practical rationality. But from the first-person standpoint of a particular deliberating agent, this enterprise of construction and the discovery of reasons are indistinguishable. I thank Eric Mack for pressing this point.

93 Putnam, Hilary, Reason, Truth, and History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 164CrossRefGoogle Scholar (emphasis in original).

94 Ibid., 165.

95 Timmons, “The Limits of Moral Constructivism,” 412–13.

96 Presumably, they do not disagree over the role of education in a good human life.