Agency as Normative Kind: Constitutivism as Aristotelianism

1 Introduction

Constitutivism as a metaethical position, in which it is claimed that moral norms arise from facts about action and agency, has been the focus of much debate over the last 20 years.^[1] This family of accounts derives its appeal, in part, by providing a metaphysically naturalistic model for overcoming practical, externalist style, problems. Such problems, like those raised by Brink’s amoralist (Brink 1986), put pressure on the intuitive idea that there is a conceptual link between moral judgment and moral motivation. While many internalist accounts are taken to give inadequate responses to the externalist challenge, constitutivism provides an account that seeks to reunify judgment and motivation through an analysis of action and agency. Much of the plausibility of the constitutivist account is going to be grounded in how effective this strategy is.

This paper will argue that those varieties of constitutivism that make recourse to constitutive aims ^[2] are able to offer a response to externalist-style problems by drawing upon an inherently Aristotelian metaethical account. While constitutivism furnishes us with a new, conceptually clear, analytical language, it is fundamentally a form of Aristotelianism. Indeed, any metaethical theory that claims the demands of morality are inescapable in virtue of its authority being derived from an intrinsic feature of what it is to be an agent is going to be Aristotelian in structure. This does not, of course, erase the interesting, impactful and intellectually provocative contributions constitutivism has made. Rather, I hope to show that understanding constitutivism as a theory within a long and rich tradition will advance the discourse. The conceptual clarity with which constitutivism has been discussed brings with it new ways of understanding Aristotelianism’s relation to contemporary debates in metaethics and, consequently, the merging of these views will be of enormous benefit.

To begin this synthesising project, I will open this paper by outlining the sort of problem the constitutivist is taken to have a novel and viable solution to, viz., Brink’s ‘amoralist objection’ to internalism. I will then outline how constitutivism can meet this challenge in a satisfying and persuasive way. I will then go on to show that concepts central to Aristotelianism, especially when supplemented with context found in Aristotelian metaphysics, or an Aristotelian taxonomy and philosophical biology, demonstrate the constitutivist structure of Aristotelianism, or, rather, the Aristotelian structure of constitutivism. This will commit me to the strong view that not only can Aristotelian, proto-Aristotelian, or quasi-Aristotelian versions of constitutivism be articulated,^[3] but rather, that any version of constitutivism is going to collapse into a metaethical Aristotelianism.

Of course, if this is indeed the case, then the Aristotelian account should be able to meet all the challenges the constitutivist can meet. Some constitutivists^[4] have claimed that this is not the case. The objection, roughly, is that Aristotelian metaethical accounts cannot be constitutivist metaethical accounts because the Aristotelian cannot convincingly respond to the practicality requirement in ethics (while the constitutivist can). If this argument is correct and a constitutivist account can answer the practical challenge and the Aristotelian cannot, then constitutivism cannot be Aristotelian. I will respond to this argument by showing how the constitutivist response to Enoch’s ‘schmagency’ objection is identical to an Aristotelian account of the practicality requirement. I will argue that if the constitutivist can respond to Enoch, then the Aristotelian can accommodate the practicality requirement by invoking and appealing to the exact same mechanism.

2 A Problem to which Constitutivism is an Answer

Normally, at least pre-reflectively, we take it to be true that a change in moral judgment is followed by a change in moral motivation. The burden, it seems, is on our metaethical theories to explain the fact that moral judgments have some sort of practical force. Reasoning about what it is good to do is often, at the same time, considered to be giving an agent reasons that count in favour of acting in a certain way. We see a conceptual connection, of some sort, between knowing what we should do, and feeling a motivation to do it. This perspective is, broadly, an internalist account of normativity and is committed to the claim that:

If an agent judges that it is right for her to Φ in circumstances C, then either she is motivated to Φ in C or she is practically irrational.

(Smith 1994, p. 61)

A moral theory that fails to account for the necessary connection between judgment and willing, that is, a moral theory that fails to account for what is known as ‘the practicality requirement’, is a deficient moral theory. Any such theory that does not explain the practical force of moral judgments, according to the internalist, glosses-over, and neglects, a pertinent fact of our moral psychology, or so the argument goes.

David Brink’s paper, Externalist Moral Realism (Brink 1986) raises a problem for this view by introducing, and arguing for the coherence of, a conceptually possible amoralist. The amoralist is a peculiar sort of moral sceptic. They are someone who agrees and accepts the relevant moral facts, but does not see why they should be motivated to act in accordance with this. Moral facts, themselves, have no authoritative normative force. Consider the following example:

Leo is hosting a dinner party and is sitting next to Giacomo. Giacomo is telling Leo about a new charity to which he is making financial donations. The cause is noble, and the charity is effective at bringing about the ends to which the cause is directed. Leo thinks this charity sounds fantastic. He supports their cause and agrees with the measures they take to bring their end about.

Leo hears a knock at the door. The charity about which he has just been informed are at Leo’s house, asking for a small donation. Leo says ‘sorry, no’ and returns to the table to a surprised Giacomo. Giacomo assumes Leo must have a defeating reason for not donating money to the charity. Perhaps Leo is saving money to buy a dog for his family, perhaps Leo has no disposable income, perhaps Leo is socially anxious and didn’t want to engage with the charity workers in any way that would prolong his interaction. On examination, none of these answers turn out to be true. Giacomo then reasons that Leo must have disagreed with his assessment of the charity. Leo tells Giacomo this is not the case, that he fully agrees with the charity and their aims … he simply does not see why he should give the charity money. Leo does not feel compelled, that is, he is indifferent to, the normative considerations of the situation.

The idea here is that in cases where we agree about the (moral) truth of a matter, it is conceptually possible that motivation to act accordingly does not follow as there is a conceptual distance, a conceptual distinction, between judgment and motivation. Michael Smith, outlining the difference between internalist and externalist accounts offers the following parallel example:

Suppose we debate the pros and cons of giving to famine relief and you convince me that I should give. However when the occasion arises for me to hand over my money I say ‘But wait! I know I should give to famine relief. But you haven’t convinced me that I have any reason to do so!’ And so I don’t.

(Smith 1994, p. 60)

On Brink’s account, neither Leo nor the person who failed to give money to famine relief, is irrational. Leo and the person who fails to give to famine relief agree that there is a moral fact of the matter, that it is good to give money to charity … and yet, they are not motivated by this knowledge; they see no reason why they should do it.

This sort of scepticism about the necessary connection between moral judgment and moral motivation is not scepticism about morality itself and it is important to highlight that the amoralist is not a sceptic in the stronger sense:

Much moral scepticism is scepticism about the objectivity of morality, that is, scepticism about the existence of moral facts. But another traditional kind of scepticism accepts the existence of moral facts and asks why we should care about these facts. Amoralists are the traditional way of representing this second kind of scepticism; the amoralist is someone who recognizes the existence of moral considerations and remains unmoved.

The… [defender of the practicality requirement] … must dismiss the amoralist challenge as incoherent… We may think that the amoralist challenge is coherent, but this can only be because we confuse moral senses of terms and ‘inverted commas’ senses of those same terms… Thus…. Apparent amoralists…remain unmoved, not by what they regard as moral considerations, but only by what others regard as moral considerations.

The problem…is that…[this]…does not take the amoralist’s challenge seriously enough… We can imagine someone who regards certain demands as moral demands – and not simply as conventional moral demands – and yet remains unmoved…[If]…we are to take the amoralist challenge seriously, we must attempt to explain why the amoralist should care about morality.

(Brink 1986)

According to Brink, if the amoralist is possible then the internalist must give up their commitment to the view that there is a necessary connection between moral judgments (or moral considerations broadly conceived) and moral motivation. That is, if the amoralist is possible, then internalism is false and the practicality requirement doesn’t need to be met. Various metaethical theories aim to show how they can meet this challenge via an externalist route. This move effectively claims that the practicality requirement of metaethical theories, the requirement that demands a theory demonstrates how it motivates an agent to act in accordance with their judgment, is dissolved.

Such a solution seems undesirable to many and it is, perhaps, this suspicion to externalism that motivates the constitutivist to find another answer to Brink.

3 Constitutivism and Responses to Brink

It is perhaps prudent to state that constitutivism is a family of metaethical approaches, rather than a single unitary position. Various versions of constitutivism have arisen that claim to find their source in writers as diverse as Plato, Aristotle and Kant (in the case of Christine Korsgaard (2009)), and Nietzsche (in the case of Paul Katsafanas (2013)). While these accounts are distinct in their content – each usually claiming a different goal, aim (function), or feature that is constitutive of action – they are all committed to a series of claims and starting definitions around what it is for something to be constitutive, and what sort of event counts as an action. Katsafanas outlines a clear, simple and mostly uncontroversial definition of what it means for a feature to be ‘constitutive’:

(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.

(Katsafanas 2013: 39)

Most commonly, constitutivists are going to agree with the following insertion for A:

(Constitutive Aim) Let A be any given action. 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 instance of A.

The definition is perhaps illustrated best with a simple example from games and sports. For ease, throughout this paper, I’ll use chess – also for ease, we will take it to be true (for the sake of argument and concision) that the only way to resolve a game of chess is to win or lose via checkmate:

(Chess) Let A be any given game of chess. Let G be checkmate. A is constituted as an instance of chess by its aim at G in that:

(i) each token of A aims at G, and

(ii) aiming at G is part of what constitutes an instance of A.

If one is playing a game of chess, one is aiming to (ultimately) put one’s opponent in checkmate. If one is not aiming to put one’s opponent in checkmate, one is not really playing a game of chess. Now, of course, one could respond that we frequently play significantly weaker opponents to practise openings, learn new variations, crush a person’s self-esteem – but the constitutivist will respond, rightly (in my view), that when one is participating in these practises, one is not in any sincere sense playing. We might be practising our chess strategies. We might be enriching our chess vocabulary. We might be torturing our rival. But we are not playing a game of chess. Aiming to put our opponent in checkmate is a constitutive feature of a game of chess.

In conjunction with our definition of a constitutive aim (which, for the sake of this paper, we’ll take to be true), Katsafanas then gestures towards how we will form our evaluative yardstick, which, when used in tandem with the constitutive aim, gives us the bare bones of a normative theory by means of a success condition, viz.:

(Success) If X aims at G, then G is a standard of success for X.

(Katsafanas 2013: 39)

Again, most constitutivists are going to agree with the following:

(Success) If A aims at G, then G is a standard of success for A.

Again, to use our chess example:

(Checkmate) If a game of chess (A) aims at checkmate (G), then checkmate is a standard of success for a game of chess.

Checkmate is a standard of success by which we, qua chess players, are measured. Good chess players are those who are good at checkmating their opponents. Bad chess players are those who fail, or fail sufficiently frequently, to checkmate their opponent. Understanding the goal, the success conditions of our action provides us with a standard by which that action is measured.

Constitutivists claim that ‘Constitutive Aim’ and ‘Success’, are foundational principles for a robust and persuasive metaethical theory, rooted in facts about action and agency. The plausibility of this claim is going to hinge on the way they fill in the substantive content of their abstract formulation (that is, the account they give of G and X), as well as how persuasive people find their integration of the philosophy of action with ethics.

The constitutivist claim that an examination into the nature of action will reveal a necessarily present component – that is, a single component operant in every action – isn’t immediately plausible. Our motivations and goals are varied. My choice to make a bowl of porridge bears little obvious motivational resemblance with my choice to go for a walk in my local park. And yet constitutivists claim this to be the case. Indeed, not only is it the case that there is some common component, feature, or goal to which an agent aims and determines an instance as an instance of action, further they argue this common component, feature, or goal to which an agent aims will form the success condition for whether our action is considered a ‘good’ action.

To assess whether the ‘token’ action is a good instance of its type, the constitutivist needs to provide a definite account of where the boundary for actions lies and offer good reasons for accepting the limitation as set. This account must capture our intuitions on where we set the boundary between, for example, actions and reflexes, or the definition is going to sound self-serving and/or circular. The picture presented by Korsgaard below provides a helpful outline of the constitutivist position on the philosophy of action:

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.

(Korsgaard 2009: 18)

This account (grounded in a Kantian landscape that supplies a precondition for autonomy) conceives of actions as those instances where our physical expressions are, in no small sense, ‘happenings’ we ‘will’. This is contrasted with ‘mere’ behaviours – the constitutivist is concerned only to provide an account of those events you have brought about following some sort of deliberative or reflective process, which is to say that the constitutivist is only aiming to give an account of intentional action. One of the rôles of this feature of the constitutivist story is to introduce the idea of inescapabilty:

Some constitutivists are persuaded that understanding the normativity of theoretical and practical reason requires an investigation of the nature of agency, the hope being that such an investigation will help to explain the categorical or objective nature of the norms of rationality and morality. Norms are constitutive of agency and action, the thinking goes, and so an inescapable part of human reality; thus opting out of rational agency is not (in the relevant sense) possible.

(O’Hagan 2014)

Inescapability, the inability to ‘opt out of rational agency’, is a central feature of the constitutivist account as it allows the idea of universality and personhood to become embedded in the account of normativity in such a way as to be norm generating. Constitutivists claim that any decent account of agency is going to have to include an internal account of intentional action (an agent who doesn’t act intentionally isn’t, according to the constitutivist, an agent at all), and agency is, as a matter of conceptual fact, inescapable:

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, 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.

(Korsgaard 2009: 1)

One cannot, by definition, intentionally fail to act, and if action is going to provide grounding for our moral norms, then nor can one absolve oneself of moral responsibility.

This helps us overcome the Brinkian amoralist challenges (agents are necessarily motivated to act in accordance with the good, in virtue of goodness just being a function of agency itself). We do not need to concern ourselves with trying to reason a person into being motivated to act in accordance with an agreed-upon good because one cannot help but aim to act in such a way anyhow.

Discussing Korsgaardian constitutivism, Christine Bratu and Moritz Dittmeyer offer a constitutivist response to Brink and the amoralist thus:

In a nutshell, Korsgaard claims that both a certain moral and a certain rational principle are grounded in the standard that is constitutive of human action: We should act morally and rationally because that is what acting amounts to. To put it differently (and more precisely), let us assume that acting morally and rationally consists in observing some principle P. The fundamental question Korsgaard is trying to answer can, then, be formulated as following: Why should we observe P? And her constitutivist reply to this is: Because observing P is constitutive of human action.

(Bratu and Dittmeyer 2016)

Our moral judgment and our moral motivation are linked in that both are functions and expressions of what it is to be an agent. Moral norms cannot be jettisoned or avoided because personhood cannot be jettisoned or avoided (in the relevant sense) – in a footnote, Hagan reiterates the point made above by Korsgaard:

Agency can, of course, be intentionally interrupted by, for example, choosing to make oneself unconscious so as to avoid giving secrets to the enemy, and agency can be brought to an end by committing suicide, but choosing to cease to exist is itself an expression of one’s agency.

(O’Hagan 2014)

There is no conceptual space between truly knowing what the normative demands of a certain situation are and being given a reason to act in accordance with the normative demands of the situation. One cannot help but aim towards acting in accordance with what we take our moral judgments to be.

Every instance of action, independently of (and sometimes despite) the wishes of the agent, is going to have a success condition at which the action will aim, and aiming at obtaining this success condition is the feature that determines whether the thing we have done is an instance of action.

Note that the Constitutivist here isn’t claiming that every instance of action succeeds in obtaining this success condition (except, perhaps, for Korsgaard^[5]) – all that is required (at least, at this stage) is that one necessarily aims to obtain this success condition. This is the last point of convergence within constitutivism.^[6] The point of departure within constitutivism concerns what such a condition would be, but they all agree (broadly) that there is such a component, and that this component, or ‘constitutive aim’, is sufficiently determinate to be norm generating. I will not provide an overview of the various constitutivist accounts here, but it is worth saying that each account is able to handle objections with varying degrees of strength. I remain agnostic about which constitutivist account is the most robust.

4 Three Challenges and Aristotelianism

As stated, the constitutivist locates the authority of moral norms in facts about the structure of agency. This helps them address three challenges any contemporary metaethical constitutivist theory ought to be able to account for:

1. The Epistemological Challenge: For any moral theory to be viable, it must 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 (epistemic) confidence in our current moral judgments/beliefs.

2. The Metaphysical Challenge: For any moral theory to be plausible it should not rely on, or make recourse to, 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 strive to be robust in the sense of ‘completeness’ – there must be no unexplained/unexplainable elements of our theory.

3. The Practical Challenge: An ethical theory must explain why and how the normative motivates us.^[7] 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 both what we should do, and why we should do it. Or, to quote Katsafanas directly, a theory must: “explain why and how morality has this grip on us”.

Katsafanas claims that constitutivism (and perhaps only ^[8] constitutivism) can provide an account that satisfies each of the three challenges. Much of the rest of his book goes to outline and dismiss other prominent constitutivist accounts (specifically, those given by Velleman, Korsgaard, and Rosati) before outlining his own preferred ‘Nietzschean’ constitutivism. I will not dedicate time to investigating the plausibility of his account in this paper. Instead, I wish to focus on Katsafanas’s dismissal of Aristotelianism and his claim that it fails to meet the third challenge (I list the others only for the sake of completeness). Of course, if Katsafanas is correct, then it will be true that constitutivism is not an updated and revised Aristotelianism.

In what follows I hope to show that Aristotelianism, using Aristotle as the exemplar (and others where necessary), can satisfy the practical challenge, contra Katsafanas’s claim. This of course, won’t show on its own that Aristotelianism is a constitutivist theory (and vice versa). But I am hopeful that the resulting discussion will adequately demonstrate this.

5 Aristotelianism

It is probably uncontroversial to say Aristotelians are committed to a sort of ‘functional’ essentialism. Any object, including persons, can be defined, identified, and indexed not in virtue of some physical property, some ‘mere trait’ or other, but by the function they perform. Christopher Shields begins his discussion of Aristotle’s own ergon argument (or function argument) by stating the opening premise, “1. The function of any given kind x is determined [metaphysically, and therefore more strongly than many constitutivists would want to assume in their account] by isolating x’s unique and characteristic activity.” (Shields 2007, p. 318). This coheres broadly with the general approach taken by various Aristotelians who claim that we can ascertain to what standard a thing ought to be held by looking at what [unique] function it performs.^[9] Agents (or persons), Aristotle argues, have the unique function of engaging in rational activity:^[10]

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 function which is the same in kind […] human good turns out to be activity of soul exhibiting excellence […].

(Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. I.7, 1098a15)

Very quickly, this functional essentialism is going to be sufficient to answer at least two of the three challenges. The Aristotelian can satisfy the epistemological challenge by offering an account that makes a plea to the authority moral facts enjoy in virtue of our capacity to assess a thing’s excellence in relation to a defined function – we do not rely (or we do not need to rely) on the moral sensitivities of an agent, or the cultural ‘fashions’ of a society, to offer us an authoritative foundation. We can settle epistemological disputes, and privilege one account over another, by examining the relevant ways in which our [normatively bound] token participates in its [functionally defined] type.

Secondly, the Aristotelian 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, and not supernatural entities. As Rosalind Hursthouse states: “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: 192). The only thing required for the Aristotelian account to (metaphysically) work, is the very existence of human beings as such. Hursthouse is, again, helpful here:

In the context of naturalism [i.e., Aristotelianism] we focus on evaluations of individual living things as or qua specimens of their natural kind, as some well-informed gardeners do with respect to plants and ethologists do with respect to animals.

(Hursthouse 1999: 197)

It is important to note that, at this stage, we are not necessarily committed to the view that the Aristotelian account is plausible, rather, at this stage, we need only be committed to the view that Aristotelians do have an account that can meet at least two of the challenges raised. It is also important to note that while various versions of the ‘natural’ teleology taken as true by Aristotle himself have been widely discredited by the findings of modern science, it is also true that the Aristotelian account is sufficiently plastic to accommodate and embrace more palatable naturalistic metaphysical grounds which cohere with contemporary scientific developments, that is there are ways ‘we can develop a naturalistically respectable version of Aristotelianism.’ (Katsafanas 2013: 31). An apparent problem emerges, according to Katsafanas, when we consider the Aristotelian account of the practical challenge, or the lack thereof. The claim is that the Aristotelian cannot give a satisfying account of the practicality challenge; no matter how they adjust various ontological/teleological features. Even granting the Aristotelian accounts’ various ways of reconciling itself with the numerous developments in epistemology and metaphysics that have occurred over the two-thousand-and-some-years since it initially emerged, and even granting that to be a person is to be a unique token of a normative kind – ignoring the wide variety of forceful concerns around whether personhood is indeed this type of thing – Katsafanas thinks the Aristotelian model proposed, in its strongest form, is irredeemably doomed to failure:

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?

(Katsafanas 2013: 31)

The charge is clear: ‘agent-centered’ virtue ethics is unable to give an account of why we should aim to be a virtuous, functioning, token of my type. Even if we can compile a complete and accurate, universally agreed-upon and uncontroversial, universally assented-to, list of excellences one ought to instantiate in order to be considered a good and virtuous person – why should I care to be a virtuous person?

I think the framing of the challenge posed betrays a misunderstanding of Aristotle that (perhaps ironically) mirrors David Enoch’s^[11] criticism of constitutivism (Enoch 2006). Compare the above with:

[…] assume that our sceptic is even convinced that – miraculously – morality and indeed the whole of practical rationality can be extracted from the aim of self-constitution. Do we have any reason to believe that he will care about the immorality or irrationality of his actions? Why isn’t he entitled to respond along the following lines: “Classify my bodily movements and indeed me as you like. Perhaps I cannot be classified as an agent without aiming to constitute myself. But why should I be an agent? Perhaps I can’t act without aiming at self-constitution, but why should I act? If your reasoning works, this just shows that I don’t care about agency and action. I am perfectly happy being a shmagent – a non-agent who is very similar to agents but who lacks the aim (constitutive of agency but not of shmagency) of self-constitution […]”.

(Enoch 2006)

Katsafanas’s objection is slightly weaker than Enoch’s. Katsafanas is claiming the Aristotelian needs to, but cannot, answer the objection: ‘even if I accept that I belong to a certain kind, why should I care about being a good token of my kind?’, whereas Enoch is saying the constitutivist must, and cannot, answer the objection: ‘sure, I accept that to be a good token of a kind is constituted by these features – but why should I endeavour to belong to that kind?’.

While these objections are not quite identical, the answer to both is the same. The answer to Enoch from the constitutivist is fairly simply: ‘because agency is inescapable and you simply cannot fail to act’. The answer to the constitutivist is effectively the same: ‘one inescapably aims to be a good instance of one’s kind – aiming towards being a good instance of your kind is constitutive of what it is to be a member of your kind’.

The confusion from both Katsafanas (and his objection to the Aristotelian) and Enoch (and his response to the constitutivist) arises from a confusion around how reasons function in Aristotelianism and constitutivism respectively. Here are two ways in which constitutive aims can be conceived:

There are two possibilities. One possibility is that the constitutive aim of a game is originative of reasons:

(1) Constitutive Aims as Originative of Reasons: If you participate in an activity A, then the constitutive aim of A is reason-providing.

Another possibility is that constitutive aims merely “transfer” normativity in the following sense:

(2) Constitutive Aims as Transferring Reasons: If you have reason to participate in A, then the constitutive aim of A is reason-providing.

(Katsafanas 2013: 48–49)

Both Katsafanas and Enoch are assuming that the Aristotelian and the constitutivist are (respectively) holding the second conception. But, of course, just as the constitutivist claim isn’t ‘if you act, then you have reason to participate in A’, neither is the Aristotelian claim ‘if you have reason to be a person, then you have reason to participate in A’. This is because Aristotelian functional essentialism claims that participating in your species type generates reasons to act in such a way that is conducive to your inescapable aim of flourishing, that is, for both the Aristotelian and the constitutivist, they are taking these reasons as the first, originative, kind. Compare:

1. Acting qua person inescapably aims towards flourishing, with

2. Flourishing is valuable

The second position is, for the Aristotelian, metaethically and normatively, irrelevant. To be a person just is to be inescapably orientated towards aiming for the attainment of your species-typical flourishing. The discussion below will show how do we get here by outlining an Aristotelian-style constitutivism.

6 Aristotelian Constitutivism?

The Aristotelian ‘ergon’ (function) argument which claims that to be a person is to be a normative kind is far from being the exhaustive account of how our moral norms are grounded and generated, compelling and authoritative – the Aristotelian discussion is enriched and made plausible by being tethered to discussions of eudaimonia (‘flourishing’, ‘happiness’) and the virtues. The question, ‘what is required for one to live well’, is answered by the Aristotelian through an analysis of the necessary conditions one requires to flourish as a token of one’s type. The Aristotelian 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. Eudaimonia is just participating in that state of excellence, that state of virtue.^[12] One is a ‘defective’ instance of one’s type if one is not in that state of flourishing or ‘well-being’.^[13]

Some constitutivists sceptical of the idea that Aristotelianism thus far articulated can respond to the practical challenge may say ‘well, why care about achieving a state of flourishing?’ – but it could be responded that it is at least plausible to suggest that flourishing is the goal at which all actions aim. Indeed, Aristotle himself begins his most famous treatment of moral philosophy, The Nicomachean Ethics, by making this exact claim. To get there, he introduces the notion of subordinate, instrumental ends:

Now, as there are many actions, arts, and sciences, their ends also are many; the end of the medical art is health, that of shipbuilding a vessel, that of strategy victory, that of economics wealth. But where such arts fall under a single capacity – as bridle-making and the other arts concerned with the equipment of horses fall under the art of riding, and this and every military action under strategy, in the same way other arts fall under yet others – in all of these ends of the master arts are to be preferred to all the subordinate ends; for it is for the sake of the former that the latter are pursued.

(Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. I.1, 1094a19)

Of course, he does this to motivate a distinction with an ‘ultimate’ or ‘final’ ends… the account of which should sound remarkably familiar, and remarkably comfortable, for the constitutivist:

Now we call that which is in itself worthy of pursuit more final than that which is worthy of pursuit for the sake of something else, and that which is never desirable for the sake of something else more final than the things that are desirable both in themselves and for the sake of that other thing, and therefore we call final without qualification that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else.

Now such a thing happiness,^[14] above all else, is held to be; for this we choose always for itself and never for the sake of something else, but honour, pleasure, reason, and every virtue we choose indeed for themselves (for if nothing resulted from them we should still choose each of them), but we choose them also for the sake of happiness.

(Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. I.7, 1097a15)

If you ask an agent why they are doing something, and keep pressing them, the answer will always end, according to the Aristotelian, with ‘because it makes me happy’. For example, if someone asks why I am making a bowl of porridge for breakfast, I might answer that it provides me with nutritious (and delicious!) fuel for running. If this person then asks why I want to go for a run, I might respond that I enjoy staying fit and healthy. Again, if the person asks why I want to remain fit and healthy, I might respond that it will enable me to participate in the physical activities I value in my (alas, fast approaching) later years. If I am asked why I want to participate in such activities, I should no doubt respond that it is because they make me happy. This seems to be the terminus for such a conversation – it would not make much sense for my interlocutor to ask ‘why do you want to be happy?’. The Aristotelian will claim that for any human-shaped activity in which we participate, ‘flourishing’ (eudaimonia, happiness) is always the thing we are inescapably aiming toward.

In drawing a distinction between an instrumental end, and an ultimate end, and by expressing the teleological relation between the two, Aristotle is claiming that flourishing is the end to which all actions constitutively aim. Indeed, he says as much here: ‘Happiness, then, is something final and self-sufficient, and is the end of action.’ (Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. I.7, 1097a34). Aiming towards flourishing is an inescapable feature of our (instrumental) actions. This furthers the constitutivist project dramatically by tacking onto the claims about intentionality and activity (from the above discussion of Korsgaard) concepts of happiness – if one is not acting towards happiness (or flourishing), then one is not, in any serious sense, participating in action at all.

So, to answer the sceptical constitutivist’s challenge (above), ‘why should one care about being a defective instance of one’s type?’ – one should care if one is ‘defective’ (a non-virtuous, non-flourishing, agent) because one cannot escape aiming for one’s flourishing – which is attained, according to the Aristotelian, by acting in accordance with excellences conducive to your functional type. Indeed, Aristotelians could plausibly argue along constitutivist-sounding lines, claiming if one does not aim towards ‘acting excellently’ – one is not an agent at all. The argument, expressed briefly, would run thus:

P1. All agents aim to flourish

P2. The virtues are the excellences required to flourish

C. All agents aim to cultivate virtue

Aristotle might offer an organic justification for this argument, pointing to his categorizations of various forms of life in De Anima (Aristotle 1987)^[15] along the principle of necessary and sufficient conditions. Each ‘mode of being’ (‘soul’) on the ‘hierarchy’ (mineral, vegetable, animal, human, etc.) contains all the properties of the preceding stage. What is necessary for persons is that they are able to feed, move, and grow (the necessary and sufficient criteria for vegetation), and experience sensations (when combined with the necessary and sufficient conditions for vegetation are the necessary and sufficient condition to be classified as an animal). However, the capacity to feed, move, grow, and experience does not make a person – 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 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 a person. Using our reason, Aristotle could claim (and does), is a constitutive element of what we are as human agents. If we are not ‘reasoning’^[16] (at least, even imperfectly) or ‘acting in accordance with some organizing, rational principle’ (which may even indeed turn out to be incorrect in some way) we are not acting as persons, and so we are not participating in our functional type. So, our sceptic’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 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 the Aristotelian position (on both defective and non-defective agents) as it seems to cohere completely with the outline of what it is to be a constitutive feature. Compare Defective* with the outline of a ‘constitutive aim’ (reiterated from above):

(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.

(Katsafanas 2013: 39)

If Aristotle would hold Defective* then it follows that he can accept both (i) and (ii) – so wherein, then, lies the disagreement, or conceptual dissimilarity between the constitutivist and the Aristotelian? Indeed, it seems that a fully expressed Aristotelian metaethics is structurally indistinct from constitutivism:

P1. All action aims at flourishing

P2. Flourishing is acting in accordance with, and participation in, virtue

P3. To act virtuously is to act in accordance with a rational, organizing, principle

C1. All action aims towards acting in accordance with a rational, organizing principle. (Assuming ‘Constitutive Aim’; aiming to act in accordance with a rational, organizing principle is what determines an event as an instance of action.)

C2. Acting in accordance with a rational, organizing principle is the normative standard by which actions are evaluated – the degree to which one realizes this standard is the degree to which one’s actions are (morally) ‘successful’. (Assuming ‘Success’)

Success here is used in a structurally identical way to the way it is used in the constitutivist account as outlined above and the implications for normativity, and our answer to the practicality challenge, are easily drawn out with our example from chess; 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 ought to do. Given our success condition, we are now in a position to evaluate actions – an action is good iff it attains (or aides in the attainment of) the goal, bad if it fails to attain (or impedes 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 (as compared to a bad (good) shoemaker – one who produces good shoes less 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 Aristotelianism, but seems to be actually the same discussion.

If the above Aristotelian constitutivism is, indeed, Aristotelian, then it is not clear how it fails to satisfy the ‘practical challenge’. Why should we care if we are a ‘defective instance of our kind?’– because we cannot help but aim to not be defective. This sentence has a remarkably constitutivist tone and it is important to note that I am not comparing Aristotelian ethics to any particular constitutivist account – instead I have offered a ‘bare bones’ account of both, showing how they are structurally indistinct.^[17] Just as Aristotelian metaethics is a broad church with considerable internal disagreement, and just as the same can be said for constitutivism, neither party should (minus fringe exceptions), disagree with the substance of the comparative outline drawn. If I have shown that Aristotelianism does, indeed, have the structure outlined, then it seems to follow that a conceptually indistinct structure is also going to be Aristotelian.

Thus, the dispute between constitutivism and the Aristotelian ‘position’^[18] is illusory, or, at least, ‘dissolvable’, and it is unclear why Katsafanas (in particular) would want to alienate such a potentially enriching (and useful) tradition.

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 satisfying 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 the Aristotelian is more closely aligned with the constitutivist position than Katsafanas considers. The Aristotelian offers a success condition (all actions aim at flourishing), 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 ought to do). The Aristotelian can even give an account of how we might fail to Φ and act ‘defectively’ (ignorance, the problem of Akrasia, etc.). Aristotle’s account seems to be highly constitutivist – or, rather, the constitutivist account seems highly Aristotelian. If this is the case, then this will spell good news for contributors in these fields. Constitutivists will find that they have an entire tradition to draw on and utilize. Aristotelians will find they have a new set of clear, analytically appealing and robust contemporary arguments. The comparison in this paper will, hopefully, show, and pave the way for, an enriching synthesis.

7 Conclusions

In conclusion, I began by outlining the amoralist problem as a means of explicating how the constitutivist position is supposed to function and respond to such issues in metaethics. I gave a brief overview of the general constitutivist approach to metaethics, explaining how normative claims are parasitic in some way on inescapable features that are constitutive of human agency, or action. While doing this, I developed the dialectic by showing what (often metaethical) problems constitutivism aimed to dissolve. I then focused on demonstrating the ways in which Aristotelianism and constitutivism appeared to share the same assumptions and methodological practices, despite some constitutivists (in particular, Paul Katsafanas) claiming otherwise. Finally, I argued that a way in which Aristotelian approaches could meet these challenges was by offering an overview of his account of the internal normativity of action that was structurally similar to the sort of account a constitutivist, and, at times, Katsafanas himself, would offer. In doing so, I hope that Constitutivists can draw upon the already rich Aristotelian approach, and that those working within the Aristotelian tradition can use some of the more contemporary (and helpful) terminology to sharpen their contribution to the overall discourse.