Visiting speaker seminar

Speaker: David Plunkett (Dartmouth College)

Title: Constructivism and the Explanatory Project of Metaethics

Abstract: The idea of constructivism in metaethics has attracted significant attention in recent years. One reason for this is the hope that constructivism could be a genuinely new option in metaethics. Another reason is that some philosophers have claimed that the plausibility of constructivism undermines the import of the metaethics/normative ethics distinction itself. Many are skeptical about both of these claims. This has lead to an ongoing debate about not only about the truth of metaethical constructivism, but also about its relationship to other well-known metaethical views as well as to the field of metaethics as such. Some think that debate on these issues is fundamentally misguided. For example, some think that these issues are merely about classification and terminology, which lack philosophical substance. I argue that this reaction to the debate over the metaethical status of constructivism misses some of the deeper issues at stake; issues about what questions we are trying to answer as philosophers engaged in “metaethics” or “normative ethics” and how different proposed answers to those questions interact. Drawing on recent co-authored work with Tristram McPherson, I argue that the best way to think of metaethics is in terms of a distinctive overarching explanatory project. Viewed from this vantage point, the question then becomes what relationship constructivism has to this explanatory project. I explain a number of different relations that might obtain, depending on how the idea of “constructivism” is developed. The result is a picture on which a) constructivism might well be a significant thesis for some research programs aimed at making progress on this explanatory project (and thus count, in certain contexts, as a genuinely “metaethical” thesis) but b) it likely is not the basis for a research program that is as distinctive from existing options as many of its proponents have claimed. Finally, drawing on the framework developed in collaboration with McPherson, I reject the idea that constructivism threatens the intelligibility or import of the metaethics/normative ethics distinction.