This graduate seminar on the constructivism and constitutivism in metaethics and epistemology, taught by Michael Titelbaum, meets on Mondays from 3:30–5:30pm in Helen C. White room 5193, beginning on January 23rd.

The final paper for the course should be e-mailed to me as a pdf by 5pm on Wednesday, May 10th.

Please note that my office hours this spring are Fridays 1:30–3:30, though of course I'm also happy to meet by appointment.

Readings for the course:

Thanks to Clinton Castro, Shanna Slank, Zi Lin, Kathryn Lindeman, Tristram McPherson, Paul Katsafanas, and others who helped me assemble this syllabus.

Inspirational quote:

"I bet your parents taught you that you mean something; that you're here for a reason.

My parents taught me a different lesson…they taught me that the world only makes sense if you force it to."

–Batman, to Superman, in Dawn of Justice

Week 1 (1/23, Titelbaum presents): Introduction to Constructivism

Primary reading:

• Street (2010) "What is Constructivism in Ethics and Metaethics?"
• Also, if you don't know the basic terminology and landscape of views in contemporary metaethics, you should read this: Miller (2003) Introduction to Contemporary Metaethics, Ch. 1. (I believe the views we'll be discussing in this class fall under what Miller calls "Weak Cognitivism".)
• If you want to get even deeper into these distinctions and the motivations for different camps, you can read this (though we won't discuss Russ's arguments for and against various positions in class): Shafer-Landau (2003) Moral Realism: A Defence, Ch. 1 and 2.

Background: You don't need to read any of this material, but I may talk about some of it in class.

• Rawls (1980) "Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory". The piece that launched a thousand constructivist ships.
• O'Neill (2015) "Constructivism in Rawls and Kant". Contains nice discussion of the historical development of Rawls's constructivism, along with comparisons between Rawls and Kant.
• Bagnoli (2011) "Constructivism in Metaethics", from the SEP. Nice survey of a lot of the issues we'll be discussing in this course. Defines "constructivism" in the procedural way Street doesn't like.
• Enoch (2009) "Can there be a global, interesting, coherent constructivism about practical reason?". Copp (2013) "Is constructivism an alternative to moral realism?" Examples of the kinds of criticisms of constructivism that result from understanding the view in terms of constructive procedures. We won't be discussing these criticisms much.

Handout.

Week 2 (1/30, Lindsay leads discussion): Street's Humean Constructivism

Primary reading:

• Street (2008) "Constructivism about Reasons".
• Street (2009) "In Defense of Future Tuesday Indifference".

Secondary reading:

• Bratman (2012) "Constructivism, Agency, and the Problem of Alignment".

Handout.

Week 3 (2/6, Ben): Velleman's view

Primary reading:

• Velleman (2000) The Possibility of Practical Reason, Introduction.
• Velleman (2009) How We Get Along, Ch. 1–3.

Secondary reading:

• Walden (2012) "Laws of Nature, Laws of Freedom, and the Social Construction of Normativity". Provides another way of deriving morality from a constitutive requirement of action that it be interpretable.
• Setiya (2003) "Explaining Action". Uses action theory to develop a sense in which the constitutive aim of action is self-knowledge. But unlike Velleman, argues that the constitutive aim of action cannot be substantive enough to "support the standards of reason that bear on practical thought".

Handout.

Week 4 (2/13, Andrew): Kantian constructions of the moral law

Primary reading:

• O'Neill (2004) "Kant: rationality as practical reason".
• Korsgaard (1996) "Morality as Freedom".

Secondary reading:

• Korsgaard (1996) The Sources of Normativity, Lecture 3.
• Gibbard (1999) "Morality as Consistency in Living". A review of/response to The Sources of Normativity.
• Schapiro (2001) "Three Conceptions of Action in Moral Theory". More on what's appealing to the agent about autonomous agency.

Handout.

Week 5 (2/20, Yang): Solving problems with constitutive standards

Primary reading:

• Velleman (1996) "The Possibility of Practical Reason".
• Korsgaard (1997) "The Normativity of Instrumental Reason".

Secondary reading:

• Korsgaard (1996) The Sources of Normativity, Lecture 1. Highly recommended if you're encountering Korsgaard's attack on realism for the first time—more approachable than "Normativity of Instrumental Reason".
• Velleman (2009) How We Get Along, Ch. 5. A later statement of Velleman's constitutive approach to normativity.
• Williams (1981) "Internal and External Reasons". Since it gets referenced a lot in the Velleman (and a bit in Korsgaard), I thought I'd put it up.
• Railton (1997) "On the Hypothetical and Non-Hypothetical in Reasoning about Belief and Action".
• Rosati (2003) "Agency and the Open Question Argument". Uses constitutive standards to defuse Moore's Open Question Argument.

Handout.

Week 6 (2/27, Titelbaum): Critiques of constructivist metaethics

Primary reading:

• Wallace (2012) "Constructivism about Normativity: Some Pitfalls".
• Hussain and Shah (2006) "Misunderstanding Metaethics: Korsgaard's Rejection of Realism".

Secondary reading:

• Shah (2010) "The Limits of Normative Detachment". Provides an alternate response to Wallace's second pitfall.
• Lavin (2004) "Practical Reason and the Possibility of Error". Deep dive on what it takes for norms to be violable. Suggests the relevant notion of norm violability is inconsistent with constitutivism.

Handout.

Week 7 (FRIDAY 3/10, 4PM, Megan): Korsgaard's teleological turn

Primary reading:

• Korsgaard (2009) Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, Integrity, Chapters 2, 4, and 5. (Feel free to skim Sections 4.1 through 4.3, since they largely repeat material we've already covered.)

Secondary reading:

• Korsgaard (2009) Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, Integrity, Chapter 1. In case you want to get the overall plan of the argument of Korsgaard's book.
• Cohen (1996) "Reason, humanity, and the moral law".
• Barry (2013) "Constructivist practical reasoning and objectivity".

Handout.

Week 8 (3/13, Stephanie): Responses to constitutivism

Primary reading:

• FitzPatrick (2013) "How Not to Be an Ethical Constructivist".
• Silverstein (2016) "Teleology and Normativity".

Secondary reading:

• Lindeman (2016) "Constitutivism without Thresholds". Critical appraisal of the notion of understanding the violability of constitutive standards in terms of thresholds.
• FitzPatrick (2005) "The Practical Turn in Ethical Theory: Korsgaard's Constructivism, Realm, and the Nature of Normativity".
• Katsafanas (2014) "Constitutivism about practical reasons". General survey of the constitutivist views we've encountered so far, their advantages, and common objections to them.
• Bagnoli (2002) "Moral Constructivism: A Phenomenological Argument". Argues for a further advantage of constructivist approaches in terms of making sense of the phenomenology of practical reasoning.
• Smith (2013) "A Constitutivist Theory of Reasons: Its Promise and Parts". In case you were wondering about the Smithian constitutivism Kastafanas mentions.
• Bratman (2009) "Intention, Practical Rationality, and Self-Governance" and (2012) "Time, Rationality, and Self-Governance". Bratman's approach to the normativity of instrumental reason relies on something like FitzPatrick's principle C3. (Thanks to Ben for these references.)

Handout.

The week of 3/20 is Spring Break.

Week 9 (3/27, Jon): The shmagency objection

Primary reading:

• Enoch (2006) "Agency, Shmagency: Why Normativity Won't Come from What Is Constitutive of Action".
• Ferrero (2009) "Constitutivism and the Inescapability of Agency".

Secondary reading:

• Enoch (2011) "Shmagency Revisited".
• Ferrero (2016) "Inescapability Revisited".
• Silverstein (2015) "The Shmagency Question".
• O'Neill (1992) "Vindicating Reason".
• Also worth revisiting Korsgaard's "Morality as Freedom" from Week 4 above.

Handout.

Week 10 (4/3, Camila): The aim of belief begins.…

Primary reading:

• Williams (1970) "Deciding to Believe".
• Velleman (2000) "On the Aim of Belief".

Secondary reading:

• Fassio "The Aim of Belief", from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Gives a good overview of the major questions and fault-lines of this literature, though I feel it occasionally runs roughshod over important distinctions.

Handout.

Week 11 (4/10, Nick): Aims and norms

Primary reading:

• Wedgwood (2002) "The Aim of Belief".

Secondary reading:

• Boghossian (2003) "The Normativity of Content". Useful if you don't have any exposure to the view that content is normative. Also highlights some potential metaphysical and conceptual construals of normativism about belief.
• Kolodny (2007) "How Does Coherence Matter?". Just in case you thought it would be easy to get from a truth norm to norms of rational coherence.
• Wedgwood (ms) "Epistemic Teleology: Synchronic and Diachronic". If you're interested how Wedgwood thinks correctness works for credences.
• Gibbard (2007) "Rational Credence and the Value of Truth". And while we're on the subject of credences, the aim of belief, and accuracy.…

Handout.

Week 12 (4/17, Clinton): The Shah/Velleman dialectic

Primary reading:

• Shah (2003) "How Truth Governs Belief". Since the reading for this week is long, feel free to skim the introductory part on Gibbard.
• Shah and Velleman (2005) "Doxastic Deliberation".

Secondary reading:

• Glüer and Wikforss (2013) "Aiming at Truth: On the Role of Belief". Argues that Shah/Velleman-type views locate the truth norm too far from the first-order nature of belief.

Handout.

Week 13 (4/24, Emma): Objections to normativism

Primary reading:

• Owens (2003) "Does Belief have an Aim?".
• Côté-Bouchard (2016) "Can the Aim of Belief Ground Epistemic Normativity?".

Secondary reading:

• Nolfi (2015) "How to be a Normativist about the Nature of Belief". Argues that the constitutivist "aim of belief" approach can't account for "output-side" norms on belief; suggests replacing it with a proper functioning account of the constitutive norms of belief.
• Drayson (2012) "The Uses and Abuses of the Personal/Subpersonal Distinction". Argues that the personal/subpersonal distinction should be applied to psychological explanations rather than psychological states.

Handout.

Week 14 (5/1, Sean): More objections, and some replies

Primary reading:

• Glüer and Wikforss (2013) "Against Belief Normativity".
• Engel (2013) "In Defence of Normativism about the Aim of Belief".

Secondary reading:

• Bykvist and Hattiangadi (2007) "Does Thought Imply Ought?". Mentioned in the Engel. Tries various formulations of the truth norm, unable to find a suitable one that handles Moore-sentence blindspots.
• Whiting (2010) "Should I Believe the Truth?". Replies to Bykvist/Hattiangadi by arguing for permissive epistemic norms rather than requiring norms.

Handout.