Sartre and Metaethics:
The implications of a Sartre-inspired model of agency for metaethical constructivism

I received my PhD from Birkbeck, University of London in 2017. If you would like a copy of my thesis, please email me.

Abstract:

Normative truth is constructed through a creative process of decision-making which involves arbitrary elements. My dissertation seeks to defend this statement as a viable theoretical position within contemporary metaethics which I call Sartrean constructivism. I will thus use elements from Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of human agency to formulate a theory of metaethical constructivism.

This dissertation begins by formulating a Sartre-inspired model of agency which incorporates elements from Sartre’s phenomenology of agency as outlined in Being and Nothingness. Sartre’s phenomenology emphasises that people’s fundamental commitments sometimes go through sudden transformations, and that other people appear as threatening because they can creatively transform their commitments. I argue that this implies that agency incorporates both arbitrariness and regularity.

I add further detail to the Sartrean model by appealing to evidence from the psychology of creativity. This suggests that creative thinking, which I argue is ubiquitous in human decision-making, is characterised by a process which involves multiple stages of repeated selection and arbitrary variation, analogous to biological evolution. I argue that such a process is more effective at solving many practical problems than deterministic processes which only involve regularity.

Sartrean constructivism holds that normative truth is often a function of creative processes within agency which incorporate arbitrary elements. This is contrasted with Christine Korsgaard and Sharon Street’s influential constructivist theories which minimise the importance of arbitrary elements within agency and emphasise that normative truth is a function of deterministic processes. I argue that their theories consequently have difficulties in explaining how agents effectively solve creative problems, and how normative standards can be applied to such problem-solving. According to Sartrean constructivism, normative truth is often indeterminate and there is no expectation that conceptions of the normative truth will converge. I argue that nevertheless a kind of objectivity which involves shareability of conceptions of the normative truth is compatible with Sartrean constructivism.

Supervisors: Hallvard Lillehammer, Anthony Price and Sarah Richmond

Examiners: Jonathan Webber and Michael Lacewing