Aristotelian Constitutivism: an alternative account of practical normativity

• Applicant: Dr. Christian Kietzmann
• Subject Area: Practical Philosophy
• Term: from 2017 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 391136454

Practical normativity, i.e. the phenomenon that we should or ought to do certain things and are at fault if we don't, is difficult to understand. It displays at least three properties that are difficult to reconcile with each other: Firstly, ought-judgements aspire to objective validity; secondly, they have motivational power; and thirdly, they are intelligible as ingredients of the natural world. The two most prominent positions concerning practical normativity in recent decades are Realism, which holds that practical normativity is grounded in irreducible normative facts, and various Subjectivisms, which take practical normativity to be grounded in subjective motivational attitudes. Both positions fail to reconcile these three properties. In recent years, Constitutivism has emerged as an alternative account of practical normativity that promises to do justice to all three properties. Constitutivists explain practical normativity through norms that are thought to be constitutive of the activity of acting for reasons. However, Constitutivism has mostly been developed in a broadly Kantian spirit, and in this form, it faces several problems of its own. Arguably, all of them have their roots in the fact that the Kantian approach, in describing the activity of practical reason, abstracts from the demands that comes from the specifically human life form. My project proposes an Aristotelian alternative to Kantian Constitutivism. Its core idea is that acting for reasons is essentially a life activity. The norms constitutive for acting are therefore norms of (specifically) human life. My Aristotelian Constitutivism differs from the various Neo-Aristotelianisms that have been proposed since it treats the norms of human life as the formal principles of human practical thinking (rather than as contents of practical thought). In my project, I will develop and defend a viable version of Aristotelian Constitutivism and show why this position is a highly promising contender for explaining the nature of practical normativity.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants