Constructivism in Practical Philosophy * By JAMES LENMAN and YONATAN SHEMMER

Abstract

What is constructivism in practical philosophy? Street observes in her 2010 article that this question has no uncontroversial answer: �The most prominent characterisations of constructivism in ethics have important threads in common but none would command universal assent, even amongst self-described constructivists.�1 Many of the essays in the present volume can be described as focused on working out exactly what constructivism is, or more precisely whether there is a position in practical philosophy, usefully called constructivist, that is not a first-order view of the sort that Rawls and Scanlon might be thought to advance. Despite this focus, this is not an introductory volume, and would be suitable for those engaging in high-level research on the topic. As Lenman and Shemmer point out in their introduction, we can distinguish between local and global constructivist views. Local views give constructivist accounts only of some part of the normative domain, using materials found in other parts of that domain. Examples of local constructivist views include Rawls�s theory of political justice and Scanlon�s account of morality, or at least that bit of it concerned with what we owe to each other. Global constructivist views, on the other hand, are more ambitious: they seek to give a constructivist account of the normative domain as a whole. Prominent such global views are Korsgaard�s Kantian and Street�s Humean constructivism. Local constructivist views typically cash out the metaphor of construction in terms of a procedure: some domain of normative facts is characterized �