Abstract

Most Kantian constructivists try to ground universal duties of interpersonal morality in certain interactions between individuals, such as communication, argumentation, shared action or the second-person standpoint. The goal of this paper is to present these, which I refer to as arguments from the second-person perspective, with a dilemma: either the specific kind of interaction that is taken as a starting point of these arguments is inescapable, but in that case the argument does not justify a universal principle of interpersonal morality. Or interaction does have a principle of interpersonal morality among its necessary conditions of possibility, but such forms of interactions are merely optional. I argue that proponents of arguments from the second-person perspective have failed to provide a convincing response to this dilemma and that this failure is systematic. This suggests that the success of Kantian constructivism depends on the success of arguments from the first person.

Highlights

  • Kantian constructivism is an ambitious ethical project which aims to justify a categorical and universal principle of interpersonal morality while avoiding some of the common metaphysical, epistemological and motivational problems of moral realism

  • The main goal of the paper is to argue that despite the existence of important differences between these arguments, they are all susceptible to the same dilemma: either the specific kind of interaction that is taken as a starting point of these arguments is inescapable, but in that case it is unconvincing that the necessary conditions of the possibility of these inescapable forms of interaction include the acceptance of a universal principle of interpersonal morality, i.e. a principle of morality which entails moral respect for all other persons

  • I have argued that transcendental arguments from the second person, despite their differences, are all susceptible to the same dilemma: they cannot show that there is an inescapable form of interaction which at the same time has a universal moral principle among its necessary conditions of possibility

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Summary

Introduction

Kantian constructivism is an ambitious ethical project which aims to justify a categorical and universal principle of interpersonal morality while avoiding some of the common metaphysical, epistemological and motivational problems of (robust) moral realism. The main goal of the paper is to argue that despite the existence of important differences between these arguments, they are all susceptible to the same dilemma: either the specific kind of interaction that is taken as a starting point of these arguments is inescapable, but in that case it is unconvincing that the necessary conditions of the possibility of these inescapable forms of interaction include the acceptance of a universal principle of interpersonal morality, i.e. a principle of morality which entails moral respect for all other persons. Some form of (universal) interaction does have a universal principle of interpersonal morality among its necessary conditions of possibility, but in that case the said interaction seems to be merely optional and the moral principles are not categorically valid.4 This suggests that the viability of transcendental arguments in ethics (at least to the extent to which they aim to justify categorical and universal principles of interpersonal morality) depends on the success of transcendental arguments from the first person.

First person versus second person
A dilemma for arguments from the second person
The implicit assumption: respect for all persons
Concluding remarks

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