Rawls on Kantian Constructivism

<p>John Rawls’s 1980 Dewey Lectures are widely acknowledged to represent the locus classicus for contemporary discussions of moral constructivism. Nevertheless, few published works have engaged with the significant interpretive challenges one finds in these lectures, and those that have fail to offer a satisfactory reading of the view that Rawls presents there or the place the lectures occupy in the development of Rawls's thinking. Indeed, there is a surprising lack of consensus about how best to interpret the constructivism of these lectures. In this paper, I argue that the constructivism presented in the Dewey Lectures is best understood as involving the view that moral truth is correspondence with procedurally-determined, stance-dependent facts. Employing Rawls’s discussion of rational intuitionism as a foil, I defend this reading against textual discrepancies from within the lectures, as well as those one finds across Rawls’s other works. In addition to settling interpretive disputes, I draw out the ways in which this understanding of Kantian constructivism fits within the broader comparative project in ‘moral theory’ that Rawls inherits from Sidgwick.</p>

The Circumstances of Intergenerational Justice

Some key political challenges today, e.g. climate change, are future oriented. The intergenerational setting differs in some notable ways from the intragenerational one, creating obstacles to theorizing about intergenerational justice. One concern is that as the circumstances of justice do not pertain intergenerationally, intergenerational justice is not meaningful. In this paper, I scrutinize this worry by analysing the presentations of the doctrine of the circumstances of justice by David Hume and John Rawls. I argue that we should accept the upshot of their idea, that justice is context sensitive, even if this at first sight seems to invalidate intergenerational justice. On the basis of moral constructivism, I subsequently provide a fresh reading of the doctrine according to which it conveys the idea that justice is the solution to a practical problem. However, as the problem background is evolving, we need to properly characterize the relevant practical problem in order to make ethical theorizing relevant. Contrary to what has been claimed, the circumstances of justice do not then clash with intergenerational justice, but are the necessary presuppositions for its advancement.

Asserting Moral Sentences

During the last century of meta-ethical debates, moral realism was much criticized for its ontological assumptions. These assumptions arise from the semantic intuition that lies at the heart of realist theories – namely, the intuition that language represents states of affairs. This makes moral realism hardly compatible with a naturalist world view and gives rise to consider ontologically more economic approaches. Moral constructivists can explain objectivity in ethics without inheriting the realist’s ontological burden. Nevertheless, constructivists tend to ignore the semantic task of giving an account of what moral sentences mean. The semantics of moral discourse, however, cannot be considered representational because, then, constructivism would lapse back into realism. I argue that semantic pragmatism is an appropriate partner for moral constructivism. Thereby, we can see the personal standpoint as an engagement in asserting moral sentences.