Kantian Structuring: an objectivist account of practical knowledge (original) (raw)

In a neglected passage of Philosophical Explanations, Robert Nozick discusses “Kantian structuring”, which is roughly the view that “we structure the world so that the statements come out true”. As an account of practical knowledge, this view purports to explain why ethics binds us in the first person. While this is a significant explanatory advantage of the theory, Nozick doubts that any such “Kantian structuring” can adequately explain morality. First, it is unclear how structural claims about rational agency may lead to a full-fledged moral theory and deliver moral duties. The objection is indeterminacy. Second, such a moral theory grounds the legitimacy of moral claims on features of one’s self rather than on the recognition of others. The objection is not self-referentiality but self-indulgence. Third, such a theory fails to ground objective practical knowledge because it does not warrant that we are tracking genuine values. The objection is subjectivism. Nozick was ahead of Kantian philosophers in identifying constructivism (under the name of structuring) as a distinctive meta-ethical theory whose promise should be measured against competing meta-ethical theories. He was also ahead of current critics of constructivism in identifying its basic weaknesses. My aim in this paper is to address Nozick’s worries. The defining feature of KC as I defend it is the claim that practical knowledge is knowledge by principles. Its task is to establish a constitutive relation between knowledge of oneself as a practical subject and knowledge about what one ought to do. Thus understood, Kantian constructivism is antagonist to non-cognitivist theories denying that moral judgments have cognitive contents, because they deny that there is something to be known. But it is also rival to cognitivist theories denying that knowledge can be practical “in itself”. (I hope to clarify this jargon as the argument develops). While the theory I outline differs from current agnostic or anti-realist accounts of Kantian constructivism, it is closer to its origins, since Kant treats practical reason as a cognitive capacity and takes moral judgments to be objective moral cognitions, which importantly differ from other sorts of rational cognitions because they are self-legislated. They bind us in the first person because they are self-legislated. Such practical cognitions are common knowledge because all subjects endowed with rationality can arrive at them by reasoning. Part of my argument is that Kantian constructivism carves a distinct logical space in the meta-ethical debate that other sorts of constructivism fail to identify. As Rawls writes, constructivism defines objectivity “in terms of a suitably constructed point of view that all can accept”. This “practical” conception of objectivity is defined in contrast to the realist or “ontological” conception of objectivity, understood as an accurate representation of an independent metaphysical order. Because of their objectivist but not realist commitments, Kantian constructivists such as Onora O’Neill place their theory “somewhere in the space between realist and relativist accounts of ethics”. Furthermore, they argue that their practical conception of objectivity succeeds in making sense of some features of morality, that is, its categorical authority and its relation to rational agency. For C. Korsgaard this is the feature that escapes rival theories. It may seem, then, that far from disengaging from meta-ethical issues, constructivism claims a privileged place in meta-ethics. But the legitimacy of this claim is widely challenged. Precisely because of its practical conception of objectivity, many – including constructivists such as T. Hill or T. Scanlon — regard constructivism as a first-order normative theory, rather than as a meta-ethical position, hence not on a par with realism. Unbeknownst to them, these critics revive Nozick’s critique of Kantian structuring when they object that constructivism fails to offer a distinct meta-ethics because it is structurally incomplete and tacitly relies on realism. Thus far, the debate about the prospects of constructivism as a meta-ethical theory has been driven by the conviction that the case for or against constructivism depends on its ontological commitments. In focusing on Nozick’s critique, I propose a change in perspective. My aim is to defend constructivism as an objectivist account of practical knowledge. Its defining feature is the claim that practical knowledge is knowledge by principles. Its task is to establish a constitutive relation between knowledge of oneself as a practical subject and knowledge about what one ought to do. By focusing on the issue of practical knowledge I hope to show that the difficulty in situating Kantian constructivism firmly on the meta-ethical map, along with other meta-ethical theories reflects ambiguities and oscillations about the practical significance of ethics.