Relation to others· Morals
Constructivism
Axis: Status of norms (metaethics) — Do moral norms hold for everyone, everywhere, and always?
Moral norms are neither discovered in the nature of things nor merely relative: they are constructed through fair rational procedures, such as deliberation behind a veil of ignorance or discussion among equals. Their validity rests on the legitimacy of the process that generates them.
Movements 3
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Pragmatisminferable
Moral values, for the pragmatists, are neither eternal essences to be discovered nor purely arbitrary conventions: they are worked out and justified within inquiry, tested by their consequences for shared experience. Dewey treats value judgments as revisable hypotheses, submitted to the same practical test as statements of fact. The good is constructed in social deliberation.
Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920) · Dewey, Theory of Valuation (1939)
Existentialisminferable
If God does not exist, no table of values is written in an intelligible heaven: values are created by human choices. nonetheless holds that in choosing oneself one chooses for all humanity, which brings the position closer to constructivism than to sheer relativism.
Existentialism Is a Humanism · Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
Utilitarianisminferable
The is universal in scope, holding for all sentient beings everywhere, yet its ground is no moral law: the good is built from a natural fact, pleasure and pain. Utilitarianism thus combines a universalism of the rule with a naturalist anchoring, midway between moral realism and a constructivism of the good out of welfare.
Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation · Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics
Philosophers 4
Sartreexplicit
With no values inscribed in an intelligible heaven, man creates them through his choices; but Sartre refuses to conclude that this is mere arbitrariness. To choose is to hold what one chooses as good, and so to propose it as an image of man: in choosing himself, he chooses all men. The creation of values thus carries a near-universal responsibility, without resorting, as does, to a law of reason.
Existentialism Is a Humanism (to choose is to choose for all)
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Beauvoirinferable
Values are neither inscribed in an intelligible heaven nor purely relative: they are instituted by freedoms that recognize one another and commit themselves. Beauvoir always starts from singular, historical situations, yet the freedom she sets up as a requirement holds for all: a situated constructivism, universalizing without relativism or moral realism.
The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), the grounding of values in freedom
Marxinferable
Morality belongs to the ideological superstructure: the law, justice and morality of an age express the relations of production and vary with them, so that no eternal moral norm hovers above history. This historicisation of values, referring them to material conditions rather than to a universal foundation, is above all a historical , with a share of class relativism.
Manifesto of the Communist Party, ch. 2 (moral ideas as products of the relations of production) · The German Ideology, I (morality, religion and metaphysics as ideology)
Humeinferable
Hume spots an illicit leap in moral treatises: their authors slip without warning from propositions joined by is to propositions joined by ought, though a new ought cannot be deduced from any set of purely descriptive premises (Hume's guillotine). No relation of fact, and so no act of reason alone, can ground an obligation: value is not a quality of things but lies in the spectator's sentiment of approval. Morality thereby loses its realist foundation, against the rationalist moral realism that thought to read the good off being. Yet this sentiment, common to all human beings and regulated by shared utility, lends judgements a near-universal stability: the position is broadly constructivist, with a relativist share, without lapsing into arbitrariness.
A Treatise of Human Nature, III, I, 1 (the is-ought passage) · Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, sect. IX and Appendix I
- Descriptive Thought experimentTo each their customs?
Peoples horrify one another with their usages, each holding its own self-evident. Does this deep disagreement prove no morality is true, or can we still judge some better than others?
the customs of other peoples - DescriptiveFound, imposed, or made?
Is a norm inscribed in the nature of things, is it merely might dressed up as justice, or do we make it through a fair procedure? And can a rule that is merely constructed still bind?
the moral rule