The ambitions of constructivisms in ethics

John Rawls's writing across the last three decades of his life advances the best-known form of Kantian constructivism. During this period his understanding of the terms constructive and Kantian changed in various ways. I shall try to trace some of these changes in this chapter and to contrast Rawls's views with the form of ‘Kantian constructivism’ which (I argue) can plausibly be attributed to Kant himself.

The metaphor of construction has had a wide use in twentieth-century theoretical and philosophical writing. On a minimal understanding, it is no more than the thought that certain entities are complex, because they are composed out of other more elementary entities. This thought may seem quite neutral about the sorts of things that are elementary and the sorts of things that may be composed out of them. In this very general sense, logical atomism, the procedure of the Tractatus and Carnap's Aufbau programme, in which complex statements are constructed from elementary statements, are all forms of constructivism. So too are many anti-realist views of science, theory and society, which speak, for example, of the social construction of reality (of meaning, of science) or the construction of social identity or the construction of modern France out of more elementary components, such as beliefs, attitudes or interactions.

However, this minimalist understanding of constructivism as ontologically neutral misleads. By and large, the term constructive is favoured by anti-realists. Realist positions argue that certain facts or properties are features of the world, so need not be based on or constructed out of other elements. Of course, realists too may think that there are simple and complex facts and properties; but they will not be generally inclined to think of the latter as constructions, because this would suggest that they are constructed by some agent or agency, a thought which realists reject. However, there is plenty of confusion in the use of the terms constructive, constructivist, constructionist and their cognates, in particular because some anti-realist writing on science and society speaks of facts as constructed, so appropriating one of the central terms of realist thought for their own purposes.

Ethical constructivists share the anti-realism of many other constructivist claims and positions.