Deriving Ethics from Action: A Nietzschean Version of Constitutivism

How can we justify normative claims about what there is reason to do, such as ‘‘there is reason not to lie,’’ or ‘‘you should not murder’’? Lately, a number of philosophers have argued that we can justify normative claims by deriving them from facts about the nature of action. According to constitutivism, action has a certain structural feature – a constitutive aim – that both constitutes events as actions and generates a standard of assessment for action. We can use this standard of assessment to derive normative claims. In short, the authority of certain normative claims arises from the bare fact that we are agents. So, at any rate, the story goes. But should we believe the story? Although Christine Korsgaard and David Velleman have defended versions of constitutivism, these theories have recently been subject to a number of powerful objections. Kieran Setiya, David Enoch, and others claim to have shown that these constitutivist theories face insurmountable difficulties; as Enoch puts it, ‘‘normativity cannot be grounded in what is constitutive of agency’’ (2006, 192). As a result, I think it is fair to say that although constitutivism is an attractive justificatory strategy within ethics, the current versions of constitutivism are widely thought to be unsuccessful. In this essay, I argue that the prospects for constitutivism are not so grim. I develop and defend a new version of constitutivism. I argue that by examining the structure of human motivation – by engaging in philosophical psychology – we can show that action has a constitutive aim. Moreover, I argue that this constitutive aim generates conclusions