Metanormative Constructivism as Non-Reductive Perspectivalism

Abstract Abstract This chapter critiques extant attempts to clearly distinguish metanormative constructivism from reductive response-dependence views. It proposes a new interpretation of metanormative constructivism as non-reductive perspectivalism, a style of view that is clearly distinct from reductionism. According to non-reductive perspectivalism, normative facts and properties have an irreducibly normative character, yet they ontologically depend upon precisely the sorts of psychological facts that, for the reductive realist, form the reduction base for normativity. This dependence is partly a matter of their “way of being” or mode of existence: specifically, the authority or bindingness of normative properties and facts exists only within an evaluative perspective partly constituted by the attitudes of the agent(s) whom they bind. In articulating the view, the chapter draws upon Kris McDaniel’s recent work in metaphysics and explains how the view provides a way of fleshing out some key emphases of leading constructivists Sharon Street and Christine Korsgaard that otherwise look difficult to understand. The chapter also argues that non-reductive perspectivalism isn’t significantly less plausible than either reductive response-dependence views or typical non-reductive realist views. Indeed, non-reductive perspectivalism has the explanatory advantage of uniquely accounting for a third-/first-person asymmetry in access to normative bindingness. While non-reductive perspectivalism and its component idea of perspectival existence of normativity also raise some new puzzles, the chapter makes a start at developing answers.