Abstract

I defend constitutivism against two prominent objections and argue that agential constitutivism has the resources to take normative and ethical deliberation seriously. I first consider David Enoch’s shmagency challenge and argue that it does not form a coherent objection. I counter Enoch’s view that the phenomenology of first-person deliberation pragmatically justifies belief in irreducibly realist normative truths, claiming that constitutivism can respect the practice of moral deliberation without appeal to robustly realist truths. Secondly, I argue that the error theoretic worry that all normative judgements are false does not threaten constitutivism ; the objection either fails to shift the burden of proof to constitutivism, or poses justificatory challenges that constitutivism can meet. I conclude that a questionable foundationalism about justification underlies these objections