Sentimentalist normative constructivism

Abstract

I articulate a new constructivist approach to the problem of the normativity of moral demands that provides a middle ground between Kantian and Humean constructivism. This approach combines a modest form of normative constructivism with neo-sentimentalism about virtues. I hold that it can plausibly avoid the Humean claim that the normativity of moral demands is completely contingent upon an agent’s valuing attitudes without embracing the ambitious Kantian project of deriving moral content from practical reason as such. The argument to be developed is this: (1) every normative judgment entails a partial description of virtue; (2) the neo-sentimentalist account of virtue imposes substantial constraints on the conception of virtue an agent can coherently uphold; (3) that provides us with a coherence test for valuing patterns and (4) it is possible to show that valuing patterns that violate recognizable moral constraints fail this test. The conclusion is that certain moral constraints follow, on pain of incoherence, from the standpoint of any affective agent that evaluates other agents in terms of virtue and vice.