Creating Normativity and Responding to It: How Metaethical Constructivists Must and Can Have It Both Ways

Abstract

This paper pursues two aims. First, it develops a novel objection to metanormative constructivism, which I term the Duality Objection . Second, it proposes a dual‐role account of practical reason and argues that it can meet this objection. Constructivists like Korsgaard and Street maintain that normativity is constructed within agents' first‐personal practical standpoints, shaped by their evaluative input. Valuing is prior to, and metaphysically grounds, value. However, a basic feature of our normative experience is that our evaluative judgements also respond to and track pre‐existing normative facts. Thus, evaluative commitments appear to play two seemingly contradictory roles – creating and responding to normative reality. This tension forms the basis of the Duality Objection. I respond in two steps. First, I show how constructivists can reconcile their metaphysical commitments with agents' normative experiences by distinguishing between first‐ and third‐personal levels of explanation. Second, I develop a Korsgaardian dual‐role account of practical reason , which elucidates the passive‐responsive and active‐creative roles that practical reason plays within our first‐personal agential standpoint. Making sense of “responsive” normative experience within a constructivist framework has a further upshot. It allows us to reject recent “arguments from first‐personal deliberation and experience” by metanormative realists (cf. Enoch 2007, 2011; Kirwin 2024).