Constructivism in Metaethics and Normative Ethics: A Critical Analysis of Sharon Street’s Thoroughgoing Constructivism

Abstract

The paper presents Sharon Street’s account of metaethical constructivism and attempts to establish whether it constitutes an adequate metaethical theory entailing acceptable normative consequences. In the course of the analysis, it turns out that Street’s constructivism is wanting in detail and its relation to expressivism remains unclear. Its normative consequences are unintuitive and controversial, mainly because the theory vindicates all the valuings of the individual as long as they form a coherent set and are instrumentally rational in the light of prosaic facts. Constructivism falls prey to the problem of self-reference which can be encapsulated in the form of the following question: does the constructivist’s take on the truth conditions of normative claims follow from each particular practical point of view, or is its validity independent of the practical point of view altogether? The problem is serious because it threatens the internal consistency of the position in question. On top of that, it is doubtful that constructivism is the strongest position even among antirealist stances in metaethics − ideal-response accounts seem superior. The latter are justifiably less permissive in the domain of normative ethics, are consistent with the consequences of the Darwinian Dilemma as seen by Street, and can be shown to be no more susceptible to irrelevant causal processes than constructivism.