Aristotelian Constitutivism: an alternative account of practical normativity

实践规范性，即我们应该或应该做某些事情，如果我们不做就有错的现象，很难理解。它至少表现出三个难以相互调和的特性：第一，应当性判断追求客观有效性；其次，他们有动力；第三，它们作为自然世界的组成部分是可理解的。近几十年来，关于实践规范性的两个最突出的立场是现实主义和各种主观主义，前者认为实践规范性以不可约的规范性事实为基础，后者认为实践规范性以主观动机态度为基础。这两种立场都无法调和这三个性质。近年来，立宪主义作为实践规范性的另一种解释出现了，它承诺公正地对待这三种属性。建构主义者通过规范来解释实践规范性，这些规范被认为是为理由而行动的活动的构成要素。然而，立宪主义在很大程度上是在广泛的康德精神中发展起来的，在这种形式下，它面临着自己的几个问题。可以说，所有这些都源于这样一个事实，即康德的方法，在描述实践理性的活动时，抽象了来自特定人类生命形式的需求。我的项目提出了一个亚里士多德的替代康德的构成主义。其核心思想是，为理性而行动本质上是一种生命活动。因此，构成行为的规范是（特别是）人类生活的规范。我的亚里士多德构成主义不同于各种新亚里士多德主义，因为它将人类生活的规范视为人类实践思维的形式原则（而不是实践思维的内容）。在我的项目中，我将发展和捍卫亚里士多德构成主义的一个可行版本，并说明为什么这个立场是解释实践规范性本质的一个非常有前途的竞争者。

Practical normativity, i.e. the phenomenon that we should or ought to do certain things and are at fault if we don't, is difficult to understand. It displays at least three properties that are difficult to reconcile with each other: Firstly, ought-judgements aspire to objective validity; secondly, they have motivational power; and thirdly, they are intelligible as ingredients of the natural world. The two most prominent positions concerning practical normativity in recent decades are Realism, which holds that practical normativity is grounded in irreducible normative facts, and various Subjectivisms, which take practical normativity to be grounded in subjective motivational attitudes. Both positions fail to reconcile these three properties. In recent years, Constitutivism has emerged as an alternative account of practical normativity that promises to do justice to all three properties. Constitutivists explain practical normativity through norms that are thought to be constitutive of the activity of acting for reasons. However, Constitutivism has mostly been developed in a broadly Kantian spirit, and in this form, it faces several problems of its own. Arguably, all of them have their roots in the fact that the Kantian approach, in describing the activity of practical reason, abstracts from the demands that comes from the specifically human life form. My project proposes an Aristotelian alternative to Kantian Constitutivism. Its core idea is that acting for reasons is essentially a life activity. The norms constitutive for acting are therefore norms of (specifically) human life. My Aristotelian Constitutivism differs from the various Neo-Aristotelianisms that have been proposed since it treats the norms of human life as the formal principles of human practical thinking (rather than as contents of practical thought). In my project, I will develop and defend a viable version of Aristotelian Constitutivism and show why this position is a highly promising contender for explaining the nature of practical normativity.