Teleology and Normativity

Abstract

Constitutivists hold that the foundations of ethics are to be found in non-normative facts about what is constitutive of agency. Most constitutivists locate these foundations in the teleological structure of agency. Some—Foot, Thomson, and Korsgaard—adopt a broadly Aristotelian approach, claiming that the functional nature of agency grounds normative judgments about actions much as the functional nature of artifacts grounds normative judgments about artifacts. Others—notably Velleman and Katsafanas—eschew talk of functions and claim instead that agency has a constitutive aim. This chapter argues that both constitutivist strategies are unsatisfactory, or at least incomplete. Functions and aims are not by their very nature normatively significant, and so both strategies leave a gap between teleological and normativity. The constitutivist project can nevertheless be salvaged, but only if it is supplemented with a reductive account of reasons for action, one that links reasons for action to successful practical reasoning.

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