Essay Abstract: Onora O’Neill’s Kantian Constructivist Approach To Practical Reasoning

Hey all,

I am not sure whether I will deal with scope but this is how the abstract for my essay on O’Neill stands at the moment:

O’Neill attempts to move beyond the impasse between robust ethical realism and ethical scepticism/relativism by means of a form of Kantian constructivism that at once ensures ethical objectivity and avoids relying on problematic metaphysical presuppositions. According to O’Neill’s “third way” it is followability, publicness and universalism of scope that render public reason ethical and accord it its normative force. I will argue that there are four principal problems with O’Neill’s thesis. First, O’Neill fails to establish that the normative force of her brand of practical reasoning is binding in the way she want it to be insofar as she fails to provide unconditioned justification for followability, publicness and universalism of scope. Secondly, O’Neill is guilty of a conceptual confusion in that she confounds everyone being able to follow a particular chain of reasoning with a particular chain of reasoning being ethically sound. Thirdly, O’Neill’s notions of followability and publicness are self-defeating in that they either admit the validity of other forms of practical reasoning or rule out the validity of all forms of practical reasoning, including O’Neill’s own. Finally, by way of a synthesis of these three critiques I will argue that O’Neill’s project is incoherent as a result of her attempt to establish practical reasoning as the unconditioned conditional of the validity of ethical claims. By way of a conclusion I will gesture at a reformulated constructivism that would be immune from the critiques that O’Neillian constructivism is unable to withstand. This “sentimentalist constructivism” would acknowledge the necessarily “ethnocentric” character of ALL forms of practical reasoning.

All the best,
Benjamin