Constitutivism and Ideal Agency

Abstract According to Michael Smith’s constitutivist account, moral norms are grounded in rational requirements. These requirements, he argues, can be derived from constitutive features of ideal agency. We target a key component of Smith’s account, namely the thesis that a rationally ideal agent has intrinsic desires to help and not interfere with other agents’ rational capacities. We cast doubt on two arguments for this thesis put forward by Smith (2015, 2020).