Agency as Normative Kind: Constitutivism as Aristotelianism

Abstract This paper argues that constitutivism is not a novel account but rather collapses into Aristotelianism albeit with new, conceptually clear and philosophically rich, terminology. The paper explores the Aristotelian structure of constitutivism and responds to objections from some constitutivists (Katsafanas 2013. Agency and the Foundations of Ethics: Nietzschean Constitutivism . Oxford University Press) that Aristotelian metaethical accounts cannot meet the practicality requirement in ethics. The author concludes that if the constitutivist can respond to Enoch’s ‘schmagency’ objection, then the Aristotelian can accommodate the practicality requirement by invoking the same mechanism. This paper thus presents constitutivism as an inherently Aristotelian theory, capable of meeting the challenges posed by externalist objections, and not simply that an Aristotelian version of constitutivism can be articulated.