Praxeological Constitutivism and the Agency Preservation Principle

Abstract This paper argues that the structure of agency itself generates categorical moral norms. From the formal conditions of purposive action, it derives the Agency Preservation Principle (APP): agents must not act in ways that destroy the conditions that make valuation and choice possible. Coercion, on this view, is not merely evaluatively objectionable but conceptually incoherent, because it cancels the authorship through which action has meaning. The paper develops a praxeological form of constitutivism that grounds normativity in what it is to act, rather than in intuition, psychology, or social convention. Unlike Kantian or Korsgaardian self-constitution views, this account derives obligation from the conditions of intelligibility of purposeful action itself, not from reflective endorsement. Moral norms are objective because they follow from agency’s structure, authoritative because no agent can coherently deny them while acting, and reciprocal because all agents share that structure. The argument resolves the shmagency objection, reframes the is–ought divide, and establishes non-coercion as the constitutive condition of moral intelligibility.