Agency, Shmagency: Why Normativity Won't Come from What Is Constitutive of Action

Abstract

There is a fairly widespread – and very influential – hope among philosophers interested in the status of normativity that the solution to our metaethical and more generally metanormative problems will emerge from the philosophy of action. What we need, so the thought goes, is to better understand what action and agency consist in. With this understanding in hand, we will then have all that we need in order to give a philosophical account of reasons for action, or of (practical) normativity altogether.In this paper I argue that this hope is unfounded. Focusing on the work of Rosati, Velleman and Korsgaard, I argue that normativity cannot be grounded in what is constitutive of action. After presenting the objection to this strategy, I then address several – actual and possible – retorts, concluding that these thinkers have not been able to address the worry, and that it does not seem likely that they can.