Social ontology in metaethics

Abstract

This article enriches discussions about the metaphysics of normative facts with conceptual resources from social ontology that metaethics has neglected so far: the resources of Haslanger’s critical realism as social constructionism. By pointing out the viability of understanding reasons as socially constructed facts, the article shows how normative facts can be understood as features of mind-independent reality that are, however, not features of the universe independently of social practices. The move into social ontology allows us to understand normative facts as mind-independent in a more substantial sense than deflationists do, by stressing individual mind-independence, while denying collective mind-independence – the subsistence independently of established human cultures. The new position can fruitfully mediate between realism, error theory and constructivism. Finally, the metaphysical nuances provided by social ontology pave the way for novel approaches to normative change and progress – thereby indicating pathways to normative theorising that many traditional metaethical positions lack.

1. Introduction

There are a few intuitions about the nature of moral judgements that seem quite common among modern people. One is the idea that nothing in the universe possesses moral properties independently of us. Another intuition says that, even though there are no such things as mind-independent moral properties, we have an indispensable commitment to at least a few moral truths. While the latter intuition is psychologically compelling when we reflect on how we make and revise moral judgements, the former intuition is still pervasive in modern thought. Even though most people probably share the indispensability intuition, most people might also subscribe to the former idea that in one way or another, the apparent moral truths are ultimately ‘made up’ in some psychological, mental, social or cultural process.

There is a great variety of metaethical positions that try to understand and account for these intuitions. On the one hand, there are several interpretations of so-called error theory (Joyce 2001; Mackie 1977; Olson 2014; Streumer 2017), saying in a nutshell that moral judgments ascribe objective moral properties, which do not exist, so that all moral judgements are false. On the other hand, there are theories that defend the idea of moral truths despite of the observation of some sort of psychological dependence or cultural contingency, or in light of it. Among these are some of the more novel defences of realism, sometimes referred to as deflationist, quietist or non-ontological realisms (Dworkin 2011; Parfit 2011; Scanlon 2014), theories spelled out as irrealism (Skorupski 2010) or presentationalism (Eklund 2017), as well as different constructivist positions (Korsgaard 1996; Street 2008).

The amount of literature is vast, and differences are often subtle. Still, the existing landscape seems to suggest a basic difference between accounts that take the basis for moral truth to be somehow ‘out there’, and accounts that take the basis for moral truth to be somehow ‘within us’, to speak very roughly. The latter depict moral truths as products or implications of structures or features that lie within an agent or observer, such as desires, representations, or structures of mind or rationality. A general trend within the metaethics of the last decade is to turn from the analysis of morality to the analysis of normativity more generally speaking, as exemplified by Scanlon (2014) or Streumer (2017), purporting that morality is less difficult to understand once we have a basic understanding of normativity as such.

Following that move, I introduce a new way of theorising normativity: ¹ Social constructionism about reasons. My proposal is inspired by a version of social constructionism that Haslanger (2012) calls ‘critical realism’. Critical realism rejects the picture that the basis for normative truth lies ‘within’ an agent. It insists on a picture of normative properties as features of external reality to which mind is responsive. However, it is fully compatible with the view that the universe does not contain any normative properties independently of human cultures. Rather, the point is that a landscape of normative properties is a social creation. While being inextricably linked to a complexity of biological and anthropological features, this creation is still genuinely social in nature. To some extent, such creations are historically contingent. At least parts of them could be otherwise and are changeable. However, the created landscapes of (entities with) normative properties constitute mind-independent and rigid ‘infrastructures’ that have subsistence beyond the individual and its internal features.

Social metaphysics, I propose in this article, has the theoretical resources for describing a type of ontological status that is suitable for describing the reality of normative properties or facts. ² Moreover, the tradition of social metaphysics offers various resources for understanding social change and normative transformation, which can be fruitful resources for moral philosophy as well. The important difference between reality in the sense of what is in the world independently of the individual, and reality in the sense of what is in the universe independently of human cultures, is I think widely overlooked in metaethical debates.

In section 2, I briefly set the stage by outlining some basic differences between realist and antirealist proposals and their respective appeals. In section 3, I propose a way of reconciling an approach of conceptual analysis with an evolutionary or psychological approach to cognition that is necessary for understanding the social constructionist proposal, and that I think is also helpful in overcoming some unfortunate ‘deadlocks’ in metaethical discussions. Then, in section 4, I show, following the baseline of one of the most influential contemporary theories within evolutionary psychology, how we can argue that reasons are socially constructed facts in some of the senses discussed in social metaphysics. Section 5 introduces Haslanger’s brand of social constructionism, its underlying motives and implications, and transfers it to moral philosophy. Section 6 shows how the introduced ontological proposal can be regarded as a metaethical approach of its own, which can potentially rival error theory, realism, and constructivism, by taking up some of their most basic guiding intuitions, while refusing or modifying some of their ontological conclusions. Finally, in section 7, I briefly sum up the article and point out some future research perspectives in my concluding remarks.

2. Taking stock: Realisms and antirealisms

A ‘realist’ position, as I am using the term here, subscribes to the following three claims:

1. Moral judgements can be true or false.

2. There are facts of the matter that make them true or false.

3. These facts are irreducibly normative.

Antirealist positions that reject already the first claim, non-cognitivist positions, will not be considered in this article. Rejecting the second claim, while accepting the first, is typical for error theories. Alternatively, it is also an option to argue for the possibility of moral truths without assuming moral facts (e.g. Eklund 2017). Distinct from that, antirealist positions accepting moral facts, and only departing from realism with respect to the third claim, can make various naturalist proposals or defend a version of constructivism – for example, Kantian constructivism, understanding moral facts as intentional objects produced by a rational will (Korsgaard 1996), or Humean constructivism, understanding moral facts as products of all our desires reflected on in light of each other (Street 2006, 2008).

Of course, there are great differences concerning the understanding of ‘moral facts’, and especially constructivist authors often do not use the term in any systematic way. I will assume for the purpose of this article, that constructivism is fine with talking about facts of the matter but hold that these facts are ‘moral’ only in virtue of being arrived at by a procedure that stems from our own psychology, thus rejecting the third claim. To express it with Korsgaard, the ‘source’ of normativity lies within us: nothing is normative in the world unless it is willed by a rational creature.

Scanlon (2014, 14), in his defence of realism, rejects Korsgaard’s rationale by arguing that the question of what moral facts ‘have to do with us’ or of ‘how they appeal to us’ is irrelevant when we ask what reasons we have. When we ask this question, we take the normative stance towards reasons. We talk about reasons in what Scanlon (1998, 19) calls the ‘standard normative sense’. Reasons in this sense, Scanlon says, are facts, not rational considerations that appeal to us. Metaphysically, they are not different from ordinary, sometimes natural facts. However, their normative quality is irreducible. What makes ‘ordinary’ facts reasons is their standing in a particular relation to a person, a circumstance and a response. That description notwithstanding, the question of what reasons in this sense are cannot be answered in a general non-circular way. The concept of a reason, Scanlon says, is a fundamental one, in the sense that it cannot be analysed – not in terms of rationality, not in terms of mental or other natural properties. We must simply presuppose that people are responsive to reasons. With this rationale, amounting to what is called Reasons Fundamentalism, ³ Scanlon establishes the truth of the third claim above – the claim that there are irreducibly normative facts.

The truth of Reasons Fundamentalism is, it seems, taken to lead directly to the truth of realism. This is certainly intuitive, since, as a position in metaphysics, fundamentalism about an entity usually means that this entity is a component of reality that is not composed of or reducible to other parts. The mind-independence claim seems to come together with the fundamentalism claim and is established with the mentioned rationale that truths about reasons cannot be conceptually or logically derived from facts about the mind.

Although Scanlon takes this basic rationale to suffice for establishing mind-independent realism, there is dispute about how far it gets us in establishing the substantial claim that defendants of moral realism are usually after (e.g. Veluwenkamp 2017; Clarke-Doane 2017). We can further note that a philosopher who is largely in agreement with Scanlon regarding Reasons Fundamentalism and mind-independence, namely Skorupski (2010), prefers the term irrealism to realism for what can count as roughly the same metaphysical picture. ⁴ Without thereby contradicting Scanlon, Skorupski elaborates on the metaphysics of reasons in an additionally illuminating way: in a Fregean spirit, he draws a threefold distinction between what depends on the mind (the subjective), what is mind-independent in the sense of causally efficacious objects in space and time (the objectively real), and what is mind-independent in the sense of non-derivable from the mind, but not existing as an object in space and time (the objectively irreal).

Despite of the terminological difference, both Scanlon’s realism and Skorupski’s irrealism satisfy the three criteria above that I take to distinguish realist from antirealist projects. The spirit and motivation of anti-realists, as I take it, is the wish to say more about how morality, or normativity more generally speaking, came into the world and became the way it is, while realists refuse to do so. The main argument for that refusal seems to rest mainly on the idea of Reason Fundamentalism. The idea of Reasons Fundamentalism, in turn, seems to rest on an analysis of how we relate to reasons when we take the normative stance. The antirealist, for example constructivist, objection that we also must understand the presuppositions of our relating to reasons in that way – our rationality or other psychological features – is discarded as irrelevant.

Crucially, no Reasons Fundamentalist that I know of denies that, when somebody is responding to a reason, there is a psychological explanation for why and how this happens. The point of metaethicists rejecting constructivism, or often rather holding that its claims are irrelevant to metaethical analysis (see Hussain and Shah 2006, 2013), is that the psychological explanation of why we respond to a reason does nothing to establish that or why it is a reason. ⁵

To sum up, I acknowledge that there is a strong appeal to the basic idea that, as engaged reasoners who ‘take morality seriously’, we think about matters at hand, not about our mind or psychological nature. Thus, I accept Reasons Fundamentalism from the normative stance. However, I would still hold that the psychological story is worth including into our metaethical picture as a whole. In the next section, I propose a way of combining the fundamentalist claim with a psychological claim without running into contradictions. The proposed perspective is essential for understanding the theoretical value of social constructionism.

3. Two compatible stories: Reasons fundamentalism and evolutionary psychology of reasons

As suggested in the short depiction above, an aspect that moral realists have in their favour is the idea that when we take the proper stance towards reasons, or ‘take them seriously’, we relate to them as irreducibly normative facts – facts the normativity of which we cannot generally explain or analyse further in a non-circular way. This is Scanlon’s definition of Reasons Fundamentalism, and his defence of realism is in fact a defence of Reasons Fundamentalism.

I further suggested that this is intuitive, since, in metaphysics, fundamentalism about an entity is usually the view that this entity is a basic part of reality that is not composed or reducible. When it comes to reasons, however, we can pose the question in which sense they are fundamental parts of ‘reality’ – or rather, of ‘reality’ in what sense they are a fundamental part. It is interesting to note that some Kantian constructivists, such as Korsgaard, seem to have no problem with acknowledging normative facts as fundamental parts of ‘human life’ or the ‘practical reality’ of humans (see for example Korsgaard 1996, 161). In this practical sense, we can say, reasons are real. The constructivist point, however, is to claim, as distinct from the realist, that we can explain this part of reality in terms of ‘rationality’ or the ‘faculty of practical reason’ – in other words, that normative facts are somehow fundamental to our life world, but not necessarily fundamental parts of the universe, whereas the universe is understood as the totality of entities in space and time. I assume that realists, such as Scanlon, are perfectly fine with denying that reasons are entities in space and time. This means, however, that we may ask further whether entities that present themselves as fundamental parts of our human reality can be explained further in any other informative way, for example, by a scientific approach, even if this explanation will not – or at least not directly – add to our everyday understanding of morality, to our understanding when taking the normative stance.

At this point, I think it is worthwhile to put cognitive science and evolutionary psychology into the picture and ask them for an account of what it is to be a reason. Even though this is not to take the normative stance, it may illuminate what we are doing when we take the normative stance and what it is that we are responding to, when we respond to a consideration as an irreducibly normative fact. Furthermore, empirical accounts seem more promising for going beyond the practical reality of our concepts than philosophical accounts, such as Kantian constructivism, as the latter can be found ambiguous about whether its claims are purely conceptual or whether it makes other, more substantial claims about human nature (see the criticism by Hussain and Shah 2006).

Recently, the cognitive scientists Mercier and Sperber (2017) have put forth an evolutionary account of both ‘reasons’ and the ‘faculty of reason’. Moreover, their work can be neatly connected to the metaethical debates that understand reasons as facts and rationality, or in a more Kantian terminology the ‘faculty of reason’, as responding to reasons. ⁶ This is so because the picture they arrive at warrants the conceptualisation of rationality as a faculty to respond to basic items of thought as reasons, rather than as a faculty of employing structural or logical principles.

Supported by many empirical studies, Mercier and Sperber claim that reasoning consists of ‘intuitive inferences about reasons’ (Mercier and Sperber 2017, 107). The process of reasoning consists of intuitive responses to considerations (facts) that we can spontaneously recognise as reasons. It is not logics or any structurally describable ‘faculty of reason’ that leads us to accept such considerations as reasons (Mercier and Sperber 2017, 174).

The evolutionary explanation of why we perform this process, why we reflect in terms of reasons, is, according to Mercier and Sperber, that we must communicate available considerations and converge on a view about which considerations we take to be relevant so that we are able to coordinate our culturally complex actions. With a short label, Mercier and Sperber state that reasons are items ‘for social consumption’ (Mercier and Sperber 2017, 123). They claim that mind ‘produces’ reasons in order to justify itself to others. Reasons, on their account, are a product of communicative practices of justification. The authors clarify that this does not mean that each culture can arbitrarily ‘build a battery of reasons all of its own’ (Mercier and Sperber 2017, 143). The production of reasons is importantly constrained by functional ‘cognitive efficiency’ (Mercier and Sperber 2017, 144). Still, they emphasise that reasons are creatively produced, and that it requires a stable communicative context to produce them. ⁷

Obviously, the major difference between the writings of philosophers such as Scanlon and Skorupski, and the writings of psychologists and cognitive scientists such as Mercier and Sperber, is that the latter speak about reasons as items of thought produced by mind, while the former hold that reasons are facts that hold mind-independently. However, I think we can understand them as speaking about the very same thing, but from different perspectives – the perspective of the engaged reasoner versus the perspective of the detached scientist: ⁸ the former regards the facts that hold in the world, the latter regards the reasoner’s grasped and shared conceptualisations of the state of affairs. Speaking about reasons as ‘considerations’ does justice to both.

As I suggested in this section, there is no problem with endorsing Reasons Fundamentalism as a view about how we conceptualise reasons when we take the normative stance, the stance of engaged reasoners, and at the same time accepting the proposed social account of reasons on scientific and empirical grounds. When we accept both views, we will say: when asking what I have reason to do, or whether something is really a (good) reason, I get no help from studying evolutionary psychology; however, I acknowledge that whenever I arrive at the conclusion that something is a good reason, I activate a certain disposition in my cognitive psychology that has the proposed social origin. There is no contradiction in this.

Moreover, it is not immediately clear which conclusions we can draw from these statements, if any. As I will show later in the article, social constructionists in general metaphysics have proposed ways of dealing with the knowledge that something is socially constructed that can be fruitfully applied in this context. Before I come to this, however, I must specify what Mercier’s and Sperber’s claims can mean for the ontology of reasons.

4. Reasons as socially constructed facts

Contemporary research in evolutionary psychology claims that reasons are items that mind produces for justification in communicative contexts. Jumping from this claim to the metaphysical claim that reasons are socially constructed is certainly too quick. In this section, I will discuss in more detail if and in what sense we can speak of reasons as socially constructed facts.

To begin with, the term ‘social construction’ is taken from the field of social ontology, which has become a common term for describing philosophical analysis of social reality (see Epstein 2018). Social reality, for example, includes groups, group agency, organisations or institutions such as money, marriage, or the law. Philosophers such as Gilbert (1989), Searle (1995, 2010) or Pettit (1993) have used the term ‘social facts’ to describe facts brought into existence by collective intentionality. More recently, social ontology has also focused on the analysis of gender, race or disability. Especially in these debates, the idea that certain facts are brought into existence by social creatures is commonly connected to the argument that certain parts of reality are not inevitable (Haslanger 2012; Díaz-León 2015) but instead determined by factors that could be changed. Before we get to the question, what we conclude from a social constructionist claim, let us first examine what the claim means.

It is commonly distinguished between what is causally socially constructed and what is constitutively socially constructed (Díaz-León 2015, 1141; Haslanger 2012, 86f; Mallon 2019). Haslanger gives the following definitions:

Causal construction

Something is causally constructed iff social factors play a role in bringing it into existence or, to some substantial extent, in its being the way it is.

Constitutive construction

Something is constitutively constructed iff in defining it we must make reference to social factors. (Haslanger 2012, 87)

In the case of ‘gender’, a frequent example in the debate, we might find elements of both types of social construction. If labelling and treating people in a certain way causes them to develop certain traits, this is a matter of causal construction. As opposed to that, many philosophers argue that gender is a social category ‘whose definition makes reference to a broad network of social relations, and it is not simply a matter of anatomical differences’. (Haslanger 2012, 86f). This means that, for example, ‘being a woman’ is defined as standing in particular relations to others, as bearing a particular social meaning or as having a particular social status, to use a term proposed by Àsta (2018), another social metaphysician.

In the following, I will examine if reasons can be considered as socially constructed in one of these senses. I will begin with specifying what it would mean for reasons to be causally socially constructed and constitutively socially constructed, respectively. According to Haslanger’s definition, causal construction would be in place if social factors were relevant for bringing reasons into existence and making them the way they are. Constitutive construction, by contrast, would be in place if we had to refer to social factors or a social group for defining what it is to be a reason.

Let us first look at causal social construction: According to the proposed evolutionary theory, reflection in terms of reasons has evolved as a social practice of justification. But does that mean that reasons – the currency of justification – have been brought into existence by this practice? It seems correct, according to Mercier and Sperber that the potential of our mind to deal with reasons is caused by a social practice. It is less clear, by contrast, that the existence of the reasons, the considerations or conceptualised states of affairs, themselves have been caused by social practice. It is trivially true that there would be no minds dealing with these reasons. But does it make sense to say that the reasons – as causally inefficacious entities – are brought into existence? Though Mercier and Sperber frequently speak of mind as ‘producing’ reasons, metaphysical analysis must be more careful at this point.

Following Haslanger’s definition, we can ask further whether social factors have played a substantial role in making reasons the way they are. We could reasonably claim this if we could establish that we are responsive to these reasons (in these contexts) rather than others as a product of the specific social practice which gave rise to our responsiveness, or our disposition to respond. If this is the case is a question difficult to answer. The account by Mercier and Sperber does not rule out that some reasons will inevitably be treated as reasons because of basic biological or anthropological constituents. Universal anthropological factors may secure that certain conceptualisations will always play a role in the relevant form of communication and reflection. As Mercier and Sperber note, a community cannot create a ‘battery of reasons of its own’ but is constrained by ‘cognitive efficiency’ (Mercier and Sperber 2017, 143f). While some reasons might indeed be the local products of a specific community, others might not be caused by social factors in an interesting sense. They may be shaped to an extent but not be directly and exclusively caused by the particular social group in which they function as currency for justification. This brings me to the conclusion that reasons are in part, or to an extent, but not entirely socially constructed in the causal sense.

Let us now turn to constitutive social construction: I take for granted that we do not refer to social factors for defining what it is to be a reason, when we take the normative stance, which is often identified as the relevant stance for metaethical analysis. The scientific analysis, however, is different in a crucial respect. It is not about how we, as moral agents, understand our reasons, but about how we best understand what a social creature producing reasons for the purpose of justification is doing.

The question is whether we need to refer to social factors when we try to define reasons from this psychologically interested stance. To begin with, it seems that the story of reasons as items produced by mind for a social goal is obviously referring to a social factor. But again, we should proceed more carefully. I suggest that we can only establish that reasons are constitutively socially constructed if we can establish that ‘being a reason’ is ‘being considered as a reason in a social practice’. To avoid the stipulation of a too reflective conceptualisation of reasons as reasons, we can replace ‘being considered as a reason’ with ‘being accepted as a reason’ or even just ‘functioning as a reason’ in a social practice.

If this claim were true, being a reason would be a ‘social status’, the property of being considered in a certain way – a property that nothing can have ‘in and of itself’, irrespective of how it is considered. While the causes for people’s acceptance of something as a reason may be a hybrid of social and non-social factors, something, however, can positively be a reason if and only if a group of people accepts it as a reason. Is this claim true?

To assess this question, we must consider the question whether there can be a consideration that is a reason without being considered or accepted as a reason by anybody. Assessing this question is not easy because we tend to conflate the empirical approach and the normative stance when we use the phrase ‘is a reason’. When taking the normative stance, it seems obvious that we are at least sometimes open to discovering considerations that nobody has considered so far. However, is it psychologically possible to respond to a consideration as a reason, if nobody else accepts it as a reason? More precisely, is it possible that such a response can count as a qualified reason response?

I think not, and here I will try to defend this claim by reference to some reasonable presuppositions about the quality of reason responses. As suggested earlier, our only sources for making reason judgements are our own reasoning capacities and the reasoning capacities of other reasoners. As Skorupski (2010) formulates it, the ‘twin pillars’ of reason epistemology are ‘spontaneity’ (our own first-personal responsiveness to reasons) and ‘convergence’ (the internal requirement of our own responsiveness to either match the responsiveness of others or find an explanation for mismatch).

This means that nothing can be a reason unless it has the potential to be arrived at by spontaneity and convergence. As moral agents who want to find out about a particular consideration whether it is a (good) reason, our best way to do so is using our own reasoning and ask others – while always being aware that neither spontaneity nor convergence, nor both, can guarantee that a reason judgement is correct. However, we must acknowledge that any possible reason we could really recognise as a reason – that is, respond to in the characteristic way of a full-fledged reason response – will be an item that we can (at least in principle) arrive at by spontaneity and convergence. This, by definition, entails that the reason in question must be within the scope of what is accepted as a reason or can be expected to be accepted when communicated. Is it possible that somebody recognises a reason in a particular context and can reasonably foresee that others will do so as well, although there has been no prior instance of communication about that type of situation? It is certainly not logically impossible. But it seems, for one thing, psychologically highly implausible.

For another thing, suppose it happens, we can wonder whether the person in question, that we could consider as a kind of moral ‘first mover’, really acted from full-fledged reason recognition. Imagine a person seeing a moral reason and claiming that any other reasonable person would see it as well, while in all experienced communications there has been no evidence in support of the latter assumption. I think there would be no relevant difference between this person and what we call a mad person. We should not exclude that ‘mad’ people may induce social change and slowly make people see new aspects, which could then function as reasons for later generations. However, this does not mean that what the ‘mad’ person did was acting from warranted reason recognition. Thus, I suggest that we should define ‘being a reason’ as ‘functioning as a reason’ in a social practice when we describe reasons in our psychological nature. This means that reasons, psychologically studied, are constitutively socially constructed.

Conceptually – as moral reasoners taking the normative stance – we can make perfect sense of the idea that there is a valid normative interpretation of a given situation that nobody has ever seen or taken seriously before. We sometimes make the experience of discovering new reason relations, and our active moral reflection seems often motivated by the hope of such discoveries. ⁹ When we think in the more detached manner of a scientist, however, it makes considerably more sense to conclude that normative dispositions, and the corresponding reasons, have changed, rather than defending the thesis that the newly discovered ‘reasons’ have been there all along – as reasons, as opposed to just aspects that could possibly become reasons.

When a consideration has become a reason for a particular person in a particular situation, it means that the mind of that person has acquired the potential to respond to that consideration as a reason – which, per definition, is a response characterised by spontaneity and convergence. ¹⁰ As suggested by the proposed psychology of reasoning, this potential is given by a communicative environment in which particular considerations are accepted as reasons in particular circumstances. It is, in contrast to the compelling phenomenology of the engaged normative stance, not a response to a feature simply in virtue of that feature’s intrinsic normative properties. It seems that the scientist studying psychological nature would take a particular, morally engaged stance if she were to claim that a solitary moral dissident is getting the ‘real’ reasons, which everyone else misses. Being consequent in taking the scientific stance, the scientist should be aware that when making that judgement, she herself is appealing to the reasons to which her moral psychology is responsive – while she should acknowledge that her psychological disposition has evolved in an analogous way, but in a different community.

5. Implications of social constructionism: Haslanger’s critical realism

I have argued that the account of reasons proposed by Mercier and Sperber warrants the metaphysical claim that reasons are socially constructed facts. In the previous section, I argued that, taking a scientific interest in reasons, we can say that they are constitutively – and in part also causally – socially constructed. However, when we take a normative interest, when we take what I earlier called the normative stance, we understand reasons as irreducibly normative aspects of the world.

We may find that we end up with a tension in our understanding of reasons. However, I have suggested earlier, that there is no contradiction in accepting those two views together. Still, assessing ourselves in the normative stance in light of the scientific picture might have an effect on us. A few possible effects of such assessment have already been discussed in the error theoretic debates, to be addressed in the next section. In this section, I will examine what insights and conclusions metaphysicians in other contexts draw from social constructionist claims.

Hacking, for example, distinguishes six types of motivations that may drive a social constructionist proposal: historical, ironic, reformist, unmasking, rebellious and revolutionary (Hacking 1999, 19–20). According to Hacking’s reading, all versions of constructionism embrace 1) ‘X need not have existed, or need not be at all as it is. X or X as it is at present, is not determined by the nature of things; it is not inevitable’ (Hacking 1999, 6). To varying degrees, they also embrace 2) ‘X is quite bad as it is’ and 3) ‘We would be much better off if X were done away with, or at least radically transformed’. (Hacking 1999, 6).

Haslanger’s social constructionism, by contrast, is more modest regarding normative and practical conclusions as exemplified by 2 and 3. As opposed to constructionists with for example reformist, rebellious or revolutionary intentions, all that she says is in the first place that there is a ‘theoretically important’ kind that has ‘not been adequately acknowledged to be social’ (Haslanger 2012, 137). As Haslanger writes, social constructionists in that sense ‘may seem to be offering radical and implausible “analyses” of our ordinary concepts, in fact they can be better understood as working within a semantic externalist model that looks to social theory’ (ibid.). Thus, they bring something to mind that is hidden in our ordinary talk, thought and practice. ¹¹ Social constructionism thus makes us better understand what we are doing when we use certain concepts or categories.

Haslanger also refers to social constructionism as a ‘debunking project’ (Haslanger 2012, 113–138), but it is important to note that ‘debunking’ here does not mean ‘destroying’ or ‘annihilating’, it means showing with sober analysis how something is built that we usually take for granted and that plays a fundamental, usually unquestioned role in our lives – gender in Haslanger’s case, reasons in the case studied in this article. I think that the ontological status of both entities is analogous to a large extent. Neither Haslanger’s critique of gender, nor the depiction of reasons in line with Mercier and Sperber, support overly enthusiastic revolutionary ideas about overthrowing the status quo and radically redefining our familiar concepts. On the contrary, they stress the many constraints, the deep interwovenness of our concepts with very general biological and anthropological factors, ¹² and the manifest rigidity of the socially constructed reality.

Haslanger also calls her social constructionist position ‘critical realism’ (Haslanger 2012, 197). Thereby, she refuses the idea that social constructionism equates antirealism or anti-naturalism. The point of saying that something is socially constructed is not to say that it is not real, or that there is no objective knowledge about it that could be good to have (ibid.: 198). Instead, social constructionism specifies the structure and creation of a particular part of reality. Moreover, saying that something is socially constructed is not to say that it cannot be a natural kind. Instead, Haslanger emphasises that the social is part of our nature and that nature consists of interdependent social and non-social factors (ibid.: 212f). Finally, Haslanger describes the point of social constructionism as follows:

if we are going to change the world, we need to know how the problematic parts are created and maintained. We need to find the levers for change. And if the goal is to find the levers for change, then it is important to understand ways in which the social and non-social are interdependent. (Haslanger 2012, 215)

We might be able to transport some of this spirit into the analysis of reasons, but we also encounter a problem at this point – a problem that occurs for social constructionism about reasons, but not for a social constructionism about gender or race. If we know how our gender categories are socially constructed, we can think about reasons for or against certain interventions or changes. When we know that our reasons are socially constructed, by contrast, how shall we decide to go on? How shall we evaluate the status quo if not in terms of reasons?

This, it seems, is a peculiarity that distinguishes social constructionism about reasons from social constructionism about other entities. Nevertheless, I think, that the analogies outweigh the differences, and that the distinction is, after all, not that deep. Consider, concerning gender, the psychological restrictions to thinking outside of deeply entrenched gender roles, that were, for example, pointed out by theorists such as Butler (1990). The socially constructed is, if we want it or not, a reality that constrains our minds. Then consider, concerning the domain of reasons, the psychological flexibility with which we can relate to our beliefs about what we have reason to do. We can pursue self-determination in terms of reasons, while we can also pursue, or at least allow for, states of mind that are less than self-determined thought but still bring about changes in the world and in ourselves that we can value. There are a couple of intriguing questions that open up when we thoroughly think about the implications of social constructionism about reasons: Can we act without or against reason and thereby bring about states for which we later start to see reasons? New states of being a subject? New ‘forms of mind’? New forms of mind that are responsive to new reasons? To reasons that were not available, and therefore could not have been said to hold, for our earlier selves?

In the next section, I argue that critical realism, as social constructionism, can be fruitfully regarded as a metaethical option standing between simple realism, error theory and constructivism.

6. Social constructionism as critical realism: a theoretical option between realism, error theory and constructivism

I have presented a way of regarding reasons as socially constructed facts that is compatible with the claim that we view reasons as irreducibly normative aspects of the world, when we take the normative stance. Social constructionism in the sense of Haslanger’s critical realism offers us a way to conceive of features of our world as dependent on social practice, without at the same time holding that this makes these aspects of the world less ‘real’.

Likewise, when it comes to reasons, I think we can accept that the landscape of reasons is mind-independently real. As mentioned earlier, the mind-independence claim is commonly defended with the argument that we cannot derive normative facts from facts about the mind, which is – in the first place – a conceptual claim from the perspective of the reasoner. As such, it would allow us to resort to deflationism about mind-independence. Deflationism about the mind-independence of reasons could be paraphrased as the idea that our practical understanding of reasons is sufficient for the defence of substantial, irreducible moral truths, and that there is no need for any robust metaphysical claims. ¹³ We might add that, if somebody wants to investigate the matter metaphysically, the metaethicist must concede eventually that there is nothing but our own representations that make the world normative, but that this is fine and no threat to the moral realist.

The social constructionist brand of realism, by contrast, allows us to be more substantial about mind-independence than the deflationist. For any particular reasoner, there is a totality of considerations that can be responded to as reasons – responded to in the peculiar way of both spontaneity and convergence typical for full-fledged reason responses. This totality of considerations that can be responded to as reasons is – however unknown this might be to the person – determined by the communicative practice in which this person’s mind was shaped. The available reasons are given by the social environment this reasoner is communicating with. They are there, irrespective of the actual representations of the individual mind – who can get it right or wrong, not according to any internal standard of its individual psychology, but against the background of the external landscape of reasons. We are warranted to speak about reasons as independent of individual mind, or individually mind-independent, in a quite robust sense. We do not need to be satisfied with just a deflationist or ‘non-ontological’ claim, nor do we have to undertake the difficult business that Kantian constructivists or constitutivists engage in. Constructivists, such as Korsgaard (1996), try to combine the view that moral truth derives from internal standards of psychology with the obvious intersubjective validity of some normative claims by arguing that certain formal internal principles are shared – and must be shared – by all rational creatures. These approaches come with problems of its own, which the social constructionist does not face. For example, the social constructionist does not have to show why a reasoner must act for ‘shareable’ reasons if she does not do so anyway (see Enoch’s 2006 criticism) because the social constructionist does not say that reasons are derived from internal principles: you can just consider the facts. Still, the social constructionist does not need to stop with the, for some people, unsatisfying claim that normative facts are simply there and have nothing to do with human psychology. They can, as distinct from individual mind-independence, claim collective mind-dependence – dependence on the existence of a collective landscape of reasons, which forces the individual mind, and which can only be ignored at a high cost. As I suggested earlier, an individual mind that responds to a consideration as a reason in a particular context without being able to reasonably foresee convergence with competent others would hardly exhibit the features of what we call a mentally ‘sane’ person. There is nothing that distinguishes this person from a mad person.

Finally, by elucidating how responsiveness to reasons is connected to mental sanity, the social constructionist picture captures the intuition driving some versions of Kantian constructivism: that normativity has to do ‘with us’, with our rationality that is, as Korsgaard (1996, 2009) formulates it, ‘constitutive’ of what we are as subjects or agents. As opposed to Kantian constructivism, however, the proposed social constructionism does not conflate the normative stance with a descriptive or scientific stance towards the question of what it is to be a reason; nor is it prone to conflating metaethics with other questions about the nature of morality, as Hussain and Shah (2006) object.

Instead of the here suggested metaphorical talk of a ‘landscape’ of reasons, Scanlon (and also Skorupski) talk about the ‘domain’ of reasons. His argument is that reasons are a part of reality, although they belong to a different ontological domain than the domain of physical objects in space and time. In general, a social constructionist can agree with Scanlon’s line of reasoning. The only difference is that Scanlon’s theory seems to imply that the ontological ¹⁴ domain that reasons belong to is ‘simply’ real, without further specification. Haslanger, by contrast, would say that it is real, but that there is more to understand about how this part of reality came into being, and became the way it is. As Haslanger also states, gaining this more profound understanding does not force us to reject our current practice. It does not proof it wrong. But it illuminates its conditions.

Furthermore, the view seems to stand between error theory and the realism I discussed in this article. On one side, it embraces Scanlon’s plausible view that claiming moral facts does not presuppose queer entities, as error theorists seem to believe it does. On the other side, the view embraces a widespread intuition that seems to drive error theory: that the universe does not contain any moral properties that are mind-independent in the same sense as mountains or particles, and that the apparent objectivity of morality is the product of a cultural process of ‘objectification’, as Mackie calls it.

There are many disputes about how exactly to understand the error theoretic proposal (Eklund 2017; Olson 2014; Moberger 2017), and about what to conclude from it. Suggestions reach from claims to revise our objectivist semantics, over fictionalist attempts (e.g. Joyce 2001), to the claim that commitments to some sort of moral facts are indispensable and that we cannot give them up, even though we can in some sense come to understand that they are not really backed up by facts (see for example Streumer’s 2017, recent proposal of an error theory about reasons). I have sympathy for the spirit behind the latter proposal, but have a hard time seeing that the term ‘error theory’ is warranted. For short, labelling something as an error – an obviously normative notion – seems inconsistent with the thesis that there are no normative properties. If there are no normative properties in the world, we cannot say that a creature whose mind responds to features of its environment as reasons is making a mistake. We can only examine what this creature is doing and how this practice came about. The worry that such examinations make us psychologically incapable of participating in the practice seems obviously unwarranted. After all, it is not a common observation that researchers of moral psychology or evolutionary psychology tend to take moral consideration less seriously in their daily lives.

A take that is both more plausible and more helpful, is to investigate our first-personally witnessed responsiveness to irreducibly normative facts as a psychological phenomenon in space and time, and eventually accept the conclusion that what we are doing is responding to a real landscape of socially constructed facts. What we do with that insight is another question. We can assume that the universe does not make any prescriptions in that regard. It is plausible that the insight influences us somehow, but very implausible that it destroys the responsiveness in question completely.

The proposed take is substantially different from error theory but captures – as far as I can see – all the important observations and presuppositions driving error theories. Of course, I only gave very brief sketches of arguments that cannot do justice to any fully developed error theoretic proposal. Still, I think these lines of thought suggest that error theory must answer questions that the proposed social constructionism does not even raise – such as the question how something can be an error if there is no normativity, and of course all the different objections concerning the alleged ‘queer’ entities out there in the universe.

Instead of giving a qualified defence of social constructionism against other theories, my aim in this article was to show its potential advantages – and the general possibility of applying Haslanger’s metaphysical insights, mainly developed to address the metaphysics of gender and race – to metaethics. Haslanger’s critical realism can count as an alternative proposal in the landscape of metaethics – a proposal that accounts for mind-independence in a substantial sense, in so far as individual mind-independence is concerned, while allowing for the possibility that the universe in itself could allow for different moral practices to function equally well. The universe does not prescribe any particular normative practice, and all normative practices are still collectively mind-dependent.

However, the resulting construction is a reality that is strongly independent of each of us individually – a reality that we either cannot ignore, or that we can only ignore at a high cost – at least for the individual. Social constructionism, I propose, gives us a deeper understanding of moral facts without debunking or undermining them, and without declaring them as non-existent. The proposed understanding is in line with the widespread modern understanding that there are no moral facts or properties in the universe independently of human cultures, and the claim of various moral philosophers to “take morality seriously” as a mind-independent force.

7. Concluding remarks

In this article, I have applied an influential proposal from the field of social metaphysics to a traditional metaethical debate. Although each of the addressed metaethical positions could only be depicted in a very general way, without claiming that what I said refutes them, I still hope to have shown how social constructionism could work within metaethics and how it could be different from, and (at least potentially) superior to, error theories as well as contemporary versions of realism and constructivism. I have shown how recent research in evolutionary psychology and the cognitive sciences allows for a conceptualisation of reasons as socially constructed facts. In addition to that, I have shown a viable possibility of integrating a psychological picture into a metaethical analysis without making the commonly criticised mistakes of such proposals – as they show up in objections to, or complaints about the unclarity of, positions such as error theory or constructivism.

In line with Haslanger’s approach, the proposed social constructionism is compatible with a realist claim. It can count as a version of realism. As opposed to accounts that stop with the claim that an entity is real, social constructionism elaborates further on the ontology of the part of reality in question. The view enables us to understand the contingency and changeability, at least of parts of our practice, but it does not force us to give it up or change it. It only shows the conditions for doing so. Moreover, I think, adopting the social constructionist view could potentially enable us to better understand various conflicts that come with our nature as moral reasoners – such as the strain of divergence, or impossibility to find convergence, and the difficulty to embark for moral change as a single individual.

Finally – and this is probably the most promising opportunity offered by social constructionism – we may start investigating how and under what circumstances a particular practice of moral reasoning evolved, and to which degree it depends on political, historical, biological or other anthropological factors. In so far as it depends on political and historical factors, we might investigate whether the normative communication was shaped by dominant groups, at the expense of marginalised or oppressed groups – and strive for a communication that listens to everyone’s considerations equally or gives everybody an equal opportunity to articulate their experiences, needs and interests in terms of proper reasons that work successfully in social life.

With that practical approach, the social constructionist might start to resemble the traditional moral constructivist, by envisioning an equilibrium between equals, but – and that could be investigated further – she might do so with a better foundation in empirical human nature and with less vulnerability to objections from (alleged) aprioricity and (false) universalism.