Louise Hanson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. She has written on a variety of topics in metaethics, aesthetics, and meta-aesthetics. She is particularly interested in the realism-antirealism debate and comparisons across different normative domains with respect to that debate. She is currently writing a book arguing for robust realism about beauty, titled Not in the Eye of the Beholder.
Constitutivism has been widely discussed in both metaethics and epistemology. In this paper I argue that it has been misunderstood in a number of key ways. I argue that a hallmark of constitutive norms is a particular kind of escapability – what I will call Jurisdictional Escapability. I argue that jurisdictional escapability is the key to whether constitutivism is a good fit or a potentially awkward one, in a given domain. Jurisdictional escapability is often run together with a different kind of escapability – which I will call Normative Escapability. But clearly distinguishing these, has significant upshots both for the normative landscape generally, and for constitutivism. First, it reveals that constitutivism is a particularly good fit for epistemic norms, and not such a good fit for moral ones. Second, it reveals that constitutivism is not, as is often thought, an antirealist position, and is in fact entirely compatible with robust realism. Third, it introduces a new dimension of precision into the normative landscape.
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