Construction, Constitution and Normativity

Constructivists and those who favour reductive accounts of reasons or values often hold that those reasons or values can be objective despite being, in some sense, mind-dependent. In arguing for this, they often rely on claims about what is constitutive of agency. According to such claims, you do not qualify as an agent unless you have certain attitudes or pursue certain aims. If that is true, then these aims or attitudes can provide the ‘construction material’ or the reductive base for reasons or values that are necessarily shared by all agents. This conference brings together philosophers working on constructivism or constitutivism in order to discuss how these views are best developed, how they interrelate, and how the objections that have been raised against them should be assessed.