ABSTRACT

This chapter shows that constructivism is a plausible view about the authority of a part of morality and rebuts some reasons for skepticism about its compatibility with Christian ethics. The inspiration of contemporary moral and political constructivism is found in the work of Immanuel Kant, but it has its more proximate origins in the theorizing of John Rawls. For constructivism uses the procedure for selecting rules to represent an important fact about the rules: by representing the rules of baseball as the outcome of a procedure for arriving at rules, constructivism displays how the rules for the practice are connected to practical reason and therefore enjoy its authority. What finally gets constructed by constructivism about distributive justice is the object of the social cooperation game. Christian ethicists, as their label suggests, assert an important connection between God and the norms of human behavior and may think it objectionable that constructivism seems not to do justice to that connection.