ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews that political constructivism is best interpreted as a pragmatic enterprise aiming to solve political problems. It argues that this interpretation's structure of justification is best conceived in terms of two separate investigations—one develops a normative solution to a particular political problem by working up into a coherent whole certain moral conceptions of persons and society. Constructivism is a metaethical theory about the objectivity and validity of political principles and judgments. The chapter argues that a subject-based investigation fixes on certain contextual features of the subject in an effort to relate those features to the public domain and shows that an alternative explanation for why a fact confers support on a principle rests on a fact-principle link unique to constructivism. It explains how the second feature can be developed so as to generate criteria against which constructivist theories can be assessed and also argues that this entails a functionalist structure of justification capable of overcoming the question-begging critique.
