ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews a number of essential features of Pope Francis’s argument that will enable its conclusions to be compared with those of one form of cosmopolitan constructivism. It explores how assessments and prescriptions about human relationships with the natural environment reached through the latter approach compare with those of Francis’s encyclical letter. In reading Laudato Si’, one is immediately struck by how deeply a sense of ecosystems—natural, social, political, and economic—pervades the entire argument. Constructivism in ethics is the position that universal principles for guiding action in a world of multiple and diverse audiences and conflicting cultural viewpoints cannot be established by metaphysical arguments or religious doctrines, or discovered in the world. Rather, action-guiding principles for a cosmopolitan audience must be constructed on the basis of plausible assumptions about agents and conditions of action that do not appeal to unvindicated ideals or particularities.
