ABSTRACT
‘Constructivism’ has become popular in meta-ethics: the idea that there is some middle ground between moral realism with its heavy metaphysical baggage on the one hand and moral expressivism, relativism, or skepticism and its counterintuitive implications and undesirable consequences on the other. There are different versions of meta-ethical constructivism. Husserl himself addresses the problem of a regress arising in any attempt of a hearer to understand what a speaker means; but he is aware of the problem of a similar regress arising in any attempt to empathically understand the mind of another whose empathic attention is directed toward the empathizer. Constructivism in epistemology, along the lines of Husserl’s Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity, provides a justification of knowledge claims: humans are justified to claim that their epistemic judgments are objectively true. However, a claim can be more or less justified, depending on the amount of data that were taken into account.
