ABSTRACT
Onora O’Neill’s work is explicitly constructivist. Towards Justice and Virtue, where O’Neill defends her ethical theory most systematically, is subtitled ‘a constructive account of practical reasoning’, while her book on Kant’s practical philosophy has the title Constructions of Reason. Her arguments can be regarded as a reaction to perceived problems in foundational justification that ‘try to orient practical reasoning by assuming idealized conceptions of persons, reasons and action, or transcendent moral ideals or real moral properties’ and so are not properly tested ‘against the limitations of the human condition and the constraints of human knowledge’.1 Confronted with the failure of foundational argument, O’Neill’s response, like Rawls’s, is to explore constructivist possibilities for justification. However, although she applauds Rawls for the vision of his explorations, O’Neill has argued that Rawls’s constructivism is unsatisfactory. She claims that her ‘more guarded constructivism’ differs from Rawls’s in two ways.2 First, although Rawls appears to base his constructivism on abstract assumptions, in actuality he idealizes rather than abstracts. Rawls assumes idealized conceptions of the person and of instrumental rationality that introduce significant elements of partiality into his constructivism. O’Neill, as we shall see, is keen not to introduce unvindicated ideals into constructivist justification and intends to rely only on legitimate abstractions.3 Second, she aims to vindicate an account of practical reasoning and its authority without relying on metaphysical argument or on the values of a particular culture. O’Neill understands Rawls’s conception of reasoning to be based on an account of democratic public political culture. Since her more ‘Kantian conception addresses “the world at large”, rather than a restricted range of fellow citizens in closed but internally democratic societies, it differs . . . from the Rawlsian conception’.4 It should be clear from the previous chapters that Rawls need not necessarily be regarded as guilty of these failings, and so Rawls and O’Neill need not be so far apart. Whilst exploring O’Neill’s constructivism, we will come to appreciate the real similarities between the reading of Rawls that we have developed and O’Neill’s own account. We will usefully also be able to focus more clearly on the constructivist account of practical reasoning.
