Kant and Constructivism.

Is Kant's approach to moral and political judgment constructivist? John Rawls argues that constructivism is central feature of Kant's approach. According to this view, Kantian constructivism generates moral principles from a model that is drawn from a particular conception of the person in combination with a conception of the public role of moral precepts. Critics, including Onora O'Neill, Larry Krasnoff and Barbara Herman, object that Rawls's interpretation distorts various aspects of Kantian moral judgment. In particular, such critics argue that Kant's approach: (i) does not describe a particular conception of the person, but rather pictures individuals facing moral questions in the actual world; (ii) provides only a shared method for evaluating individual maxims, and not a method for identifying a shared set of principles; and (iii) focuses on the possible endorsement of maxims, not on the hypothetical choice of principles. I will argue that these three objections fail. The first objection reflects a misunderstanding of the role played by a conception of the person in a constructivist procedure; and the second and third objections reflect an unnecessarily constricted view of Kantian moral judgment. The constructivism of Kant's approach, moreover, reflects Kant's commitment to clarity in moral argument. The clearly defined structure of moral argument and the transparency that such a structure produces are designed to ensure that the reasoning is accessible and to lay the contents of the arguments open to critical review. I will argue that this commitment to clarity, combined with the approach's implicit commitment to intersubjective justification of moral and political judgments, constitutes a particular virtue for an account of political reasoning for societies characterized by pluralistic disagreement. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]