David Velleman and Christine M. Korsgaard have argued that constitutive accounts of agency provide a foundation for normativity. In my talk I will defend constitutive accounts against the criticism that agency is not tied to normative standards which amount to moral standards. I will, however, argue that constitutive arguments are not apt to decide the metaethical dispute between constructivism and realism. My claim is that constitutive accounts of agency are open to metaethical realism as well as metaethical constructivism. I try to show that constitutive standards are sometimes tied to fact-based reasons that have been there all along but are just triggered by an agent’s normative beliefs. Constitutive accounts, however, sometimes give rise to reasons which are a response to the constitutive standards of agency, thus shaping the normative and moral relations of agents to others as well as to themselves.
