Call this the problem of collapsing the hypothetical imperative. Any argument we give that one ought to follow a norm n can be AQ1 understood by someone sufficiently incredulous or critical as merely hypothetical. If we want to show that some norm is categorical, we need to find some very special F that Jones cannot parry away. There are two models for this search. Both involve the questions of children. The first begins with the familiar thought that our explanations have to stop somewhere. A child asks, "why do cicadas have such an odd life cycle?" and we answer, "because q" (something about avoiding predators), to which the child rejoins, "but why q?" and we answer "because r." This line of questioning has to stop somewhere, and when the child asks, "why z?" we answer, "because it's just in the nature of things that z; that's just the way it is." The normative realist wants to adapt this feature of scientific explanation to the work of collapsing the hypothetical imperative. At a certain point we just have to insist that it is in the nature of things that we are bound to n, that this obligation is a bedrock law of nature. The constitutivist looks to the child who questions the constitutive aims or rules of a game. The child asks, "why should I castle now?" and we say, "because then your rook will be free to attack my open queen side." The child may ask further questions about the wisdom of this tactic, but if he comes to the question, "why should I try to checkmate your king?" then he has gone too far. Mating your opponent's king just is the aim of chess, so within the realm of chess strategy it doesn't make sense to ask why you should try to mate your opponent's king. The constitutivist models his response to Jones on this observation. Jones's questions are part of the activity of practical reasoning, and, just like chess, this activity has certain conditions that must be met for someone to be engaged in it. So for Jones to ask, "why should I be interested in things that are F?" he must accept, at least implicitly, the conditions of practical reasoning. Among these conditions is that the person asking such a question be an agent. She is asking what she should do, so she must be the sort of creature who can do things, a creature whose deliberations affect the world through her will. Otherwise, this activity is not really practical reasoning, but idle speculation with a practical veneer. The constitutivist's idea is to halt Jones's regress in the conditions on generating that regress. How does this show that the demands of agency automatically have authority over us? If the constitutivist is right, there should be something amiss with the question, "why should I be an agent rather than something similar but essentially different-a shmagent?" 2 But to most ears this sounds Comp. by: pg2846

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Traditionally, questions about the role of the arts in moral thought have focused on the arts' role in the acquisition of new moral knowledge, the refinement of moral concepts, and the capacity to apply our moral view to particular situations. Here I suggest that there is an importantly different and largely overlooked role for the arts in moral thought: an ability to reconfigure the structure of our moral thought and effect what we might call a revolution in that framework. In this article I explain this distinction between two kinds of change in view, suggest the second type has not been addressed by the extant literature, provide examples of this role, and argue for its importance.Nonetheless, Gibson's suggestion is that literature can flesh out our moral knowledge in a way not so very different from the one described by Carroll. Literature connects abstract and

It is an essential part of Kant's conception of regulative principles and ideas that those principles and ideas are in a certain sense indeterminate. The relevant sense of indeterminacy is cashed out in a section in the Antinomies where Kant says that the regress of conditions of experience forms not a “regressus in infinitum” but a “regressus in indefinitum.” The mathematics that Kant appears to rely on in making this distinction turns out to be problematic, as Jonathan Bennett showed long ago. But I suggest that despite this, there is another mathematically legitimate way to make Kant's point, one enunciated by, among others, Michael Dummett. This reading is corroborated, I suggest, by Kant's conception of reason as a radically open‐ended endeavor.

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