Abstract
In this essay, I claim that certain passages in Book IV of Benedict de Spinoza’s Ethics suggest a novel version of what is known as metaethical constructivism. The constructivist interpretation emerges in the course of attempting to resolve a tension between Spinoza’s apparent ethical egoism and some remarks he makes about the efficacy of collaborating with the right partners when attempting to promote our individual self-interest (Sect. 1). Though Spinoza maintains that individuals necessarily aim to promote their self-interest, I argue that Spinoza has an atypical conception of self (and hence of self-interest) that allows the interests of other people to be partially constitutive of one's own self-interest. In this way, Spinoza can account for the rationality of concern for the interests of others (Sect. 2). This interpretation attributes to Spinoza a form of constructivism that differs in important ways from contemporary Humean and Kantian constructivisms and which can in principle be detached from Spinoza’s particular metaphysical commitments in order to yield a third general category of constructivist view (Sect. 3). Though my treatment is necessarily brief, it is my hope that it can serve both to motivate a constructivist reading of Spinoza and, perhaps even more crucially, to suggest a Spinozistic variety of constructivism as a live theoretical option in metaethics.
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Notes
See, e.g., Nadler (2014).
For a detailed reconstruction of Spinoza’s complex argument for the conatus doctrine, see Garrett (2002).
I argue in Sect. 3 of this paper that what makes Spinoza’s approach most interesting is his general strategy of appealing to (necessary) metaphysical facts. Spinoza’s view, I claim, is one token of a distinctive type of constructivist metaethical view that can in principle be decoupled from his particular metaphysics.
The Elwes translation of the same passage renders “appetite” as “desire” (de Spinoza 1955, IVPref, p. 188), making the connection with our conative ends more obvious.
Thanks to Mark Kulstad for the suggestion here.
See also Steinberg (1984, pp. 313–315)’s discussion of this passage.
Brink (1997) claims that Plato, Aristotle, and T.H. Green each engage in a similar kind of endeavor.
A constructivist interpretation is also defended by Jarrett (2014), though his account of what a distinctively Spinozistic constructivism amounts to differs in important ways from the one I will propose. Jarrett denies that Spinoza’s constructivism rests upon the actual nature or essence of human beings (p. 68-69), relies heavily upon parallels with mathematical constructivism (p. 79) and the social construction of things like money and property (p. 80), and claims that Spinoza’s constructivism is ultimately self-effacing insofar as it “advocates or recommends that we take a perspective from which good and evil cannot be conceived” (p. 84).
I understand by anti-realism the denial that there are objective moral truths, where objectivity is understood in terms of mind-independent reality. I understand by cognitivism the view that moral utterances make claims and hence have truth values. Cognitivism is often paired with realism, but a key tenet of constructivism is that it need not be: one can coherently affirm the existence of mind-dependent moral truths, as Spinoza seems to. For an overview of recent anti-realist interpretations of Spinoza’s metaethics, see Kisner and Youpa (2014, pp. 5–7).
Della Rocca (2008, p. 305), for example, claims to no longer find Spinoza’s philosophical system implausible, though he admits that it can often seem that way.
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Acknowledgments
Special thanks are due to Baruch Brody, Dan Burkett, Carl Feierabend, Nyssa Juneau, Mark Kulstad, Jacob Mills, George Sher, Ericka Tucker, Graham Valenta, Brandon Williams, and audiences at the Rice-UH-UST Works in Progress series and the 2014 Pacific APA for helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper.
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Zuk, P.D. A third version of constructivism: rethinking Spinoza’s metaethics. Philos Stud 172, 2565–2574 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0428-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0428-3