Title: Practical reason and the structure of reflective agency
Description: Any purported normative claim invites the question why it should be authoritative gent. Confronted with normative claims as diverse as "lying is wrong" and "you should take the means to your ends," we can ask why these claims should hold sway over us. What makes these claims true? How can they be justified? I argue that we can justify certain normative claims by deriving them from facts about the nature of action. The strategy that I employ is sometimes called constitutivism about practical reason . According to constitutivism, action has a certain structural feature--a constitutive aim--that both constitutes events as actions and generates a standard of assessment for action. We can use this standard of assessment to derive ethical claims. In short, ethics arises from the bare fact that we are agents. The opening chapters of this dissertation attempt to show that the constitutivist strategy enjoys a number of advantages over competing methods of justifying normative claims. However, I also argue that the present attempts to execute the constitutivist strategy encounter a series of difficulties. In particular, I contend that the theories of action employed by the current constitutivist theories do not yield substantive normative conclusions. As a result, these theories, while illuminating and insightful, are ultimately unconvincing.

In the last three chapters, I develop and defend a new version of constitutivism, which is based upon Nietzsche's work on agency and value. I argue that Nietzsche develops an account of action according to which action has the constitutive aim of encountering and overcoming resistance. This is what Nietzsche means when he famously claims that all actions manifest "will to power." I argue that the Nietzschean version of constitutivism is based upon a compelling account of action, and is capable of generating a number of intriguing normative conclusions. Thus, by mining Nietzsche's work on agency and value, we can develop a successful version of constitutivism. We can thereby ground ethics in facts about human action.