David Enoch (2006), The Philosophical Review 115(2): 169–198 — DOI-10.1215/00318108-2005-014
Key takeaways
- Constitutivism cannot ground normativity. Even granting that action has constitutive aims, one can ask what reason there is to be an agent rather than a “shmagent” (a near-agent lacking those aims), and the constitutive facts cannot answer that question without presupposing normative reasons.
Seeded from the abstract alone, not a reading. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Many philosophers interested in normativity hope that metaethical problems can be solved from within the philosophy of action, by deriving normative standards from what is constitutive of agency or action (constitutivism, associated with Korsgaard and Velleman). Enoch argues that this hope is unfounded. Even if action has constitutive aims or principles, facts about them explain normative truths only together with a reason to be an agent. A “shmagent”, a being as similar to an agent as possible but lacking the constitutive commitments, could ask why it should be an agent at all. Constitutivism therefore cannot deliver normativity from non-normative materials.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 35 seconds of active reading over 1 session. Deferred because nobody has read it closely here yet, not on merit.
Priority for a deeper reading: medium — t=35s, but this is a canonical, load-bearing paper that the record would cite, and no full text could be reached here.
What a deeper reading should check:
- It is the origin of the “shmagency objection”, which remains the standard challenge to constitutivism and has a large literature of replies (Silverstein, Ferrero, Katsafanas) and Enoch’s own “Shmagency Revisited” (2011).
- It is relevant to agency discussions of whether an artificial agent’s goals can be normatively grounded in what constitutes its agency.
- A reading should check whether the argument targets constitutivism’s claim to independence from other normative sources, or constitutivism as such.
Access when seeded: The PhilPapers code ENOASW was resolved by web search, which returned Enoch’s “Agency, shmagency” (PhilPapers ENOASW / ENOASW-2), with Crossref metadata (Philosophical Review 115(2), issue date 2006-04-01; Crossref also lists a second DOI, 10.1215/00318108-115-2-169, for the same article). No open full text could be reached: PhilPapers has no archive copy, Wayback has none, SSRN (abstract 2607208) returned 403, Duke’s journal site returned 403, and Enoch’s university page gives only the citation. The abstract below is reconstructed from search-result descriptions and the citation, not from the paper’s own abstract. published: is the issue date; no earlier online date was found.