Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject Politics – General and Theories of International Politics, grade: High Merit, London School of Economics (Department of Government), course: Foundations of Political Theory, language: English, abstract: Meta-ethics, the study of the ontological foundations of ethics, is one of the big topics for moral and political philosophy. In this essay I argue that conventional constructivism (conventionalism) is the most compelling meta-ethical view for the purposes of political theory. First, (i) I determine what the purposes of political theory are. Then, (ii) I define logical validity and the ability to accommodate pluralism as requirements that a meta-ethical view must fulfil to be compelling for the purposes of political theory. Since conventional constructivism is a cognitivist, minimal realist and non-objectivist view, I show that a) cognitivism is logically valid, b) minimal realism is reasonably preferable to error theory and c) full-blown realism, opposed to non-objectivism, doesn’t fulfil the requirement of validity. I provide examples which illustrate that this applies also to virtual reality (“VR”). Based on a)–c), I argue that d) non-objectivist conventional constructivism fulfils both the validity and the pluralism requirement for a meta-ethical view to be compelling for the purposes of political theory. I support this with what I call the wake-up argument.
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Graduate student at the London School of Economics and Political Science
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