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Facts and Principles 1 Facts and Principles in Political Constructivism

This paper develops a unique exposition about the relationship between facts and principles in political constructivism. It claims that facts form part of the ground for affirming principles insofar as reasons relating facts to the public sphere help generate criteria for assessing principles. One key element of political constructivism is that it focuses on specific political subjects. By offering reasons for why a particular subject falls within the political domain, the constructivist inevitably expresses concerns with respect to practical action. These concerns can be developed into criteria against which principles are assessed. Principles meeting these criteria are justified and, as a result, relate to facts. While I do not argue it here, this exposition helps provide a response to G.A. Cohen’s critique of constructivism the ground for viewing constructivism’s justification as teleological, which departs radically from current views. Constructivists believe, along with most political theorist, that judgments about normative political principles reflect or respond to truths about matters of facts. For example, principles of justice are said to respond to the factual circumstances of moderate scarcity and conflicting human interests. This is a claim about the relationship between principles and facts; it says that facts form part of the ground for accepting principles and principles provide directives for dealing with those facts. In this paper, I offer an account of the fact-principle link within constructivist argument, where it is usually taken as evident and perhaps for this reason has gone largely unexamined. Since much of my argument arises from G.A. Cohen’s attack on constructivism and the fact-principle link, I will follow him in taking normative “principles” to be any general directive telling agents what they ought to do, and “facts” as any truth other than a normative principle. My thesis is that, within constructivist arguments, facts form part of the ground for affirming principles insofar as facts generate criteria for assessing principles. I do not argue that facts determine principles or principles are reducible to