Normativity and Agency: Themes from the Philosophy of Christine M. Korsgaard PDF
Preview Normativity and Agency: Themes from the Philosophy of Christine M. Korsgaard
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 20/05/22, SPi Normativity and Agency OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 20/05/22, SPi OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 20/05/22, SPi Normativity and Agency Themes from the Philosophy of Christine M. Korsgaard Edited by TAMAR SCHAPIRO, KYLA EBELS- DUGGAN, AND SHARON STREET OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 20/05/22, SPi Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © the several contributors 2022 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2022 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2022933696 ISBN 978–0–19–884372–6 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843726.001.0001 Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 20/05/22, SPi Contents Editors’ Preface vii List of Contributors xiii 1. The Horizons of Humanity 1 David Sussman 2. Finite Valuers and the Problem of Vulnerability to Unmitigated Loss 21 Sharon Street 3. A Question of One’s Own: Concepts, Conceptions, and Moral Skepticisms 50 Kyla Ebels- Duggan 4. The Two Normativities 78 J. David Velleman 5. Self- Consciousness and Self-D ivision in Moral Psychology 95 Richard Moran 6. What Makes Weak- Willed Action Weak? 126 Tamar Schapiro 7. Integrity, Truth, and Value 147 Sigrún Svavarsdóttir 8. Shadows of the Self: Reflections on the Authority of Advance Directives 175 Japa Pallikkathayil 9. Korsgaard on Responsibility 197 T. M. Scanlon 10. Animal Value and Right 213 Stephen Darwall 11. Juridical Personality and the Role of Juridical Obligation 240 Barbara Herman 12. The Social Conditions for Autonomy: Kant on Politics and Religion 264 Faviola Rivera- Castro Index 287 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 20/05/22, SPi OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 20/05/22, SPi Editors’ Preface Christine Korsgaard decided not to go to college—at least at first. She had purchased a set of great books, and her plan was to educate herself while earning a living doing office work. And so it happened that she first stumbled upon Plato and Nietzsche while on the Illinois Central commuter train between her home in south suburban Chicago and the secretarial school she was attending downtown. The encounter was to change her life. Growing up, Korsgaard had often found herself preoccupied with big questions about human life, including questions about the objectivity of ethics. But, as she later recounted, “I am a first- generation college student, so I hadn’t the vaguest idea that philosophy was an academic field.”1 It was only upon reading the philosophers of the past that she realized that this thing she had been doing—this thinking and won- dering about fundamental questions—had a name. In ways she couldn’t possibly have anticipated, this discovery would also change the course of moral philosophy, for Korsgaard would go on to become one of the most important moral philosophers of her time. She would write pathbreaking books and articles, developing her own answers to the questions that had intrigued her early on, and she would teach and inspire countless students. Along the way, she would break barriers for women in the profes- sion, serving as the first woman chair of the Harvard Philosophy Department, and the first woman to give the Locke Lectures at Oxford. We owe a debt of gratitude to those whose recognition and support helped set her on this remarkable path. At her first job, working for attorneys at the American Bar Association, she made new friends who gave her a picture of college that was more attractive than the one she had imagined. That, together with her sense that her efforts to learn philosophy on her own weren’t bearing fruit, changed her mind about college. She enrolled mid-y ear at Eastern Illinois University, later transferring to the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, where she earned her B.A. in 1974. Her professors at UIUC saw her extraordinary potential, and with their encouragement, she applied to graduate school. Soon she began to study toward her Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard under the supervision of John Rawls. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 20/05/22, SPi viii Editors’ Preface She landed in fertile soil. Rawls was a generous and conscientious mentor, and though women were a marginalized minority within the profession at that time, they were unusually well-r epresented among his students. Korsgaard found Rawls’s lectures on the history of moral philosophy exhilarating. She soon found herself writing on both Aristotle and Kant. Rawls “told me to pick one of them,” Korsgaard later remembered, “so I picked Kant and my disserta- tion became a search for the basis of the claim that the categorical imperative is a principle of reason.”2 Korsgaard went on to become one of most successful among Rawls’s many accomplished students. After graduating from Harvard in 1981, she held positions at Yale, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Chicago. In 1991, Korsgaard returned to Harvard as Professor of Philosophy, becoming the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy in 1999. Now, on the occasion of Korsgaard’s retirement from teaching, we are delighted to present this collection of essays to acknowledge and honor the tremendous impact that both her writing and teaching have had on the discipline. In her lectures, Korsgaard made the history of moral philosophy live and breathe. Her storied courses, Philosophy 168 (“Kant’s Ethical Theory”) and Philosophy 172 (“The History of Modern Moral Philosophy”), kindled a pas- sion for moral philosophy and its history in countless undergraduates and graduate students. She demonstrated how to have substantive conversations with writers of the past by reading charitably, with careful attention to the text and its historical context, but also with an eye to how that philosopher’s sys- tem might be relevant to the philosophical questions that continue to engage us today. Like her mentor, Rawls, Korsgaard was a deeply giving and committed teacher. Her office hours—every Thursday at 2 p.m.—were always crowded, and legendary among graduate students for the way one could drop in for immediate, penetrating feedback on whatever one was thinking about. She devoted countless hours to helping her students find what was most valuable in their own thoughts. To one young graduate student, who was unsure whether she belonged in the profession, Korsgaard wrote, “This is well done, but next time I’d like to see more of you in there.” The fact that Christine Korsgaard was listening and wanted to know what you had to say was power- ful and inspiring to many a student trying to find their way. Korsgaard’s published work is striking for two reasons—first, its ability to communicate the urgency and excitement of moral philosophy, and second, its sheer range and depth. To convey the scope of the work, it is useful to divide it into four stages. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 20/05/22, SPi Editors’ Preface ix In the first stage, Korsgaard published interpretive papers on specific topics in Kant’s ethical theory, along with comparative papers highlighting the struc- tural features of the Kantian approach in relation to other ethical theories. These papers were collected in her volume Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge, 1996). While issues of Kant interpretation are never entirely set- tled, in this early period Korsgaard succeeded in mapping out positions of enduring influence on a range of topics: the motive of duty, the nature of uni- versalizability, the concept of humanity, and the relationship between free- dom and morality. Many of these have become standard readings of the texts, and these early positions continued to inform her distinctive version of Kantianism even as it evolved over subsequent decades. In her comparative essays, Korsgaard raised the level of the standard debate between consequentialists and non-c onsequentialists. Her strategy was to reveal deeply rooted structural differences between utilitarian and Kantian approaches to ethical theory. In “Personal Identity and the Unity of Agency,” for example, she helps us to see why utilitarians and Kantians differ on the topic of whether to aggregate value across persons. Her diagnosis includes the observation that utilitarians and Kantians hold different conceptions of per- sonal identity. But it goes even deeper. These philosophers hold divergent views of identity, she argues, because they disagree about why moral philoso- phy needs a conception of personal identity in the first place. The utilitarian looks for a concept of practical identity that can be employed in theoretical reasoning, whereas the Kantian needs that concept to play a role in practical reasoning. In “The Reasons We Can Share,” she shows that the consequential- ist feature of utilitarianism is not simply based on an intuition that results matter more than motives. It is rooted in the idea that morality is about what we do to or for others, where this contrasts with the Kantian idea that moral- ity is about what we do with one another. In these essays, Korsgaard put into practice a new way of doing moral philosophy. Instead of focusing on com- peting intuitions about, say, whether to kill one or let five die, she asks how and why we use moral concepts in the first place, mapping out different possi- ble answers, along with their implications. The second stage of Korsgaard’s career is best represented by her contem- porary classic, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge, 1996). The volume consists of four Tanner Lectures, delivered in 1992 at Cambridge University, along with comments and replies. It is perhaps the most vivid example of Korsgaard’s ability to make moral philosophy gripping. The book opens by identifying and pressing what Korsgaard calls “the normative question”—why am I obligated to do anything at all? This question is at once deeply
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