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Normativity and Agency: Themes from
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Korsgaard Tamar Schapiro (Editor)
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Normativity and Agency

Normativity and Agency

Themes from the Philosophy of
Christine M. Korsgaard
Edited by
TA M A R S C HA P I R O, K Y L A E B E L S - D U G G A N ,
A N D SHA R O N ST R E E T
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

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Contents
Editors’ Preface vii

List of Contributorsxiii
1. The Horizons of Humanity 1
David Sussman
2. Finite Valuers and the Problem of Vulnerability to
Unmitigated Loss21
Sharon Street
3. A Question of One’s Own: Concepts, Conceptions, and
Moral Skepticisms50
Kyla Ebels-Duggan
4. The Two Normativities 78
J. David Velleman
5. Self-Consciousness and Self-Division 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
Directives175
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 Religion264
Faviola Rivera-Castro
Index 287
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-year 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.
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-represented 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.
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-consequentialists. 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
x Editors ’ Preface
philosophical—concerning the foundation of ethics itself—and yet also

arrestingly practical. It is a question that, in an extreme moment, any one of us
might ask. This framing of the question illustrates Korsgaard’s Rawlsian con-
viction that questions of moral philosophy proceed, ultimately, from the
standpoint of the moral agent, rather than the observer of moral practice. Her
thought is that it is only by answering the moral agent directly that we can
even frame subsequent questions about the existence and nature of moral
facts, the attainability of moral knowledge, or the meaning of moral terms.
The book is also a signature example of Korsgaard’s engagement with the
history of philosophy as part of an ongoing conversation. In the first two
lectures, she interprets the voluntarists, rationalists, and sentimentalists of
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain as providing, respectively, three
candidate answers to the normative question. In the culminating third and
fourth lectures of the book, she offers her own answer. Normativity arises out
of our reflective nature, which puts us into the position of being governors of
ourselves. It is a Kantian answer—that is, deeply informed and inspired by
Kant—but an answer which Korsgaard began here to articulate, revise, and
elaborate in ways that are her own.
In The Sources of Normativity, Korsgaard emphasizes that the theory pro-
posed there is only a sketch. We may think of the third stage of Korsgaard’s
work as the period in which she filled in additional substance and detail. Her
initial replies to her commentators grew into articles, and eventually into her
Locke Lectures, delivered at Oxford in 2002. The articles and lectures were
published as companion volumes in 2009 (The Constitution of Agency and
Self-Constitution, both Oxford). Drawing on metaphysical ideas from both
Plato and Aristotle, she develops and defends her Kantian answer to the nor-
mative question. A central feature of this view is the claim that moral obliga-
tions are binding upon us because they are the internal standards of agency as
such. To act well, in a moral sense, is just to be fully active in governing one-
self. This aspect of her theory, which others have labeled “constitutivism,” has
again changed the course of debates in normative ethics, metaethics, and the
philosophy of action, and has become one of the most-discussed positions in
contemporary metaethics.
In the fourth stage of her career, Korsgaard broadened her influence in an
entirely different direction, engaging applied ethicists and policymakers. One
of Korsgaard’s deepest lifelong commitments has been to the protection of
non-human animals. (She has been a vegetarian since 1975.) She began to lay
out a defense of this commitment in a second set of Tanner Lectures,
Editors ’ Preface xi
delivered at the University of Michigan in 2004. While Kant himself had noto-
riously limited views about the moral standing of the other animals, Korsgaard
argues that a proper development of Kantian commitments brings them
within the scope of the moral community. After publishing Self-Constitution,
she returned to this topic. The result was Fellow Creatures (Oxford, 2018), in
which she shows how her distinctive blend of Aristotelian and Kantian ideas
can provide the basis for robust obligations to protect the interests of non-
human animals.
The present volume marks Korsgaard’s retirement from teaching. She will
continue to write and to advise, and there will, no doubt, be a fifth stage in the
development of her ideas. But this occasion provides us with the opportunity
to express our gratitude and admiration by collecting essays written specifi-
cally in her honor. The contributors are former students (the three of us, Japa
Pallikkathayil, Faviola Rivera- Castro, and David Sussman), Harvard col-
leagues (T. M. Scanlon and Richard Moran), and colleagues at other institu-
tions (Stephen Darwall, Barbara Herman, Sigrún Svavarsdóttir, and David
Velleman). This list is only representative of the many thinkers who have been
influenced and inspired by Korsgaard’s teaching and writing. We could have
easily filled additional volumes with papers by others who have been lucky
enough to know and work with her.
The essays engage with the kinds of philosophical problems that Korsgaard
helped us to recognize and appreciate. Four of the papers assess her answer to
the normative question and explore alternative versions of constitutivism
(Sussman, Street, Ebels-Duggan, Velleman). Another four focus on concepts
central to her philosophical psychology—self-consciousness, strength and
weakness of will, integrity, and personal identity (Moran, Schapiro,
Svavarsdóttir, Pallikkathayil). T. M. Scanlon offers an interpretation of
Korsgaard’s account of holding someone morally responsible. Stephen Darwall
evaluates her more recent work on the moral status of nonhuman animals.
Barbara Herman and Faviola Rivera-Castro explore the relation between
Kant’s ethics and his political theory. The scope of the volume is broad, testify-
ing to the remarkable range and fertility of Korsgaard’s work.
We would like to thank our contributors, each of whom responded enthu-
siastically to our invitation. We are also grateful to Peter Momtchiloff and
others at Oxford University Press for their guidance and patience, and to Evan
Behrle and Bennett Eckert, for invaluable editorial assistance. Of course our
deepest thanks are to Chris, for finding in us what we never could have found
on our own.
xii Editors ’ Preface
Notes
1. Katrien Schaubroeck, “Interview with Christine Korsgaard, holder of the Cardinal Mercier
Chair 2009,” The Leuven Philosophy Newsletter, volume 17, 2008–2009/2009–2010,
pp. 51–56, p. 51. Available at https://docplayer.net/89264337-Volume-17.html.
2. Schaubroeck, “Interview with Christine Korsgaard,” 51.
Bibliography
Korsgaard, Christine M. Creating the Kingdom of Ends. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1996.
Korsgaard, Christine M. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge
Korsgaard, Christine M. The Constitution of Agency: Essays on Practical Reason
and Moral Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Korsgaard, Christine M. Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009.
Korsgaard, Christine M. Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Schaubroeck, Katrien. “Interview with Christine Korsgaard, holder of the
Cardinal Mercier Chair 2009.” The Leuven Philosophy Newsletter, volume 17,
2008–9/2009–10, pp. 51–56. Available at https://docplayer.net/89264337-
Volume-17.html.
List of Contributors
Stephen Darwall is the Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy at Yale

University and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the
University of Michigan. His books include Impartial Reason, The British Moralists and
the Internal Ought, Welfare and Rational Care, The Second-Person Standpoint, and two
recent collections of his essays, published by Oxford University Press. He is a fellow of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and, with David Velleman, a founding
co-editor of Philosophers’ Imprint.
Kyla Ebels-D uggan is Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. She
specializes in moral and political philosophy working in a broadly Kantian tradi-
tion. Her work has appeared in Ethics, The Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical
Studies, and Philosophers’ Imprint.
Barbara Herman is Griffin Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law at
UCLA. She is the author of The Practice of Moral Judgment (Harvard, 1993), Moral
Literacy (Harvard, 2007), The Moral Habitat (Oxford, 2021), Kantian Commitments
(Oxford, 2022), and numerous essays on Kant’s ethics, practical agency, and moral
psychology.
Richard Moran is Brian D. Young Professor of Philosophy at Harvard
University. He is the author of Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-
Knowledge (Princeton, 2001), The Exchange of Words: Speech, Testimony, and
Intersubjectivity (Oxford, 2018), and The Philosophical Imagination (Oxford, 2017), a
collection of essays.
Japa Pallikkathayil is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Pittsburgh. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University. Her work focuses on
issues at the intersection of moral and political philosophy. She has written about
coercion, consent, and Kantian political philosophy.
Faviola Rivera-C astro is Professor of Philosophy at Instituto de
Investigaciones Filosóficas at National Autonomous University of Mexico. She is
author of Virtud, felicidad y religión en la filosofía moral de Kant (2014) and currently
works on the development of liberalism in Latin America as well as on the relation
between politics and religion from a philosophical perspective.
T. M. Scanlon is Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and
Civil Polity, emeritus at Harvard University, where he and Christine Korsgaard were
long-term colleagues.
xiv List of Contributors
Tamar Schapiro is Professor of Philosophy at MIT. Previously she was a faculty

member at Stanford and a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She is
author of Feeling Like It: A Theory of Inclination and Will (Oxford, 2021) as well as
articles on various problems in Kantian practical philosophy.
Sharon Street is Professor of Philosophy at New York University. She is the
author of a series of articles on how to reconcile our understanding of normativity
with a scientific conception of the world. In current work, she is exploring how
insights from Eastern meditative traditions could shed light on questions in secular
metaethics.
David Sussman is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. His main research interests are ethics, Kant, moral psychology,
philosophy of action, and German Idealism. His current work focuses on the expres-
sive aspects of human action, their ethical significance, and their bearing on the dis-
tinction between practical and theoretical reasoning.
Sigrún Svavarsdóttir is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Tufts
University. Her research focuses mainly on issues within metaethics but extends also
into theory of agency. She has published on the nature of moral judgments, value
ascriptions, the link between evaluation and motivation, objectivity in ethics, practical
rationality, personal integrity, and coherence of attitudes.
J. David Velleman is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at New York
University and William H. Miller III Research Professor of Philosophy at Johns
Hopkins University. His papers are available in open-access volumes published by
Open Book Publishers and Michigan Publishing.
1
The Horizons of Humanity
David Sussman
One of the most striking features of the work of Christine Korsgaard is her
aspiration to derive substantive moral norms from the idea of rational agency,
simply as such. In so doing she joins Kant in his endeavor to legislate for all
rational agents, regardless of the ways those agents might differ with respect
to their biology, psychology, or culture. In Kant, this project goes beyond even
the ambitions of the Critique of Pure Reason. Supposedly, the epistemological-
cum-metaphysical claims of the first Critique hold only for those rational
beings who encounter their world, as humans must, through the sensible
intuitions of space and time as they are brought under concepts in some way.
Kant does not pretend to show that space and time are the only forms of sen-
sible intuition possible. He allows that there might be other kinds of discur-
sive thought in which such formal categories as substance, cause, and even
reality are given radically different interpretations, thereby constituting
realms of nature completely distinct from our own.
Yet Kant shows no such reserve when it comes to the realm of freedom and,
with it, morality. At least by the second Critique, Kant comes to recognize an
important asymmetry between practical and theoretical thought. Theoretical
cognition depends upon the deliverances of contingent forms of sensible
intuition in order to give determinate content to its basic concepts. In doing
so, these forms of intuition help establish just what is to count as an object in
this context, how such objects are to be individuated, what sorts of powers
and forms of interaction they can possess, and so on. In contrast, practical
cognition does not depend on any such prior intuitions to provide determi-
nate sense to its fundamental concepts (such as action, end, motive, intention,
goodness, responsibility, etc.). Although Kant realizes that sensibility has an
important role to play in practical life, he maintains that the character and
significance of such feeling is consequent upon the Moral Law, rather than
being a prior psychological given that could ground or constrain that law.
This is what Kant’s detractors, more than anything else, find so incredible: his
David Sussman, The Horizons of Humanity In: Normativity and Agency: Themes from the Philosophy of
Christine M. Korsgaard. Edited by: Tamar Schapiro, Kyla Ebels-Duggan, and Sharon Street, Oxford University Press.
© David Sussman 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843726.003.0001
2 David Sussman
conceit of legislating not just for human beings, but for angels, robots,
Martians, and all other possible finite beings, insofar as they are able to con-
front practical questions at all. Kant even goes so far as to claim that the Moral
Law must apply to God, despite the fact that God supposedly has no body,
exists outside of time, and knows the world immediately in a way that depends
on neither sensations nor concepts.1
In his later works, Kant seems to abandon the goal of legislating morality
for all rational agents. The second Critique presents our ethical life as spring-
ing from a “Fact of Reason,” the supposedly immediate recognition that we
stand under some unconditional obligations and so are absolutely responsible
for our actions. The appeal to such a fact (or “deed,” Faktum) suggests that
Kant is no longer ruling out the possibility of other forms of rational agency
that might be grounded in profoundly different understandings of how and to
whom we are accountable. Here things get pretty obscure, even for Kant. In a
puzzling footnote to Religion Within the Limits of Mere Reason, Kant distin-
guishes our essential predispositions in a way that intimates that there might
be beings who manage to partake in “humanity” (finite rational agency) with-
out participating in “personality” (autonomy, as defined by recognition of the
Moral Law):
For from the fact that a being has reason does not at all follow that, simply
by virtue of representing its maxims as suited to universal legislation, this
reason contains a faculty of determining the power of choice unconditionally
. . . . Were this law not given to us from within, no amount of subtle reason-
ing on our part would produce it or win our power of choice over to it. Yet
this law is the only law that makes us conscious of the independence of our
power of choice from determination by all other incentives (of our freedom)
and thereby also of the accountability of all our actions. (Religion 6:26n)
Yet in the Doctrine of Virtue, Kant goes on to tell us that with the loss of
“moral feeling” that comes with “moral death,” our humanity “would dissolve
(by chemical laws, as it were) into mere animality and be mixed irretrievably
with the mass of natural beings” (Metaphysics of Morals 6:400). Unfortunately,
Kant never develops this cryptic suggestion, leaving unclear whether this
moral mortality characterizes humanity as such, or merely our humanity,
allowing the possibility of other forms of finite rational agency that might sus-
tain themselves outside of ethical life as we know it.
Sorting out these issues in Kant would require a deep dive into the murki-
est regions of his metaphysics of nature and agency, where we would have to
The Horizons of Humanity 3
come to grips with transcendental freedom, timeless choices of an agent’s

entire “empirical” character, and the inescapable but still culpable “radical
evil” in human nature. Remarkably, Korsgaard manages to rehabilitate the
Kantian project in a way that avoids any metaphysical entanglements that
might offend a proper naturalistic sensibility. (I think Kant does so as well,
but that’s another story.) Although her arguments shift, Korsgaard never
wavers in her resolve to show how a recognizably Kantian form of morality
realizes a fundamental commitment implicit in any sort of self-conscious,
rational agency: that is, in the self-understanding of any being capable of
reflecting upon and deciding what to do. In The Sources of Normativity,
Korsgaard contends that any sort of practical reasoning on my part presup-
poses that I embrace a basic normative conception of myself as simply a
human being, governed by a distinctively Kantian standard of universalizabil-
ity. In Self-Constitution, Korsgaard argues that the formal function of all
action, regardless of its specific material goals, is to integrate the agent as an
agent, and so make it possible for there to be any determinate facts about
what he really wills in the first place. Supposedly, the unity of the self that
makes action possible requires that our practical reasons be unconditionally
“sharable” in a way that once again commits us to Kant’s Moral Law.
In both of these central works, Korsgaard may appear to have succeeded in
deriving substantive moral norms from an analysis of an unmoralized under-
standing of rational agency and action, simply as such. However, I believe that
both accounts fall short of this audacious (if not quixotic) goal. In what fol-
lows, I contend that what Korsgaard actually establishes is something less
dramatic than she herself thinks, although still quite significant. The proper
moral of her story is not that Kantian norms of universalizability, publicity,
and reciprocity are presupposed by rational agency per se. Instead, what
Korsgaard really shows is only that these norms are implicit in the distinc-
tively modern, liberal form of self-consciousness that we happen to inhabit as
the result of wholly contingent historical processes (contingent both meta-
physically and rationally). Admittedly, this more humble conclusion might
appear to relativize Kantian morality to a particular time and place in a way
that would threaten the Moral Law’s supposedly unconditional normative
authority. However, I argue that while a certain kind of moral relativity does
emerge from my reading of Korsgaard’s conclusions, such relativity turns out
to be almost completely innocuous for practical purposes, much as the onto-
logical relativity that follows from the first Critique places no interesting lim-
its on the achievements and ambitions of the natural sciences.2
4 David Sussman
Ultimately, I believe we will have to give up the ambition of showing morality

to be grounded in the fundamental character of rational agency simpliciter.
This result does not mean that rational agency must have some different, non-
moral nature. Rather, we need to see that “rational agency as such” isn’t some-
thing that has a real, determinate character at all, any more than do the ideas
of an object or cause, simply as such.3 What I hope to show is that when we
think in terms of any of these abstractions, we are not getting to the funda-
mental nature of anything, despite framing issues in the most general terms.
Instead, such abstractions often turn out to be nothing more than logical
placeholders, setting forth the form of an answer to some basic question, but
not constituting any such response themselves. Instead, questions of nature
and essence gain purchase only when these placeholders are further inter-
preted in the context of the right sort of conceptual background: in the case of
rational agency, a particular kind of “ethical life.”
At first, my reinterpretation of Korsgaard’s conclusions may seem to
deprive the Moral Law of a certain kind of important objectivity. But once we
see that this standard of objectivity isn’t the right one to bring to practical
concerns in the first place, the corresponding (purely formal) sense of relativ-
ity will similarly lose its bite. Like Kant, Korsgaard’s defense of the Moral Law
does not ultimately achieve the apodictic certainty for which they both strive;
nevertheless, her defense of the Moral Law turns out to be good enough for
self-government work.
In The Sources of Normativity, Korsgaard presents Kantian morality as the

solution to a problem pressed on us by our capacity to reflect upon our own
mental life. Unlike other animals, human beings are able to direct their atten-
tion to the grounds of their own beliefs, desires, and feelings, and so consider
whether those grounds adequately support such thoughts. Korsgaard observes
that, as self-reflective beings, we stand in need of reasons; that is, potential
justifications for our continued adherence to a belief or intention. Such justifi-
cations allow us to recognize these attitudes as aspects of our own doing,
rather than as just psychological states that we experience and observe within
ourselves. Korsgaard contends that we can avoid such self-estrangement only
insofar as we embrace, at least implicitly, some “practical identity.” A practical
identity is a kind of background normative self-conception, “a description
under which you value yourself ” (Sources 3.3.1, p. 101).
Of course, there are many different ways someone might value herself, with
many different kinds of practical significance. A human being might value
herself as a physical commodity, a volume of water and assorted hydrocar-
bons, or as a chunk of meat that fetches a certain price on the dark web. An
individual could value himself merely as a tool or resource, as a self-identified
slave might. For Korsgaard, however, a practical identity is a way in which
“you find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking”
(Sources 3.3.1, p. 101). Such a self-conception specifies a way in which I
can value myself as a person, as something immediately important as the
bearer of something like rights, duties, prerogatives, liberties, and liabilities.
Fundamentally, a practical identity defines a way a person can esteem or
respect herself as an agent, and so how she might experience pride, shame, or
embarrassment. As Korsgaard’s discussion develops it becomes apparent that
my practical identities also determine who else I could take seriously with
respect to such practical self-evaluation, picking out those agents whose
responses would count when it comes to how I think and feel about myself.
My practical identities define the ways in which I do or could matter to
myself, and so who else does or could matter to me, and how. To recognize
such an identity is to locate myself within a horizon of possible interpersonal
relationships, oriented with respect to those whom I might be able to take
seriously, those by whom I expect to be taken seriously, and just what such
“seriousness” comes to within this particular social space.
Korsgaard contends that only reasons that satisfy the norms of such a prac-
tical identity can adequately address what she calls “the normative question.”
To answer this question, my reasons must do more than merely demonstrate
that it is true that someone in my situation should act in some way, as a piece
of propositional knowledge. An adequate response to the normative question
must also immediately engage our concern in a non-alienated way. Such an
answer must speak not just to the question, but to the questioner, to me
(rather than just someone in my circumstances, however precisely described).
Only an appeal to such identities can answer the normative question in an
irreducibly practical rather than a merely theoretical spirit. Such answers are
addressed to me foremost as an agent thinking in a way that is irreducibly
first-personal and practical.
Korsgaard contends that our reasons for action are properly grounded in
our practical identities insofar as such identities receive our ongoing
“endorsement” or self-identification. More specifically, my obligations are the
distinctively practical necessities that stem from the principles that are consti-
tutive of some such identity. For Korsgaard, our most fundamental moral
6 David Sussman
obligations are grounded in an ur-identity (“humanity”) that we must all rec-

ognize in order to coherently affirm any other practical identity at all.
Supposedly, the normativity of obligation is just a more richly conceptualized
form of the normativity of life in general: the normativity that any animal’s
needs have for it. For Korsgaard, all our duties are essentially matters of basic
self-maintenance and self-preservation.4
In an animal, self-preservation involves the continual reproduction of an
individual organism, that is, a living body insofar as that body is engaged in
just such a continuous activity of self-reproduction. At the most basic level of
consciousness, anything that threatens this self-constituting activity is experi-
enced as pain: as something that must be attended to at the risk of ceasing to
fully be oneself. For Korsgaard, our sense of moral obligation is really just a
fancy version of such pain, now developed and articulated in ways appropri-
ate to a being whose defining form of life is not just conscious, but essentially
self-conscious. To feel that I ethically must do something is to recognize my
situation as one in which my life (as a Catholic, or an aristocrat, or an
American, or my children’s father, etc.) is somehow very much at stake. The
demandingness of obligation, running together cognition and concern, is
thus no more “queer” than the special urgency of pain; sadly, one the most
familiar and unmysterious things in the world. Such “inherent prescriptivity”
can indeed appear occult, but only because it is much too close to us to be
seen clearly, rather than because it is infinitely distant.5 We may indeed feel at
a loss as to how to explain such normativity, but this may only be because we
cannot imagine anything easier to grasp than such experiences that might
serve as a way of making them more intelligible.6
So far, Korsgaard has shown only that a person’s practical identity must be
analogous to the implicit self-awareness and self-concern possessed by any
animal, a position that leaves the content of such identities still pretty much
up for grabs. However, Korsgaard observes that by solving the first problem
caused by reflection, the endorsement of a practical identity engenders yet
another difficulty of the same type at a higher level. Perhaps I am wondering
why I shouldn’t plagiarize an obscure but useful passage, but then realize that
doing so would conflict with my endorsement of myself as an academic and
as a philosopher (if nothing else). This response is a fine reply to my original
worry, but in so answering that initial question about plagiarism, I now find
myself having to face my endorsement of this academic identity as a further
act in which I am engaged. At this point, the possibility of alienation now
attaches to this background activity that has now been brought to my atten-
tion. Now I must consider whether my embrace of an academic identity is to
count as something that I am really doing, or if such endorsement will count

as just a psychological hang-up that I find myself gripped by, something that
is merely happening to and through me (as with a compulsion). Unfortunately,
my acts of identification are no more immune to such anxieties than are my
more immediate desires. The normative question can just keep reinscribing
itself: is this newly identified identification really an expression of das Ich, or
merely das Es?
This process of self-estrangement and self-reconciliation keeps spiraling
outward to increasingly abstract conceptions of myself, until ultimately I wind
up wondering why I should identify with any particular practical identity at
all.7 For Korsgaard, this last challenge can be decisively answered only by
appeal to the supposed practical identity of a rational agent, simply as such.
For as we have seen, any rational agent, if able to make up their mind about
what to do in the first place, must recognize some practical identity or other,
and so the affirmation of this highest identity gives us at least some reason to
adopt any more specific identity that is minimally up to the task.
Admittedly, from this lofty perspective we will not find any further reason
to adopt one particular identity rather than another: to satisfy the basic needs
of rational agency, any coherent practical identity will do. However, the lack
of such a more complete justification would be a real problem only if we
approached the normative question completely uninvested in any such self-
conception in the first place: and so, like Buridan’s ass, faced a range of options
that were all equally desirable. Our basic self-definition would then, like the
ass’s choice of meal, depend on an initial moment of profound arbitrariness.
Yet for good or ill, human beings can never encounter problems about them-
selves in this form. Instead, we confront such normative questions only inso-
far as we are already “thrown” into a particular practical identity that we find
ourselves inhabiting and endorsing (however unreflectively). The only real
issue I can face is whether to continue to affirm that endorsement as my own
activity, or instead to disown that attitude as merely a psychological quirk that
I am going to have to find a way to work around.
The situation is a little like contemplating your love for someone. I would
be at a loss if, without any prior attachments, I had to choose someone to love
out of all the perfectly love-worthy people of the world (assuming that a per-
son can be worthy of love in some sense). Fortunately, I can only confront this
question already deeply “biased” toward my spouse (or child, or parent, etc.).
From this position, I might then wholeheartedly reaffirm my devotion, if only
because it is a very good thing in general for a person to have love in their life
(so long as there aren’t any strong reasons against loving this particular
8 David Sussman
person (e.g., their being manipulative, or cruel, or a Yankees fan.)). A rational

being needs reasons for what she does, and so she must endorse some practi-
cal identity or other. Yet although that need is very general, it can suffice to
settle any real worries about the specific practical identities in which I already
see myself (so long as no defeaters obtain).
So far, self-reflection has brought me to acknowledge my implicit endorse-
ment of the practical identity as simply a rational agent. As a rational being,
I accept that I need some reasons or other, and in so seeing this need as my
need, I implicitly affirm my identity as a rational being, simply as such. I rec-
ognize the demands of rationality (whatever they are) to be demands on me,
and so take myself to be accountable to other rational agents simpliciter. Yet
while I have now become conscious of my ongoing embrace of this very
abstract identity, further reflection need not alienate me from that self-
conception as it had done before. In the case of other (more substantive)
identities, once I realized that I was endorsing that identity, the question of
whether or not that very act of endorsement itself is truly expressive of me
was able to reinscribe itself. Yet that alienating question cannot similarly find
purchase when I come to face myself simply as a rational agent. What is dif-
ferent in this case is that, unlike previously, I cannot see myself as performing
some further “act” of endorsement that might be called into question, some
optional affirmation from which I might in turn become estranged.
The practical identity of “rational agent” is unique in that, unlike any of my
other identities, I cannot make sense of what it would be not to see myself in
this way. Admittedly, I might be able to form a coherent idea of a purely theo-
retical intellect that observes and interprets the doings of its body and psyche
in a purely spectatorial way (Kant even proposes this form of subjectivity as a
thought experiment in the opening chapter of the Groundwork8). Yet although
we can allow for the logical possibility of such a purely theoretical form of
self-consciousness, I nevertheless cannot accept such a self-understanding as
a real possibility for me. As a being that already inhabits some practical per-
spective, I cannot recognize such a purely contemplative creature as a possible
version of myself. Such a contemplative being could be at best just a replace-
ment for me (even if identical to me in all physical respects). Because I could
not become alienated from my identity as a rational agent, I cannot see myself
having to perform any further act of endorsement with respect to that self-
conception. I can make no sense of the suggestion that I might do or have
done anything else (I might just as well “endorse” my own birth). Instead, my
commitment to rationality is, from within a practical point of view, less a vol-
untary act of endorsement than the irresistible acknowledgment of a
necessary truth, the horizon against which I can recognize any particular
practical questions at all.9
Admittedly, there can be no (non-question-begging) reasons to abide by
the norms of practical rationality itself.10 This limitation would be a problem
if we approached the ultimate normative question from some completely
neutral position, as if we were considering whether to understand ourselves
merely as intellects or also as agents. But, as before, this situation is not one in
which human beings could ever find themselves. Rather, we can come to such
dilemmas only from already within the practical, from some substantive
background understanding of ourselves as agents rather than as mere con-
templators. Perhaps a purely theoretical form of mindedness might be possi-
ble for some kind of thinker, but this possibility is not open to anything
I could recognize as myself (any more than the fact that it is possible for some
human beings to be Bronze Age warriors shows that I could be such).11 This
necessity is neither causal nor logical but rather phenomenological or existen-
tial. Here the token-reflexive (“I,” “me,” “mine”) cannot be replaced with any
name or other referring expression without profoundly changing what is
under consideration, and how.
At this point, Korsgaard may seem to have assembled all the materials
needed to reconstruct Kantian morality. As a condition on the reason-
giving force of any other considerations, I must first recognize myself as a
rational agent, and so as bound by norms that hold for myself and all other
rational agents, simply as such. Here it would be tempting to jump to the
conclusion that rational agency must then be the “source” of all values,
having authority over any other concerns, regardless of whether such agency
is realized within myself or somebody else. If this were the case, it might seem
that our reasons are any good only insofar as they can be sincerely
addressed to any being that could coherently be the object of any such
address. Korsgaard would then have succeeded in deriving robust ethical
norms of publicity, universality, and reciprocity from the nature of practical
reflection, simply as such.
Korsgaard does sometimes suggest these inferences but apparently realizes
that they would be too quick. After all, even if rational agency can be shown
to be the “source” of all other value or values in some sense, this fact would
not entail that rational agency is itself the supreme, authoritative value. As has
often been pointed out, it is not generally the case that the source of F is itself
supremely F (soil is a source of food, but nevertheless inedible; Picasso pro-
duced great beauty, but was not himself particularly good-looking, etc.).
There are many ways for one thing to be the source of the value of another,
10 David Sussman
and only some of these ways involve a transfer or delegation of some power
from a greater authority to a lesser.
To make sense of what the basic human identity involves, Korsgaard argues
that all practical reasons must be “public” or “sharable” in a robust sense.
Following Wittgenstein, Korsgaard observes that normative concepts (rules,
reasons, meanings, etc.) only apply where ideas of violating such norms can
find purchase. An agent cannot be following a rule merely because she is sin-
cerely trying to do so; her perspective must, in principle, be answerable to
some different point of view. This consequence rules out the radical privacy
that Kant calls “logical egoism”: that some reason or principle applies to just
me, only here, merely now.
Admittedly, this conclusion by itself does not usher in the Kingdom of
Ends. The rejection of absolute privacy need not drive us to the opposite
extreme of universal publicity, so that norms must be taken to apply to every-
one, everywhere, always. Obviously, there is a great deal of space between
logical egoism and logical universality. To avoid an objectionable privacy, it is
enough that an agent sees her reasons as applying to some other perspectives
in ways that can be situated in some sort of normative practice. Although
there cannot be a logically private language, it does not follow that the gram-
matical or semantic norms of English must be universal, or even that English
be fully translatable into every other language (or potentially comprehensible
by every other language-user, simply as such).
Korsgaard is certainly right that reasons must be “sharable” in some sense.
The real question, though, is sharable how, and with whom? As I understand
her, to share a practical reason is really to engage in a process of shared rea-
soning, in which some group of people make up their minds together, as part
of what is essentially one complex deliberative act. Korsgaard need not deny
that an individual can ever make up his mind all by himself, any more than
the impossibility of a private language keeps me from coming up with a per-
sonal code that no one else ever learns. The point is only that the possibility of
such individual decisions or meanings depends on a background of essen-
tially public, shared normative practices. A person can come up with a secret
code purely for her own use; but such a code could not be her first or only
language. Similarly, the possibility of my having some completely idiosyn-
cratic values depends on a broader ethical practice, because it is only against
such a background that I can understand myself as any sort of agent or
valuer at all.
However, this requirement shows little about the specific content of any
such background practice. Private property presupposes some sort of public,
political authority that makes legal and economic relations possible. Yet this
condition does little more than rule out the more egregious metaphysical fan-
tasies of libertarians (e.g., Lockean labor-mixing). The dependence of private
property on some kind of prior political institutions does not by itself entail
that people must be able to sell their organs, or alienate their labor-power, or
that the means of production must or must not be owned in common.
Although any of these positions might be true, none can be derived from the
transcendental conditions of property in general. Instead, such claims stand
in need of some more specific ethical/political justification.
To be any kind of normative consideration at all, a reason must at least be
sharable with some others in the sense that these others would count as hav-
ing the standing to judge whether that reason has been applied correctly or
not. Their agreement or disagreement with my judgment would have to mat-
ter to me in my judging. To make possible practical reasons, these other
judges must in addition have a kind of distinctly practical (or ethical) stand-
ing. As Aristotle holds, to draw a practical conclusion is not to accept some
sort of proposition about what would be good or right to do in some set of
circumstances. A theoretical judgment about a practical subject is not itself a
practical judgment. Instead, to draw a practical conclusion is simply to act
with a specific intention (or, derivatively, to form an intention to act in the
future). If so, then for other people to agree with my practical judgment is to
act together as a result of making up our minds jointly. Insofar as I recognize
these other agents as fellow participants in such a collective endeavor, I must
take their attitudes toward me to have a special standing with regard to how
I evaluate myself as a practical being (that is, in terms of my sense of desert,
merit, or self-worth, as matters of pride, shame, guilt, disappointment, regret,
glory, etc.). In order to be in a truly practical kind of agreement with others,
I must understand my individual agency in terms of what I do or might owe
somebody as a fellow deliberator—so that my self-worth is situated within
some practice of holding one another responsible. It is these structures of
mutual accountability that transform a group of individuals acting in similar
ways (either cooperatively or competitively) into a truly joint enterprise, con-
stituted by a “general will” prior to the decisions of any particular members.
This conclusion, although broad, is hardly an “empty formalism.” Arguably,
the dependence of practical reasons on some such background practice of
shared reasoning and action rules out at least rational egoism. Admittedly, the
rational egoist holds herself accountable to her future self with respect to her
long-term welfare, and so does not succumb to logical egoism. Nevertheless,
such purely intra-personal forms of accountability fall short of being a real
12 David Sussman
practice simply because the ideas of mutual disagreement, argument, advice,

and deliberating together cannot find adequate purchase within the life of just
one being. I may now successfully anticipate my future views, and my future
self may accurately recall and respect my present positions, but the arrow of
time rules out the possibility of any real give and take between these points of
view. At the very least, real practices need participants that can exist at the
same time, but in different spaces. Similarly, it may also be the case that no
agent could inhabit a completely freestanding “Kingdom of Two,” just because
the relations between two people cannot have enough complexity or open-
endedness to count as a real normative practice.12
Yet we have not yet reached a completely universalistic understanding of
our most basic practical identity, in contrast to the more parochial forms of
ethical life that have characterized the vast majority of human history. To get
to recognizably Kantian conclusions, Korsgaard has to show that the most
basic conception of this formal identity should be that of fellow citizen-
legislators of a universal “Kingdom of Ends.” In such a Kingdom, I under-
stand myself, with every other rational agent, as engaged in an essentially
joint activity of determining the basic standards of our common life, so we
are all equally accountable to one another, regardless of any of the ways in
which we might differ as individuals. What is distinctive about this practice is
that it has completely open borders; the only qualification of citizenship is the
ability to assert a citizen’s rights, by holding others responsible (and taking
oneself to be responsible to others).
To defend this radically egalitarian and universalistic vision, Korsgaard
appeals to the phenomenology of our moral experience. Supposedly, when we
interact with others, even strangers, the structure of our reactive attitudes
(such as resentment, remorse, and gratitude) reveals that we cannot help but
recognize such others as beings to whom we owe justification in a richer
moral sense, simply as persons to other persons. It may indeed be possible for
some human beings to fail to recognize the objections of other agents to be
directly addressed to them merely as such (rather than just as a Jew from fel-
low Jews, as a Greek aristocrat from other Greek aristocrats, etc.). Even so,
there seems to be no way for you and me (given our place in history) to fail to
experience this relation as that of just one person to another. As a good liberal
modern, I take it for granted that such qualities as my gender, race, class, and
religion are, metaphysically speaking, accidental. However important and
unavoidable these categories are in my actual social life, I cannot but allow the
possibility that I could have been female, or black, or Muslim (regardless of
whether or not there is any remaining possibility that I might become such,
given who and what I already am).
Yet however inescapable for me, this Kantian form of self-understanding is
nevertheless a fairly recent invention. In the past, human beings have taken
qualities such as caste, religion, or gender to be essential to the people they are,
and so simply did not recognize any sorts of ethical claims addressed to them
from others outside of such concrete identities.13 Korsgaard does not establish
that these more limited conceptions of an agent’s basic practical identity must
be intrinsically defective (assuming that these conceptions are not dependent
on confusion, fantasy or self-deception). At best, she shows only that such self-
conceptions are no longer open to us, given the particular ways we have been
already been initiated into rational agency. The possibility of practical reason
may indeed require that we inhabit some kind of ethical life, taken broadly.
However, a specifically Kantian conception of this life is not the consequence
of a general transcendental argument. Instead, this morality (like every other)
is ultimately the expression of a kind of groundless self-confidence: a fact not
of reason simpliciter, but of what reason can be in and for us, here and now.
I do not think there are any reasons to be dissatisfied with this more modest
rendering of Korsgaard’s conclusions. However, in her subsequent Self-
Constitution, Korsgaard redoubles her efforts to establish the absolute neces-
sity of Kantian morality for all rational agents. Her arguments here appeal to a
teleological metaphysics of action. Korsgaard contends that for a being to be
able to truly act (and not just respond to inner or outer forces), that being
must define and govern itself by a fundamental principle, just as a polity is
defined and made capable of action by a legal constitution. Such a principle
determines what activities count as the agent truly exercising her powers (in
response to her desires and other incentives), and what counts as her being
acted upon by something else. As such, these basic commitments give the
agent’s soul a special kind of integrity. This unifying scheme establishes the
distinction between what behaviors are to count as the doing of the agent’s
whole self, and what responses are to be merely the products of some external
influence or sub-personal component of her psyche.
Constitutional principles serve to integrate (differentiate and unify) the
parts of the soul so as to make action possible, and this service is something
14 David Sussman
that all agents need qua agents. From this necessity Korsgaard infers that the
essential function of such basic commitments is to articulate and integrate
the agent in this way. The more stable or durable the resulting unity, the
better the constitution qua constitution. Supposedly, the principle that provides
for the most unshakable integrity is the one that most fully does its job, and so
is a practical principle in the fullest sense. For Korsgaard, Kant’s Moral Law is
the only constitutive principle that an agent can address to any other rational
agent (and so any possible version of herself) under all conditions. As a result,
the agent who recognizes this law can thereby recognize what counts as her
own proper choices in any possible situation, regardless of how drastically she
or her environment may have changed.
In contrast, the unifying principles of defective souls only render a clear
verdict under a limited range of circumstances. The timocratic soul pursues
honor above all else, not distinguishing between meriting the esteem of the
right sort of person, and actually being so esteemed. Supposedly, such an
agent would lose his bearings should these two considerations come apart:
when doing the truly honorable thing would elicit only scorn and contempt
from the people who matter, so that only a shameful action will be admired.
As a result, the honor-lover cannot see any way of remaining true to himself
in such contexts; either way, he must betray the fundamental commitment
that defines him. In contrast, the autonomous Kantian person can recognize
and affirm what it would be to act as herself in any possible context: “not
necessarily happy on the rack, but herself on the rack, herself even there”
(Self-Constitution, 180).14
Korsgaard is right that only the autonomous soul has such integrity needed
to recognize itself in any possible context. However, what she fails to establish
is that proper agency requires this maximal degree of durability. It does not
follow from the fact that an agent’s self-conception must have some degree of
integrity in order to act that the stronger that unity, the more fully that being
acts, and so is better qua agent. A car must be able to hold together under
some stress, but that doesn’t mean that a Humvee is the best or truest kind of
car, or that my old Honda Civic is defective because it can’t withstand a road-
side bomb. With agents as with cars, once a certain minimal threshold of
integrity is attained, other considerations may come to the fore in ways that
can justify various trade-offs with respect to further increases in durability
(my Civic gets much better mileage and is easier to park just because it lacks
much armor).
As Korsgaard contends, a fundamental principle is needed for me to be
able to reproduce and recognize myself in other practical contexts. Yet
although a principle of self-constitution enables me to recognize myself in a

wide range of possibilities, this constitution does not have to guarantee that I
will be able find myself in all conceivable situations. It may be perfectly all
right for an agent to know that she must lose a grip on herself in some possi-
ble set of (exceptional) circumstances, so that she could not continue to rec-
ognize herself no matter what she might do (Sophie’s Choice comes to mind).
Indeed, a vulnerability to coming undone this way may be a necessary con-
comitant of anything that can count as love or personal attachment: and so, of
particularly rich kinds of agency and forms of interpersonal relationship.15
At bottom, action may be less a simple functional kind like “can-opener,”
and more like speech. Speech (and language-use generally) serves many dif-
ferent functions simultaneously, and the nature and extent of these tasks are
continually being redefined by linguistic practice itself. Some of the functions
of language may indeed be more central than others (e.g., communication vs.
exhortation). Yet such centrality does not entail that the language that best
facilitates such sharing of belief is most fully a language, let alone the best
language simpliciter. After all, an ideally communicative language might still
make it very difficult to issue an order, make a joke, or give thanks. Of course,
a language that makes basic communication very difficult is defective.
However, this fact doesn’t show that ease of communication is the only or
even dominant linguistic virtue, or that facilitating such exchanges always
takes priority over everything else we might be trying to do with our words.
Languages are constituted by norms and normative practices centered in
certain tasks, but there need be no such thing as the better language as such.
Past some threshold, there may just be different ways of being better or worse
which do not allow for any determinate ranking overall (at least, outside of a
specific context). Likewise, Korsgaard’s and Kant’s autonomous agent may
enjoy much greater integrity than the minimum required for action, but this
does not mean he has attained a fuller kind of agency in any absolute sense.
Kantian agency is just better in one important respect, perhaps to the detri-
ment of others. There is no reason to suppose that all the potential virtues of
agency could be completely unified or even specified, any more than all
potential excellences of speech could all be fully realized in a particular
language.
Perhaps there simply is no fullest or most real type of agency. Instead, there
may be many different types of agency, realizing different virtues of action to
varying degrees, without there being any neutral standpoint from which to
rank them as forms of agency in itself. There would then be many ways of
being an agent, involving different sorts of trade-offs, and so indefinitely
16 David Sussman
many ways to act well or poorly. Once again, the analysis of action only shows
that an agent must identify herself in terms of some broader ethical practice.
But that analysis does not specify any particular version of such a practice,
not even a Kantian one. Such substantive conclusions depend not just on
what we are as rational agents in general, but on who we can be, given the
specific self-understandings in which we can actually find ourselves.
Ultimately, Korsgaard manages to establish Kantian morality only relative to a

certain modern form of subjectivity. Yet little of value is lost by this qualifica-
tion. Such relativity does not entail that a person must be particularly enlight-
ened or even decent for Kantian morality to apply to him. Even the bigot
must, on some level, implicitly recognize the moral address of the people he
despises and denigrates; otherwise, why would he feel such a need to deny or
diminish their apparent moral standing? Here hatred may be the homage that
self-conceit and self-deception pays to human dignity. Kantian morality does
indeed bind all liberal moderns not just in their more virtuous (that is, coher-
ent and articulately self-aware) forms, but even in those degenerate cases pre-
sented by the avowedly illiberal (racists, reactionaries, Proud Boys, etc.).
Even so, we must still allow that there can be (and perhaps have been)
forms of practical self-consciousness where the moral standing of the stranger
is neither affirmed nor denied in any real way. In pre-modern societies,
human beings may have often seen themselves as standing in substantive eth-
ical relations only with fellow members of their clan, class, or caste. These
groups would define the people to whom the agent was answerable in a rich
way, before whom they might feel proud, ashamed, or disappointed. The
claims of complete strangers would not need to be either recognized or repu-
diated; being simply inaudible in the second-person, no rationalization or
self-deception would be required to ignore them.16 In these cases, agents sim-
ply might not address themselves to, or take themselves to be addressed by,
strangers, who might then appear as nothing more than potential resources
or threats (as in relations of trade or war). Kantian morality would then be an
answer, not to the normative question as such, but only to such queries as they
could issue from my mouth, or the mouths of those with whom I could hope
to form substantive interpersonal relationships. Other agents might well get
by with different and perhaps weaker answers to the normative questions they
confront, relating to strangers in a purely Hobbesian way.
Yet while a medieval samurai or Neolithic hunter-gatherer need not be

impressed by Korsgaard’s (or Kant’s) results, these conclusions may neverthe-
less be inescapable for anyone who might actually find themselves reading her
work. This more reserved interpretation opens the door to moral skepticism
only if it turns out that there is indeed some real chance of our abandoning a
basically liberal self-conception in favor of something more medieval or
Neolithic, but such forms of ethical life are almost certainly no longer real
possibilities for us. The problem is not simply that being a medieval samurai
or Bronze Age warrior requires broader social practices and intuitions that no
longer exist and are beyond our knowledge and power to restore. More
important, these earlier forms of self-understanding might well require a cer-
tain kind of unreflectiveness that, having been lost, cannot be regained with-
out doing violence to mind and spirit. An essential part of these earlier
self-conceptions was the inability to entertain certain logical possibilities; the
idea that one’s fundamental ethical identity might be independent of a partic-
ular class, gender, or tribe was something that just could never be taken seri-
ously. In contrast, we are able to form such a conception of our ethical
relations and recognize ourselves in its terms, however vehemently we might
then try to convince ourselves that we can’t. As Bernard Williams observes,
the attempt to recover such earlier self-understandings would be an attempt
to regain a kind of lost innocence, to forget or unlearn a basic possibility that
has been central to our lives up to now. As he warns, such an effort would
constitute only a futile if grotesque exercise in self-delusion (e.g., the Third
Reich).17
There is one way in which this humbler reading of Korsgaard’s conclusions
qualifies their normative force. Although we need not worry about objections
posed from pre-modern perspectives, we cannot foreclose the possibility of
new, distinctively “post-modern” challenges. We are not able to say from the
outset that there could never be some new ethical self-conception that, while
not demanding that we unlearn our basic reflectiveness, is nevertheless
incompatible with the Kantian way of understanding ourselves as agents. If
the Moral Law were an implicit commitment of valuing or rational agency per
se, we could dismiss the possibility of such challenges out of hand. Instead, we
can only note that no such alternatives are currently in sight, shifting the bur-
den of argument to the skeptic to put some substantive proposal on the table.
Should the skeptic manage to do so, we will then just have to consider that
supposed alternative in detail: whether it is coherent, consistent with other
things we know, and truly independent of the Kantian self-understanding
that it pretends to replace. Finally, even if such a proposal passes these tests,
18 David Sussman
we would then have to consider whether we can imagine actually inhabiting

this new self-conception, given who we are now, and, if so, what would be
gained by doing so, and what lost. These are all high hurdles to clear, but per-
haps a sufficiently bold visionary might do so (Zarathustra the godless?).
Until such a figure arrives, we can only stand ready to meet these challenges
as they come, with confidence rather than certainty.
Notes
1. Kant does allow that God’s experience of the Moral Law would be importantly differ-
ent from our own. As discursive beings, we must confront the Law as an imperative,
leaving open how we will actually act. For God, in contrast, the distinction between
the normative and the descriptive breaks down; the Moral Law simultaneously spells
out how God should act and also how he does act.
2. This analogy has its limits. If the first Critique is right, then the truths of the natural
sciences hold for all discursively judging subjects who engage with the world through
the intuitions of space and time. In a sense, we wouldn’t share a world with those who
didn’t have those forms of intuitions; indeed, it’s not clear that we would be able to
recognize such creatures as thinking beings at all. In contrast, it does seem that we can
recognize beings outside of our basic form of ethical life as rational agents, even if we
couldn’t share a social world with them. The difference may be that even when a being
isn’t practically intelligible to us, we can still have some theoretical understanding of it
as a thinking subject. In contrast, when even this theoretical understanding fails,
there is nothing left to fall back on. My thanks to Kyla Ebels-Duggan for pressing me
on this point.
3. The move here recalls Kant’s resolution of the antinomies, which he shows to rest on a
confused aspiration to grasp the “world as a whole” in some univocal sense.
4. It’s important to see that this claim is formal, not material. When I act from duty, sus-
taining my identity need not be part of my objectives, whether explicitly or implicitly.
Rather, this sense of myself is found in the peculiar sort of necessity with which I
adopt such ends as telling the truth, keeping a promise, or helping someone in need.
My identity is found not in the content of my practical reasoning, but in the forms of
inference I employ. As a result, moral action need not be egoistic in any interesting
sense: I help the needy for their sake, although I do so as a kind of self-affirmation.
There is no greater paradox here than in the fact that a person can be self-assertive
without ever actually talking about herself.
5. See J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin Books, 1977).
6. Johnson was right at least this far; the way to refute the skeptic about “normative
properties” is indeed to have them kick a stone (at least if it’s big and kicked
really hard).
7. Here Korsgaard seems to conflate the possibility that the normative question will keep
reattaching itself with the necessity that it does so. Yet my alienation from any partic-
ular demand might well disappear once I see how that claim is connected to some
broader way that I understand and care about myself. It does not follow from my hav-
ing lost confidence in some duty I have that I must similarly question the identity that
grounds it once I become conscious of my endorsement of it. While any answer to the
normative question opens up the possibility of such a regress, such alienation will
typically come to an end somewhere short of the identity of rational agent simpliciter.
We do not always feel a need to answer every question that reflection presents to us:
arguably, experiencing such a need is not the essence of rationality, but rather a kind
of pathology.
8. Immanuel Kant, The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In Practical Philosophy,
translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), 4:395.
9. In effect, I confront this identity as something like Kant’s “Fact of Reason.” Although it
is not logically (let alone causally) necessary for a thinking being to see herself this
way, this identity forms the horizon of my possibilities: that is, of all the potential ways
of understanding oneself that I can recognize as ways of understanding myself.
10. The question “Why be rational?” cannot be answered, but only because it cannot
really be pressed. No helpful answer could be given to anyone who asked this question
in earnest, yet that question is not something a rational being needs to answer in
order to properly remain confident in her commitment to rationality. Where reason
ends, questioning and answering is over as well.
11. Here I have in mind Bernard Williams’s distinction between “real” and merely
“notional” possibilities for how a person might understand herself. A real possibility,
unlike the merely notional, is one that a rational agent can inhabit without depending
on ignorance, fantasy, or self-deception, and which makes her social world intelligible
to her. See Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1985), p. 161.
12. My thanks to Nir Ben Moshe for pressing me on this point.
13. I don’t doubt that these pre-modern agents might have had some understanding of
the fact that outsiders were making claims on them or expressing emotions of resent-
ment or disgust. My point is only that such understandings would be purely theoreti-
cal, not practical. A truly practical appreciation of resentment or anger would
approach these attitudes not as objects of psychological explanation (or amusement),
but as demands immediately calling for a reply of the same general kind, in the sec-
ond rather than the third person.
14. Or more precisely, that there will be some fact of the matter of what it would be for
her to succeed, or fail, at remaining herself on the rack. Whichever turns out to be the
case depends not on her commitments, but on her subsequent actions.
15. See my “Morality, Self- Constitution, and the Limits of Integrity.” In Beatrix
Himmelmann and Robert Louden, eds., Why Be Moral? (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter,
2015), pp. 123–40.
16. I offer this claim only as a piece of anthropological speculation, although one familiar
enough from Hegel and Nietzsche. So long as this possibility is credible, not much
here depends on the particular historical facts.
17. See Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1985), pp. 161–2.
20 David Sussman
Bibliography
Kant, Immanuel. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. In Religion and
Rational Theology, translated and edited by Allen W. Wood and George Di
Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Kant, Immanuel. The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In Practical
Philosophy, translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge
Kant, Immanuel. The Metaphysics of Morals. In Practical Philosophy, translated
and edited by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Korsgaard, Christine M. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge
Korsgaard, Christine M. Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009.
Mackie, J. L. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. New York: Penguin Books, 1977.
Sussman, David. “Morality, Self-Constitution, and the Limits of Integrity.” In
Beatrix Himmelmann and Robert Louden, eds., Why Be Moral? Berlin: Walter
De Gruyter, 2015.
Williams, Bernard. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
2
Finite Valuers and the Problem of
Vulnerability to Unmitigated Loss
Sharon Street
1. Introduction
The Holy Grail of secular analytic metaethics—or, better, the “Non-Holy

Grail”—would be a clear, informative, intuitively satisfying account of the
subject matter of ethics that both (1) vindicates a strong form of ethical objec-
tivity, while (2) avoiding any hint of metaphysical or epistemological mystery.
In the past, I’ve been pessimistic about the existence of the Non-Holy Grail,
having elsewhere defended a rather strongly subjectivist view.1 That being
said, I believe that it would be premature to give up the search, in part because
I’m convinced that in our quest for the Non-Holy Grail, we (the “we” here
being those of us who work in secular analytic metaethics in the broadly
Western tradition) haven’t even begun to exhaust the available philosophical
resources. In particular, I’m convinced that Eastern meditative traditions,
including Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism, among others, offer a wealth of
resources that are, so far, vastly underexplored by secular metaethicists. In
this paper, I will mention in passing some ways in which I think meditative
traditions are relevant, but that will not be the main point of the discussion.2
Instead, the main point is to summarize what I think is the most promising
strategy in our search for the Non-Holy Grail, and to get to work pursuing
one part of that strategy.
In the paper, I will be making two background assumptions, both of which
I defend elsewhere. The first background assumption is that theism is false.3
There is no God, in the sense of an omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly
good being. More broadly, the universe has no concern for the living things
that arise as a result of natural processes within it. This is not because the
universe is malevolent, of course, but rather because it has no concerns at all.
Only finite valuers—roughly, living beings with a conscious, evaluative
Sharon Street, Finite Valuers and the Problem of Vulnerability to Unmitigated Loss In: Normativity and Agency: Themes
from the Philosophy of Christine M. Korsgaard. Edited by: Tamar Schapiro, Kyla Ebels-Duggan, and Sharon Street,
Oxford University Press. © Sharon Street 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843726.003.0002
22 Sharon Street
perspective on the world—have concerns, and we’re alone in the universe

apart from each other.
The second background assumption is that normative realism is false.4
There are no robustly mind-independent normative truths, in the sense of
truths that hold independently of the evaluative standpoints of finite valuers
like ourselves. This is so, in my view, no matter what form of normative real-
ism is proposed—whether naturalist, non- naturalist, or quasi-
realist, for
example. Instead, normativity is mind-dependent in the following sense: If
some fact or consideration X has any normative significance (e.g., if it is good
or bad, or a normative reason for or against some belief, feeling, or action),
then X has that normative significance only for a given valuer, and in virtue of
that valuer’s evaluative perspective on the world.5
It is widely recognized, at least among philosophers, that the rejection of
theism is compatible, at least in principle, with a strong form of normative
objectivity. Secular forms of normative realism have gained enough traction
to make this area of conceptual space vivid. It is less widely recognized that
the rejection of normative realism (whether secular or theistic) is also com-
patible, at least in principle, with a strong form of normative objectivity. How
so? Well, the rough idea is that even if normative significance is, as the antire-
alist claims, “conferred” by minds (and, in particular, by the minds of finite
valuers) upon otherwise neutral facts or considerations, it might still be the
case that every time you have a mind (and, in particular, a valuing mind), that
mind’s state or activity of “valuing” somehow dictates or implies the same
thing about the normative significance of a given fact or consideration, no
matter who the valuer is.
A view along such lines is a tantalizing metaethical possibility for many
reasons, and in the history of secular analytic metaethics since Moore, no
philosopher has done more to draw our attention to this possibility than
Christine Korsgaard. In a body of work spanning nearly four decades,
Korsgaard has developed a comprehensive metaethical and ethical theory
which shows, both by example and in its explicit articulation, how one might
simultaneously (1) understand normativity as a thoroughly mind-dependent
phenomenon (thereby avoiding the metaphysical and epistemological prob-
lems that plague realism—or so I would argue), while also (2) vindicating a
strong form of ethical objectivity. Even if one is skeptical that the details of
Korsgaard’s proposed vindication of morality go through, Korsgaard has—
drawing on her reading of Kant—mapped out a general strategy for combin-
ing normative antirealism with ethical objectivity that is of extremely
widespread philosophical relevance and interest. The strategy she identifies
Finite Valuers and Vulnerability to Unmitigated Loss 23
provides a template not only for anyone looking to vindicate ethical objectiv-
ity within an antirealist framework but also for anyone looking to vindicate
any kind of normative objectivity within an antirealist framework.6
In any case, as the above remarks suggest, I believe that for anyone who
hasn’t given up on the search for the Non-Holy Grail, there is no better
stepping-off point than the path that Korsgaard’s work in metaethics has laid
out for us. I’ll now very briefly characterize that path, which I’ll call the generic
constructivist strategy for vindicating the objectivity of ethics, and then begin
sketching an alternative implementation of that strategy.
2. The Generic Constructivist Strategy
Glossing over many important details,7 and drawing heavily on Korsgaard’s

way of articulating the constructivist strategy in terms of the search for a
universal “problem” to which morality might be the universal “solution,”8
we may describe the generic constructivist strategy as consisting of
three steps:
Generic Constructivist Strategy for Vindicating the Objectivity of Ethics

Step 1: Explain what is constitutively involved in being an agent, valuer,
or will.9
Step 2: Identify a universal problem that is faced by every agent (valuer, will,
etc.), by her own evaluative lights, simply in virtue of her being an agent (val-
uer, will, etc.) at all.
Step 3: Argue that the best or only solution to the relevant problem involves
adopting an ethical principle or standpoint.
We may summarize Korsgaard’s more specific, Kantian-inspired implementa-

tion this way:
Korsgaard’s Kantian Implementation of the Generic Constructivist

Strategy10
Step 1: Explain what is constitutively involved in being a will.
Step 2: Argue that every will has the problem of “needing a law” that is not
“given from the outside.”
Step 3: Argue that the solution to that problem is the categorical imperative as
represented by Kant’s Formula of Universal Law.
24 Sharon Street
For reasons I discuss elsewhere,11 I don’t think that Korsgaard’s specific

implementation of the strategy succeeds in the end. But it would be an
egregious case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater to give up on
the generic strategy on that slender basis. Furthermore, we should not
assume that all implementations of the generic constructivist strategy
must be Kantian—or, for that matter, even committed to an exclusively
rationalistic account of the epistemology of ethics. On the contrary, there are
any number of ways in which one might try to implement the generic con-
structivist strategy.
In current work, I’m trying to develop one such alternative implementation—
an implementation which, in its fully developed form, will draw in a variety
of ways upon the resources of Eastern meditative traditions. In extremely
cryptic outline, the implementation I have in mind may be summarized
this way:
Alternative Implementation of the Generic Constructivist Strategy

Step 1: Explain what is constitutively involved in being a valuer. (The concept
valuer is the one I find it most useful to start with.)
Step 2: Argue that no matter what the substantive content of a given valuer’s
evaluative standpoint on the world, if he is a finite valuer “in the business of
action,”12 then he faces a certain problem: what I will call the problem of vul-
nerability to unmitigated loss.
Step 3: Argue that the best solution to this problem is to seek out and occupy
what I call the standpoint of pure awareness. First, point to the standpoint of
pure awareness in a philosophically informative way by describing it as a “way
of seeing” that may be achieved, among other ways, by way of meditation
practice.13 Next, argue that the standpoint of pure awareness not only (i) pro-
vides a solution to the problem of vulnerability to unmitigated loss; but also
(ii) constitutes an accurate seeing of reality; and (iii) entails the adoption of
an ethical perspective.
In this paper, I will be focusing exclusively on Step 2 of the Alternative

Implementation, hoping to arrive at a clear statement of the relevant problem,
and taking a stab at arguing for the maximally ambitious claim that the prob-
lem in question is universal to finite valuers (or, more precisely, finite valuers
who are “in the business of action”). There won’t be time to say anything
about Step 1, except in the most cursory fashion required for Step 2.14 Nor
will there be time to say much of anything about Step 3. But as will become
clear, Step 2 turns out to be more than enough to deal with in one paper.
3. Four Clarifications of the Task of “Step 2”
As we just saw, the task of Step 2 of the generic constructivist strategy is to

identify some problem P that every valuer has by his own evaluative lights,
regardless of the particular substantive content of his set of values. Four clari-
fications are needed, however, before we begin the work of trying to identify
such a problem. The first two clarifications concern the sense of “having a
problem” that is relevant. The third clarification distinguishes between the
task of Step 2 and a related task with which it is easily confused. The fourth
clarification concerns argumentative strategy.
First, it is consistent with a valuer’s “having a problem” in the relevant sense
that she does not currently, and indeed may never, recognize the problem as
hers. We are all familiar with the idea that you can have a problem (e.g., a
drug problem or an anger problem) without realizing that you do, and the
problem identified by the constructivist is no different in this respect. The
constructivist’s claim will be that there is a problem that every valuer does
indeed have, by her own evaluative lights, when these evaluative lights are
combined with the non-normative facts. But that does not imply that any
given valuer will ever recognize or agree that she has the problem. There are
any number of ways in which this could happen: It could happen if she is
ignorant of, or incapable of recognizing, the relevant non-normative facts, or
if she is, for whatever reason, unable to see or draw out the logical and instru-
mental implications of her own deepest values. So it’s not an objection to the
claim that some proposed problem P is a universal problem of valuers merely
to point to actual valuers who don’t think they have the problem. It’s possible
they’re in denial or simply haven’t realized it yet.
Second, it is also consistent with a valuer’s “having a problem” in the rele-
vant sense that they already have, in their possession, a solution to it—maybe
a perfect and complete solution, or maybe just a makeshift and partial one.
For example, there is a perfectly good sense in which anyone reading this
paper has the “problem” of obtaining food, water, clothing, and shelter. These
are ongoing challenges we face in virtue of deep (in this case, biological) fea-
tures of ourselves. However, as the mere fact that we have time to do philoso-
phy shows, we are among those lucky human beings who happen to be in
possession of an ongoing solution to these biological problems. The universal
problem located by the constructivist, while emphatically not a biological
problem, is similar in the sense that it’s not an objection to the claim that
some proposed problem P is a universal problem of valuers merely to point
out that some valuers don’t have the problem because they’ve already solved
it. After all, the constructivist’s hoped-for ultimate conclusion is that a certain
26 Sharon Street
standpoint on the world—and in particular, an ethical standpoint, cashed out

in a certain way—provides a solution to the relevant problem. So it would
make sense that plenty of people already have the problem in question pretty
well under control.
Third, it is important not to confuse the task of Step 2 with another task
that one frequently sees undertaken in moral philosophy, namely the task of
locating a self-interested reason to adopt an ethical perspective. This is not
what we’re after here. We’re instead on the hunt for a quarry that one might
worry is even more elusive and improbable, namely a universal reason to
adopt an ethical perspective, where by “universal” I mean a reason that applies
to any and every valuer, by his own evaluative lights, no matter what the par-
ticular substantive content of his values. The upshot of this point is that when
seeking to execute Step 2 of the constructivist strategy, the valuers we need to
keep in mind aren’t just ones with mostly, or exclusively, self-interested val-
ues, though of course this is one important and salient category of case.
Rather, as best we can, we need to try to think about any and all valuers—
including ones who are deeply other-directed, altruistic, or indeed already in
possession of recognizably ethical values.
I emphasize this third point because the problem that I ultimately want to
focus on—the problem of vulnerability to unmitigated loss—is one that for
many of us (where by “us” I now mean human beings in general) is often
especially acutely felt and faced “from the standpoint of ” our ethical concerns
themselves—the ethical concerns that many or most of us in fact already
possess. Roughly speaking, the losses we fear and face are not just personal
losses; they are losses to others we care about, and potential losses to all of
humanity and animal life, such as those associated with climate change. This
observation might at first sound problematic for my implementation of the
constructivist strategy. After all, if an “ethical standpoint” is ultimately sup-
posed to be the solution to the problem in question, then isn’t it bad news if
people who already have ethical values are still, in many cases, suffering from
the problem? Here I can gesture only briefly at the reply. But the rough idea is
that the “solution” in question is not going to be just any old version of the
ethical standpoint, but rather a specific interpretation of it. In other words,
the solution is going to be the ethical standpoint cashed out in a certain way
(and in particular, in way that I think is especially clearly suggested in the
Upanishads and developed more fully in the Advaita Vedanta tradition,
though the same idea is present in many other literary, poetic, philosophical,
and religious traditions).15
A fourth and final point. The sheer ambition of the metaethical constructivist
strategy—that it aims to locate a problem that faces any valuer by his own
lights—means that a successful argument is going to need to operate on mul-
tiple levels. Here I’ll mention three. First, in order to make it even remotely
plausible that the proposed problem P is universal, one will need to try to
show how certain formal features of being a valuer inevitably generate the
problem. Arguments to this effect will proceed abstractly, seeking not to pre-
suppose anything about the particular substantive content of the evaluative
standpoints being talked about. I do some of that kind of work in this paper.
Second, one will have to consider salient apparent counterexamples—valuers
who seem not to have the problem—and other problematic cases as they
arise. I try to do some of that too, though not remotely enough is done here.16
Third and finally, to make it plausible that the problem in question has the
kind of teeth that it needs to provide every valuer with not only a reason, but
a strong reason, to seek out the alleged solution, it is important to speak to the
problem as it manifests for us human beings. That is what explains why, in
some parts of the paper, I speak freely about the general kinds of things “we”
want and dread and so forth, where the concerns mentioned are typical
human concerns. Part of the idea here is that in order to get a proper grip on
the nature of the problem and its strength, we cannot just consider it from a
purely formal, “outside” point of view. We also need to look at the problem in
the specific, substantive guise in which it presents to us. The hypothesis is that
even valuers with very different substantive concerns face a formally identical
problem, presented to them with all the force of whatever their own evalua-
tive standpoint on the world happens to be.
I’ll now start working to pinpoint the problem I have in mind. In the next
section, I’ll begin with a rough, intuitive statement of the problem and then
take a first stab at a philosophical account, noting a constitutive connection
between valuing and vulnerability. In the remainder of the paper, I’ll work to
develop the account in stages, moving through a series of five refinements
(Sections 5–9) on the way to a sharper statement of the problem. I conclude
in Section 10 with some speculative remarks about next steps.
4. First Stab: Valuing and Vulnerability
To start with a rough, intuitive statement of the problem: We are small, finite
beings in a very big universe that does not, in itself, care a whit about how
28 Sharon Street
things turn out for us. And yet, as valuers, we are invested in how things turn
out—in what happens to ourselves and the people and things we love—and
this makes us deeply vulnerable. Indeed, we are so vulnerable that a clear-
sighted awareness of that vulnerability can have a corrosive effect on our
ability to go forward, leading to crippling anxiety or depression, for example.
Our hopes and loves, conjoined with our finitude, make us vulnerable to
loss—indeed, in many cases guarantee it—and yet we don’t want to abandon
our hopes and loves. How best to cope with this situation? Is there a way of
coping that doesn’t involve some version or other of denial, distraction, hard-
ening, giving up, or numbing out? Or just white-knuckling it through and
hoping for the best? How should we live with the ever-present threat (and in
many cases guarantee, for those of us who never want to die or grow old or be
separated from the ones we love) of losses that we reasonably fear we might
not be able to bear?
To begin the process of developing this intuitive statement into a philo-
sophical account, let’s start with the following observation. However exactly
we characterize the attitude of “valuing,”17 it is plausible that constitutively
involved in the attitude of valuing is taking there to be either a gap, or at least
the potential for a gap, between the way the world is, as a matter of fact, on the
one hand, and the way it would be good or desirable for it to be, on the other.18
This is not meant to be a substantive or particularly illuminating point in
itself, but rather merely a conceptual observation—one that I hope strikes you
as obviously correct.
If the observation is correct, then—now shifting to put the same point in
terms of a “problem” that presents from the standpoint of the valuer herself—
one problem that is necessarily built into the standpoint of any valuer is the
problem of either a gap, or at least the potential for a gap, between the way the
world is, as a matter of fact, on the one hand, and the way it would be good or
desirable for the world to be, on the other.
In another shift that is not meant to introduce anything controversial, but
rather just help us talk about the problem as it presents to the point of view of
valuers themselves, I’ll now introduce a somewhat technical use of the term
loss. I’m going to use the term loss in the following sense: Whenever there
either already exists, or opens up, a “gap” between how things are and how,
from a given valuer’s point of view, it would be good or desirable for things to
be, and whenever that gap either persists, widens, or otherwise won’t go away
in spite of that valuer’s hopes, wishes, or efforts, then the existence of that gap
is what I’ll call a “loss” for that valuer.
In many contexts, this use of the term loss is entirely natural and intuitive.
If, for example, a beloved person, object, or way of life is lost or destroyed,
then this constitutes an opening up of a “gap” in the relevant sense, and is
also, obviously, a “loss” in an entirely standard sense of the word. Still, my
usage is significantly broader than everyday usage. In particular, we may dis-
tinguish between “loss” in the narrow sense that requires having had some-
thing in order to be able to lose it, and “loss” in a broader sense that doesn’t
require that one ever even possessed something in the first place in order to
suffer a loss. In this second, broader sense, failure, disappointment, and heart-
break over things never achieved, possessed, or realized count as losses. I use
the term loss in this second sense. Finally, in yet a further extension of the
ordinary use of the term, loss in the very general sense I have in mind needn’t
even involve objects (whether ever possessed or not) at all. All it need involve
is some gap or other between the way things play out in the world and the way
that the valuer in question thinks they should play out. Suppose, for example,
that a valuer holds that it is never acceptable to deny someone a job on the
basis of race. Next, suppose that somewhere in the world, someone denies
someone else a job on the basis of race. (The people involved may be unknown
to our valuer.) In my extended sense of “loss,” this event—in which the “is” of
the world fails to match up to our valuer’s “ought”—counts as a “loss” from
the evaluative standpoint of this valuer.19
Using the term loss in this broad sense, then, the rough idea is that to be a
valuer necessarily involves vulnerability to loss. And that vulnerability to loss
is, from the valuer’s point of view, a “problem.” We’re far from having ade-
quately pinpointed the problem that I want to isolate, but it’s a start.
5. First Refinement: The Possibility of Invulnerable Valuers
What I’ve said so far might seem to suggest that every conceivable valuer
faces the problem in question—roughly, the problem of vulnerability to loss.
But this is not so. To see this, we need to consider the possibility of what I’ll
call invulnerable valuers. There are at least two types of invulnerable valuers
we might imagine.20
The first type consists of valuers who are invulnerable in virtue of being
omnipotent. I won’t spend any significant time on this possibility, because
I take it to be clear that the universe does not contain omnipotent valuers.
Individual, conscious evaluative points of view on the world arise at
30 Sharon Street
particular places in space and time, due to particular sorts of configura-

tions of matter, and those configurations are continually changing and
impermanent. Any being with a conscious evaluative standpoint on the world
depends for its existence on a particular ongoing organization of matter,
which will eventually move out of existence. In more everyday terms, valuers
are finite; we are subject to illness, accident, aging, death, and more generally
circumstances beyond our control. (The connection here with points empha-
sized in the Buddhist tradition should be clear.)
The second type consists of valuers who are invulnerable in virtue of the
nature of their ends. As a far-fetched example, consider the case of a valuer
who values the fact that 2 + 2 = 4. Or, as a more realistic example, consider the
case of a valuer who values the fact that he already accomplished something—
writing the Great American Novel, say—a fact that the rest of time can do
nothing to change. Valuers who are invulnerable in virtue of the nature of
their ends are important to consider. Here are a couple of brief observations.
First off, notice that in order to be this type of invulnerable valuer, it is not
enough that one values the above sorts of things; it must also be the case that
this is all one values, and such cases are hard to imagine. Nevertheless, it
seems to me that we can imagine such valuers. They wouldn’t live very long,
since they wouldn’t be motivated to pursue the means necessary for living or
doing anything, but we can still imagine them. If this is right, then it’s not true
that every conceivable valuer is vulnerable to loss. The possibility of invulner-
able valuers shows that we’ve failed to find a universal problem facing valuers
as such, even when we set aside omnipotent valuers and focus on finite ones.
The next question is whether this puts a damper on the larger philosophical
aim that we are pursuing—namely, seeking to vindicate the objectivity of eth-
ics by way of the generic constructivist strategy. My claim is that it does not.
For notice that invulnerable valuers who are invulnerable in virtue of the
nature of their ends have no normative reasons for action.21 They might be
agents in the sense that they are capable of acting for normative reasons, but
due to their happy combination of values and the state of the world, there is
nothing at all such that they have normative reason to do it. For this reason,
invulnerable valuers are not part of the audience that a vindication of ethics
needs to address. If they take themselves to have reason to do anything—and
a fortiori to do something unethical—they are making a mistake on their
own terms (which, according to the constructivist metaethical view that I’m
assuming, are the only terms there are). As I’ll also put it, this subset of finite
valuers—those who are invulnerable in virtue of the nature of their ends—are
not “in the business of action.” Or rather—and this is what’s relevant to a
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as in the original. Some translations are poor or incorrect but have been retained as in the
original, except as noted in the list below.
The corrections listed in the Errata have been made except where the Errata entry is itself
incorrect. Other obvious printer or spelling errors have been corrected without note.
Archaic English and Scottish spellings have been retained as in the original.
The following substantive errors have been retained as in the original:
p. 13, maxim 7 - "not valid" should be "valid."
p. 18, maxim 5 - "Catella" should be "Catalla"; "A little whelp, (perhaps cattle)" should be
"Chattels."
p. 21, maxim 7 - "Condictio" should be "Conditio"; "The appointment of an action for a
certain day" should be "A condition."
p. 22, maxim 2 - "Condictio præcedens" should be "Conditio præcedens"; "The
appointment of an action preceding" should be "The fulfillment of a condition precedent."
p. 29, maxim 8 - "lex volentes" should be "lex nolentes"; "law draws those who are willing"
should be "law draws those who are unwilling."
p. 54, maxim 5 - The Errata indicate that "three witnesses may be brought" should be in
the translation, but that is not supported by the Latin, which is correct as is and says
nothing about witnesses.
p. 62, maxim 7 - "est alleganda" should be "non est allegenda"; "to be alleged" should be
"not to be alleged."
p. 80, maxim 3 - "casis" should be "cassis"; the translation should be "Law is the safest
helmet."
p. 139, maxim 2 - The Latin maxim should read, "Quemadmodum ad quæstionem facti
non respondent judices, ita ad quæstionem juris non respondent juratores"; the
translation should read, "As judges do not answer to questions of fact, jurors do not
answer to questions of law."
p. 151, maxim 3 - The Errata entry, "consensus," does not appear in the text of this
maxim.
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Normativity and Agency Themes From The Philosophy of Christine M Korsgaard Tamar Schapiro Editor Full Chapter

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Normativity and Agency: Themes from

the Philosophy of Christine M.

Normativity and Agency

Normativity and Agency

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

Editors’ Preface vii

Christine Korsgaard decided not to go to college—at least at first. She had

viii Editors ’ Preface

In the first stage, Korsgaard published interpretive papers on specific topics

philosophical—concerning the foundation of ethics itself—and yet also

xii Editors ’ Preface

Korsgaard, Christine M. Creating the Kingdom of Ends. Cambridge: Cambridge

Stephen Darwall is the Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy at Yale

xiv List of Contributors

Tamar Schapiro is Professor of Philosophy at MIT. Previously she was a faculty

The Horizons of Humanity 3

come to grips with transcendental freedom, timeless choices of an agent’s

Ultimately, I believe we will have to give up the ambition of showing morality

In The Sources of Normativity, Korsgaard presents Kantian morality as the

The Horizons of Humanity 5

obligations are grounded in an ur-identity (“humanity”) that we must all rec-

The Horizons of Humanity 7

count as something that I am really doing, or if such endorsement will count

person (e.g., their being manipulative, or cruel, or a Yankees fan.)). A rational

The Horizons of Humanity 9

The Horizons of Humanity 11

practice simply because the ideas of mutual disagreement, argument, advice,

The Horizons of Humanity 13

The Horizons of Humanity 15

although a principle of self-­constitution enables me to recognize myself in a

Ultimately, Korsgaard manages to establish Kantian morality only relative to a

The Horizons of Humanity 17

Yet while a medieval samurai or Neolithic hunter-­gatherer need not be

we would then have to consider whether we can imagine actually inhabiting

The Horizons of Humanity 19

The Holy Grail of secular analytic metaethics—or, better, the “Non-­Holy

perspective on the world—have concerns, and we’re alone in the universe

Finite Valuers and Vulnerability to Unmitigated Loss 23

2. The Generic Constructivist Strategy

Glossing over many important details,7 and drawing heavily on Korsgaard’s

Generic Constructivist Strategy for Vindicating the Objectivity of Ethics

We may summarize Korsgaard’s more specific, Kantian-­inspired implementa-

Korsgaard’s Kantian Implementation of the Generic Constructivist

For reasons I discuss elsewhere,11 I don’t think that Korsgaard’s specific

Alternative Implementation of the Generic Constructivist Strategy

In this paper, I will be focusing exclusively on Step 2 of the Alternative

Finite Valuers and Vulnerability to Unmitigated Loss 25

3. Four Clarifications of the Task of “Step 2”

As we just saw, the task of Step 2 of the generic constructivist strategy is to

standpoint on the world—and in particular, an ethical standpoint, cashed out

Finite Valuers and Vulnerability to Unmitigated Loss 27

4. First Stab: Valuing and Vulnerability

Finite Valuers and Vulnerability to Unmitigated Loss 29

5. First Refinement: The Possibility of Invulnerable Valuers

particular places in space and time, due to particular sorts of configura-

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

START: FULL LICENSE

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free

Section 1. General Terms of Use and

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other

1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is derived

Editors’ Preface vii

although a principle of self-constitution enables me to recognize myself in a

Yet while a medieval samurai or Neolithic hunter-gatherer need not be

The Holy Grail of secular analytic metaethics—or, better, the “Non-Holy

We may summarize Korsgaard’s more specific, Kantian-inspired implementa-