Ep. 371: Christine Korsgaard on Normativity (Part One)

This fall, I will be teaching a new online class, foundational texts in political philosophy. Learn more about it and express your interest at partiallyexaminedlife.com/class. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 371 is something like how are we subject to moral obligations? We're continuing to discuss Christine Korsgaard's The Sources of Normativity, now moving toward positive view in lectures three and four. The lectures were delivered in 1992, published in 1996. This is Mark Linsenmeyer, taken two to make a reason in Madison, Wisconsin. This is Seth Paskin intrinsically and not extrinsically motivated in Austin, Texas. This is Wes Ollman trying to figure out which of my impulses count as reasons in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is Dylan Casey just trying to make sense of the noise in Madison, Wisconsin. Alright. So we get the neo well, she attacks someone as a neo Kantian. So she's not a neo Kantian, but she says she is giving something she had described in the previous chapters that the outcome of this reflective endorsement view ends up being something like Kantianism where you are your own authority. And she actually even says that the very first set of views that she considered, the voluntarists like Hobbes that say, we only have obligations because there is a boss that commands things of us, that that's actually in some way correct. It's just that you are the boss. Your deliberating self is the boss of your acting self, and it's a legitimate authority. It can push sanctions on you, can make you feel guilty. And so, yeah, that's the way it works. And there's even though it's just me doing it to myself, there's still because we're doing it with reasons which are inherently public. Right? He gives us she gives us a Wittgenstein private language argument sort of thing for why when you're giving reasons to yourself, you're not just doing something very solipsistic. This really is invoking the third person, the public, to command yourself. And the thing that she's adding to Kantianism is something about identities, that you have certain identities among which is your identity as a human being. And there are obligations that go with those identities. There are things those identities rule out that were you to do this thing, you would no longer be that kind of creature. And we value our identities. We need them. So that's how we boss ourselves around as you say, are you an American citizen? Are you a member of your family? Well, then you better be faithful to your country, to your family, to humanity at large. The one about humanity at large underlies all the rest of them. So, yeah, we are committed to these identities, and therefore, we have to obey our own commands. Yeah. I want to rephrase what you just said …