This book, a compilation of Christine Korsgaard's 1996 Tanner Lectures,* was one of my selected core readings for an excruciatingly difficult philosophy mini-dissertation which I completed last week. It was the most intellectually strenuous thing I've ever worked on, but was also really interesting, so despite having handed in the final draft last Wednesday, I've still got my student library card until June 13th so am making the most of it by reading through the texts more thoroughly - it's an important topic and I want to actually understand it somewhat! The book contains four lectures by Korsgaard herself, then critical replies by G.A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel, and Bernard Williams, and finally a reply to these replies from Korsgaard again. I only skimmed these reply bits because the bulk of the original idea material is found in the main section and to be honest I've read far too much academic philosophy in the last two months to plough through an extra 92 pages of stuff that didn't fascinate me.
Anyway, sorry, what's it about? To explain it to someone already familiar with moral philosophy and practical reason would be superfluous as the lectures are quite short and available free online (see link at bottom); to explain it to someone not already quite closely familiar with these topics would be an endeavour far beyond the capacity of time I want to spend on this post. But I'll try, and if it sounds interesting, give it a read below.
Normativity is that realm of reality comprised of oughts, shoulds, goods, rights, and so on; conceptual, social, ethical, psychological and philosophical structures that lend purpose and direction to our lives as rational will-directed beings. We're more than mere biological animals following instincts, we have the capability to step back in reflection from our activities and assess our desires, reasons that apply to actions that we could take in given circumstances, and so on, and we assert our self-constituted identity by committing our will to endorsing any of these given reasons for action and acting accordingly. But where do these 'reasons' come from? Korsgaard presents the four main cases that have emerged most plausibly throughout the history of moral philosophy: voluntarism (we are obligated by a legislator whose authority in relationship to us can prompt us to follow their commands), realism (we are obligated by the embeddedness-in-reality of values that give us reasons to act in particular ways), reflective endorsement (we are obligated to act by ourselves when we rationally assess external conditions' relation to our own mental activity to see what we consider would be good for us to do), and Kantian rational autonomy - which she argues emerges as a synthesis of the true aspects of the other three. Her arguments for this are extensive, deep, and compelling. Once having established her slightly-modified interpretation of Kant's model, she discusses how we may consider this to apply and function with our perception of values, our intrinsic value of human and animal life, our rational faculties, and our constitution of ourselves as agents with integrity in our identities based on our conduct - all very interesting and too complex for me to summarise.
I've literally read so many chapters and articles about practical reason and moral psychology recently. It was quite refreshing to sit down and go directly through one book on the topic, especially one that as far as I can see is pretty much right on all points as this one. I feel like I'm actually learning helpful applicable things about what goodness and persons are from philosophy, which does happen sometimes. As I said, this was my last ever essay, so I'm no longer a student of the subject, which is a shame, but my interest will live on - I'll be one of those weird postgrads who takes books from someone else's course out of the library for personal interest reading. But yeh, Christine Korsgaard is a top philosopher, and if my hashed attempt to explain what this book is about hasn't completely put you off, particularly if you're already interested in theories of why people do what they do and how we could rationalise it in a good coherent way, check out these fantastic lectures from the pdf link below.
* The lectures themselves, effectively comprising the entirety of the book, are available for free online here:
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