Work · Political Philosophy & Ethics (20th–21st c.)
Self-Constitution
To act at all is to make oneself a unified agent – and that already binds one to morality.
Introduction
Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity is based on the John Locke Lectures that Korsgaard gave at Oxford in 2002. She argues that action is the activity by which a person makes herself into an agent: to act is to unify oneself under principles, so that the movement can be ascribed to the person as a whole and not to some impulse within her. The categorical and hypothetical imperatives are in this sense constitutive principles of action, and bad action is defective action. Korsgaard draws on Plato’s Republic, where justice is the unity of the soul, as much as on Kant. Critics ask whether this “constitutivism” can explain how bad action is possible at all.
Connections
Builds on
- The Sources of Normativity1996 · Christine Korsgaard
More works by Christine Korsgaard
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