The Sources of Normativity

Introduction

The book grew out of Christine Korsgaard’s Tanner Lectures at Cambridge in 1992 and was published in 1996 together with replies by G. A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams. Korsgaard poses the “normative question”: what justifies the claims morality makes on us, from the standpoint of someone deciding what to do? She examines voluntarism, realism and reflective endorsement, then defends a Kantian answer. Because we are reflective, we must act for reasons, and reasons depend on a practical identity – a description under which we value ourselves; valuing any such identity commits us to valuing our humanity as such, and therefore that of others. The book is a central text of contemporary Kantian constructivism.

Connections

Builds on

• Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals1785 · Immanuel Kant

Taken up in

• Self-Constitution2009 · Christine Korsgaard

More works by Christine Korsgaard

• 2009Self-Constitution