Person:

Korsgaard, Christine

Kant condemned revolution as a violation of a duty of justice, yet was a supporter of the French Revolution. This chapter defends Kant's view that revolution is a violation of a duty of justice by appeal to the fact that in order to be just, revolution would have to accord with the general will, and the government speaks for the general will. The chapter then explains Kant's paradoxical attitude by appeal to the distinction between duties of justice and duties of virtue. The duties of justice require us to obey the powers that be, because only in the political state can human rights and freedom be realized. But the virtue of justice requires us to make human rights our end. When a political society itself violates human rights, the virtue of justice is turned against itself, and the person who makes human rights his end may be driven to take the law into his own hands.

According to Plato and Aristotle, a virtue is a quality that makes you good at performing your function. Aristotle thinks that the human function is rational activity. This chapter asks how the moral virtues could contribute to rational activity. It distinguishes five different answers suggested by the text of the Nicomachean Ethics, and examines their merits and demerits. Combining the most promising of them, it argues that in Aristotle's theory, rationality is a potential that is actualized by the acquisition of the virtues. By providing correct evaluative perceptions, the moral virtues bring the soul into a transformed condition in which appetites and passions are caused by rational considerations.

This introductory chapter summarizes the themes of the book. It explains the general idea of self-constitution: that we constitute our agency by choosing our actions in accordance with the principles of practical reason. It sketches the main types of principles of practical reason, and raises some problems about the concept of rational prudence. It advances a theory of the normativity of rational principles based on the idea that they are constitutive standards of action. It discusses the role of the idea of virtue within ethical theory, and the possibility of conjoining an Aristotelian theory of virtue with Kant's ethics. It raises issues about the connection between individual agency and the agency of the state, explains the connection between Hume's conception of agency and Kant and Aristotle's, and discusses the methodological idea of constructivism.

Aristotle believes that an agent lacks virtue unless she enjoys the performance of virtuous actions, while Kant claims that the person who does her duty despite contrary inclinations exhibits a moral worth that the person who acts from inclination lacks. Despite these differences, this chapter argues that Aristotle and Kant share a distinctive view of the object of human choice and locus of moral value: that what we choose, and what has moral value, are not mere acts, but actions: acts done for the sake of ends. Morally good actions embody a kind of intrinsic value that inspires us to do them from duty (in Kant) or for the sake of the noble (in Aristotle). The chapter traces the difference in their attitudes about doing one's duty with pleasure to a difference in their attitudes towards pleasure itself: Aristotle sees it as a perception of the good, while Kant thinks of it as mere feeling.

In Nicomachean Ethics 1.7, Aristotle claims that to discover the human good we must identify the function of a human being. He argues that the human function is rational activity. Our good is therefore rational activity performed well, which Aristotle takes to mean in accordance with virtue. This argument has been criticized at almost every point. This chapter defends Aristotle's argument from these criticisms. Drawing on the account of form and matter in Aristotle's Metaphysics, it argues that “function” does not mean purpose but rather a way of functioning — how a thing does what it does. The way human beings do things is by making rational choices. The human good or happiness is not merely a result of rational choice, but consists in it, because a rational action or activity is one whose principle expresses the agent's conception of what is worth doing for the sake of what.