Person:

Korsgaard, Christine

In recent years a number of biologists, anthropologists, and animal scientists have tried to explain the biological evolution of morality, and claim to have found the rudiments of morality in the altruistic or cooperative behavior of our nearest nonhuman relatives. In this paper, I argue that there is one feature of morality to which these accounts do not pay adequate attention: normative self-government, the capacity to be motivated to do something by the thought that you ought to do it. This is a feature of the (form) of moral motivation rather than merely of its (content), one that I believe we do not share with nonrational animals. Unlike his more recent followers, Darwin, drawing on the sentimentalist tradition in moral philosophy, did try to explain how this capacity evolved. I explain Darwin’s account and the way it drew on sentimentalist philosophy, and argue that such accounts are unsatisfactory. Drawing on the more radical accounts of the evolution of morality found in thinkers like Nietzsche and Freud, I speculate that moral motivation may have originated with the internalization of the dominance instincts, and sketch the beginnings of the path that the development of reason in both its theoretical and practical employments might have followed.

In response to Arroyo, I explain my position on the concept of “natural goodness” and how my use of that concept compares to that of Geach and Foot. An Aristotelian or functional notion of goodness provides the material for Kantian endorsement in a theory of value that avoids a metaphysical commitment to intrinsic values. In response to Cummiskey, I review reasons for thinking Kantianism and consequentialism incompatible, especially those objections to aggregation that arise from the notion of the natural good previously described. In response to Moland, I explain why I think Hegelian worries about the supposed emptiness of the Kantian self do not apply to my account. And in response to both Moland and Bird-Pollan, I argue that, contrary to the view of some Hegelians, the intersubjective normativity of reason is not something developed through actual social relations; rather, it is something essential to an individual's relations with himself or herself. I want to begin by thanking Christopher Arroyo, David Cummiskey, Lydia Moland, and Stefan Bird-Pollan for their interesting and provocative comments in this symposium. There's more in their papers than I can possibly respond to in a reasonable space, so I'm just going to pick and choose. “The Origin of the Good and Our Animal Nature” spells out some of my current thinking on the good, so a summary of that paper will put me in a position to begin by addressing some of Arroyo's and Cummiskey's points.

This chapter argues that the relation of being good-for someone is prior to the property of being good. After discussing the views of Moore, Geach, Foot, and Rawls, the author argues that there are final goods because there are conscious animals. Hedonists also believe this, but think of goodness as an intrinsic property of certain conscious states—pleasant ones. This is because they mistake pleasure for sensation and so for an object of experience. After advancing an alternative conception of pleasure as a relational state of welcoming, the author argues that animals experience the things that contribute to their well-functioning, the things that are good-for them, as welcome and so as finally good. Judgements of final goodness involve taking up the animal's own point of view and are therefore essentially sympathetic. These ideas support a constructivist account of absolute goodness: something absolutely good must be a shared good, something good-for all concerned.

This chapter discusses socially dependent attributes by providing an example of appreciating two different buildings. It comments on the idea of philosophising about value as it can perhaps be applied to a number of terms including valuable objects like operas and flowers, and the properties of virtue such as inventiveness and symmetry in architecture can be deemed as different values. It also considers object existence and its correlation to pluralist views with reference from Plato and Aristotle’s ‘Metaphysics’. It presents normative ideas and examines Immanuel Kant’s argument that the fundamental characteristic of humanity is the power to set ends. In relation to the author’s socially dependent values, this chapter argues that recognising cultural values is not a requirement in order to be appreciated and concludes that humanity is the ultimate source of value.

In some recent papers I have been arguing that the concept ‘good-for’ is prior to the concept of ‘good’ (in the sense in which final ends are good), and exploring the implications of that claim. One of those implications is that everything that is good is good for someone. That implication seems to fall afoul of our intuitions about certain cases, such as the intuition that a world full of happy people and animals is better than a world full of miserable ones, even if the people and animals are different in the two cases, so that there is no one for whom the second world is better. Such cases tempt people to think that there must be impersonal goods, and that what it means to say that something is good for you is that you are the one who ‘has’ some impersonal good. In this paper, I argue that if we approach things in this way, it is impossible to say what the ‘having’ consists of, what relation it names. This leads me to a discussion of various things we do mean by saying that something is good for someone, how they are related to each other, and what sorts of entities can ‘have a good’. Finally, I explain why we think that a world full of happy people and animals is better than a world full of miserable ones, even if the people and animals are different in the two cases.