Valuing Our Humanity

Abstract

In the past Christine Korsgaard has argued that when Kant claims we value our humanity as an end in itself, he means that we take the value of the power of rational choice to be the condition of the value of our ends, and therefore to be unconditional. Here she reexamines these arguments by raising questions about the nature of valuing. She argues that valuing our moral nature does not imply thinking ourselves superior to non-moral creatures. She identifies two different ways of valuing ourselves that are at work in Kant’s arguments, regarding humanity as a valuable property and as the source of normative standing. She argues that we value ourselves as ends both in the sense of attributing normative standing to ourselves and in the sense that we regard our ends as good because they are good for us, a sense which extends to the other animals.