Christine M. Korsgaard (1992), “The Sources of Normativity”, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, 16 and 17 November 1992; printed in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values 15 (1994), pp. 19–112 — https://tannerlectures.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/korsgaard94.pdf
Key takeaways
- The normative question is first-personal. It is asked “in the heat of action” by someone whose confidence has been shaken, and it asks “what justifies the claims that morality makes on us”. Substantive realism “refuses to answer” it: belief in intrinsically normative entities rests on the very confidence the question puts in doubt. Normative concepts exist “because human beings have normative problems”.
- Practical identity is the source of reasons and obligations. Reflection opens a gap between impulse and action, so “the reflective mind cannot settle for perception and desire” and “needs a reason”. Choosing requires identifying with a principle, and so a “conception of your practical identity”: “a description under which you value yourself, a description under which you find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking”. “Your reasons express your identity, your nature; your obligations spring from what that identity forbids.” Violating the identities most important to you is “to lose your integrity and so your identity”.
- From any identity to humanity, and to others. Because you must value some practical identity in order to act at all, you must value your humanity, the source of all your reasons. Reasons are public, like meanings on Wittgenstein’s private-language argument: “it takes two to make a reason”, and in calling out your name, “I have obligated you”. Pain is “the unreflective rejection of a threat to your identity”, so animals can obligate us too.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-03 at the owner’s request, as the read substitute for The Sources of Normativity (1996, LIT-599). The book is closed, and is filed Deferred beside this as the canonical citation. The lectures are the book’s first version: the book calls itself the “longer version” and adds the commentaries of Cohen, Geuss, Nagel and Williams and Korsgaard’s reply. The book’s chapter titles (Crossref) follow the lectures’ sequence, so the argument read here is the argument the book develops.
Tags. ethics comes first, because the lectures are a metaethics: an
account of what makes moral claims normative. self-governance, agency
and personhood follow the owner’s distinction. Self-governance is because
autonomy, being “a law to yourself”, is the source of obligation. Agency is
because the argument runs from the structure of reflective choice.
Personhood is because practical identity, what makes someone the person
they are for practical purposes, does the work, and Korsgaard ties integrity
to being “a person at all”.
Where it bears on the record:
- Frankfurt and the regress (THEORY-029). Korsgaard borrows Frankfurt’s “wanton” and argues that a person “cannot be like that”: someone who acts like a wanton “must be treating the desire of the moment as a reason”, and that commitment “counts as a second-order volition” (Lecture III, note 4). So every reflective agent has a law, and which one depends on how she conceives her identity. This is a stopping point specified by the structure of reflection rather than by an attitude’s order. Whether it escapes Velleman’s dilemma is what THEORY-029 asks, and the NOTE takes it up.
- Self-constitution (LIT-587, LIT-597). Practical identity here becomes self-constitution in her later work. “The Normative Constitution of Agency” cites these lectures’ Lecture 3, in its book form, for the claim that self-consciousness puts the agent in “a kind of relationship of authority over herself”.
- Personal identity. The lectures cite her “Personal Identity and the Unity of Agency: A Kantian Response to Parfit” (1989) for the point that “the acting self cannot coherently be taken to exist just at a particular moment”. That paper is not in the record: the author’s Harvard deposit sits behind a bot challenge. It is the direct link between Korsgaard and Parfit’s reductionism (LIT-447, LIT-469).
- Frankfurt’s Tanner Lectures (LIT-293) answer the same question from the side of caring and love. Korsgaard’s are the Kantian answer.
No anthology topic holds it, and it carries no instruction for machine-learning practice.