Christine M. Korsgaard (2009), Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity, Oxford: Oxford University Press — DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199552795.001.0001
On the citation. The brief’s details are right: Korsgaard, 2009, a book. The record’s LIT-468, “The Constitution of Selves”, is not Korsgaard’s. It is Schechtman’s 1996 narrative account of personal identity, filed Deferred.
Key takeaways
Registered from the contents and from what a read chapter says of it, not a reading.
- Chapters, with Crossref’s pages: 1 Agency and Identity (1–26); 2 The Metaphysics of Normativity (27–44); 3 Formal and Substantive Principles of Reason (45–58); 4 Practical Reason and the Unity of the Will (59–80); 5 Autonomy and Efficacy (81–108); 6 Expulsion from the Garden: The Transition to Humanity (109–132); 7 The Constitutional Model (133–158); 8 Defective Action (159–176); 9 Integrity and Interaction (177–206); 10 How to be a Person (207–214).
- As “The Normative Constitution of Agency” (LIT-587) reports the book: we “constitute our own agency or activity by adopting certain laws to govern our actions” (§§1.4, 4.3, 5.1). Chapter 6 says that the self-consciousness of rational animals turns their attitudes into “a heap” that must be unified. §7.2.11 gives the Spartan example: an attack counts as an act of Sparta only if it is ordered by Sparta’s rulers.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-03 at the owner’s request, as the canonical statement of
self-constitution. It is Deferred because it was not read.
LIT-587 (read in full) is the read substitute, and extends it in the
LIT scheme’s sense. The chapter restates the book’s argument and cites its
sections for each step. The owner’s brief asked whether the record’s LIT-468
was this book. It is not: LIT-468 is Schechtman’s narrative view, the other
“constitution” view of the self. Read together they give two accounts in
which persons make themselves: by narrative (Schechtman) and by
law-governed choice (Korsgaard).
personhood is carried because the book’s last chapter is “How to be a
Person”, and because, as the Tanner Lectures (LIT-564) already argue,
integrity in the sense of being one is what makes someone “a person at all”.
ethics is carried because the book’s thesis is that good action is action
that constitutes its agent.
No anthology topic holds it, and it carries no instruction for machine-learning practice.