Christine M. Korsgaard, with G. A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams; edited by Onora O’Neill (1996), The Sources of Normativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press — DOI-10.1017/CBO9780511554476
On the citation. The brief’s details are right: Korsgaard, 1996, a book, with the 1992 Tanner Lectures as its earlier, free version.
Key takeaways
Registered from the contents, not a reading. Chapters, with Crossref’s pages:
- Introduction, by Onora O’Neill (xi–xvi)
- Prologue: Excellence and obligation: a very concise history of western metaphysics 387 BC to 1887 AD (1–6)
- 1 The normative question (7–48)
- 2 Reflective endorsement (49–89)
- 3 The authority of reflection (90–130)
- 4 The origin of value and the scope of obligation (131–166)
- 5 Reason, humanity, and the moral law, by G. A. Cohen (167–188)
- 6 Morality and identity, by Raymond Geuss (189–199)
- 7 Universality and the reflective self, by Thomas Nagel (200–209)
- 8 History, morality, and the test of reflection, by Bernard Williams (210–218)
- 9 Reply, by Korsgaard (219–258)
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-03 at the owner’s request, as the canonical citation for
Korsgaard’s theory of practical identity and normativity. It is Deferred
because it was not read. The Tanner Lectures (LIT-564, read in full)
stand in for it. This book extends them in the LIT scheme’s sense: the
lectures call it “a longer version” and it keeps their order. The fourth
chapter takes the title of the lectures’ last section, “The Origin of Value
and the Value of Life”, in a revised form. Korsgaard’s “Normative
Constitution of Agency” (LIT-587) cites the book’s Lecture 3 (pp.
90–130) for the claim that reflective self-consciousness places the agent “in
a kind of relationship of authority over herself”.
What the record lacks without a reading is the exchange: four commentaries, two of them (Geuss’s “Morality and identity” and Nagel’s “Universality and the reflective self”) on practical identity by their titles, and Korsgaard’s forty-page reply. Those are the chapters to read first, because NOTE-465’s open questions (whether practical identity can be specified without the agent’s participation, and how conflicting identities are resolved) are the commentators’ questions.
No anthology topic holds it, and it carries no instruction for machine-learning practice.