Which unity, and which word
This is an account in ethics, of where obligation comes from, and it is about self-governance: being “a law to yourself”. “Practical identity” is not personal identity in the sense of what makes someone the same person over time. It is “not a theoretical one, a view about what as a matter of inescapable scientific fact you are” (LIT-564, p. 83). It does bear on personhood, since Korsgaard ties living up to one’s standards to integrity, “what makes him a person at all” (p. 84). It is not a claim about the self as subject, and not about narrative unity: a practical identity is a role or standing description (“a woman or a man, an adherent of a certain religion … someone’s friend”), not a story.
Source
- Korsgaard (1992), LIT-564, the Tanner Lectures, read in full in NOTE-465. Page references are to the printed numbering in the PDF’s running heads.
- Korsgaard (2014), LIT-587, read in NOTE-455, for the later statement that the content of maxims chosen under the formal norms constitutes practical identity.
What was actually shown
From reflection to identity. “The reflective mind cannot settle for perception and desire”; it “needs a reason” (p. 79). Choosing requires identifying with a principle, and so a conception of one’s 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” (p. 83). “For the average person there will be a jumble of such conceptions” (p. 83). “Your reasons express your identity, your nature; your obligations spring from what that identity forbids” (p. 84).
Obligation as reflective rejection. The identities most important to an agent give unconditional obligations, because to violate them “is to lose your integrity and so your identity”, “to be for all practical purposes dead or worse than dead” (p. 84). “If reasons arise from reflective endorsement, then obligation arises from reflective rejection” (p. 85). Lecture III ends with the formula: “Obligation is the reflective rejection of a threat to your identity. Pain is the unreflective rejection of a threat to your identity” (p. 106).
To morality, and only by one route. The argument so far “is formal, and in one sense empty”: it does not say which law an agent should be to herself, “so moral obligation is not yet on the table” (p. 85). The step to morality is Kant’s argument for the Formula of Humanity, recast. Since a human being “needs a practical conception of her own identity” in order to act at all, and you are such an animal, “you must endorse your own humanity if you are to act at all”, and “Enlightenment morality is true” (pp. 92–93). Conflicts between moral and less fundamental identities are left open: the more fundamental laws need not “always trump” the others (p. 92, n. 16).
So the lectures argue both halves of the title. They flag the first step, from “must have a law” to “must have an identity”, by appeal to how deliberation seems from inside, and they summarise the second from her paper “Kant’s Formula of Humanity” (NOTE-465, Limitations). “What I say will necessarily be sketchy, and sketchily argued” (p. 78).
What this does not say
- It does not say every obligation is moral. Most obligations, on the account, come from contingent identities (a psychiatrist’s confidentiality, p. 84) and are as relative as those identities. Only the humanity step gives obligations every agent has.
- It does not say how conflicts between identities are resolved. Note 16 leaves that open, and the book’s reply is the next place to look.
- It does not say identities are chosen freely or alike. Human identity “has been differently constituted in different social worlds” (p. 89). How an identity was acquired is not discussed.
- It does not rest on the argument about animals. The claim that pain is the unreflective rejection of a threat to identity, so that animals can obligate us (pp. 101–106), is sketched, by its author’s account, and this theory does not rest on it.
Connections
- Frankfurt’s caring (LIT-293, NOTE-264). Frankfurt’s Tanner Lectures
answer the same normative question from the will rather than from
reflection. Love is “strictly volitional”, not based on reasons, and is
“the only legitimate authority” for our normative convictions; morality’s
authority is not the authority of reason, and moral necessity is the
universal volitional necessities of human nature, projected (NOTE-264, C9,
C10, C14–C15). The two accounts cannot both be right about the source:
for Korsgaard, valuing humanity is required by the structure of reflective
choice; for Frankfurt, nothing is important except as cared about, and
what everyone cares about is a fact about human volition. No THEORY in the
record states Frankfurt’s account, so no
rivalsis declared. If one is filed, it should be. Korsgaard borrows Frankfurt’s “wanton” and argues that a reflective person “cannot be like that”: acting on the desire of the moment treats it as a reason, and that commitment “counts as a second-order volition” (p. 82, n. 4). - THEORY-029 (the regress). The wanton argument makes every reflective agent’s action express some law, a stopping point specified by the structure of reflection rather than by an attitude’s order. But which identity counts as one’s own is still how she conceives herself, and practical identity is chosen or constituted, so it looks like the dilemma’s second horn. THEORY-029’s Connections take this up.
- THEORY-065 (unity of agency by normative constitution) is the 2014 form of the same view. There, practical identity is what the content of chosen maxims makes one; here, it is the source of reasons and obligations.
- The SDT accounts (THEORY-054, THEORY-047). SDT’s integrated regulation is a value “brought into congruence with one’s other values and needs”, and some values are said to be “not integrateable” (THEORY-054). That is a descriptive counterpart of an obligation springing from what one’s identity forbids, with no claim about normativity. SDT’s claim that the conditions of acquisition fix how a value is held (THEORY-047) addresses the question these lectures leave open.