Practical identity and the constitution of agency

Journal of Value Inquiry 38 (1):49-59 (2004)
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Abstract

In this paper I argue that Christine Korsgaard’s account of the normativity of practical reasons cannot meet her own justificatory criteria, specifically the demand that an answer to the normative question be successfully addressed in the first person. On this point her position is crucially ambiguous. I argue that Korsgaard’s demand that the authority of norms be justified by appeal to an agent’s practical identity leads her to conflate psychological facts about agents with the norms that establish the authority of those psychological dispositions. Her ambition to make reasons genuinely public is undermined by the psychologism of her account.

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Emer O'Hagan
University of Saskatchewan

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References found in this work

The Normativity of Instrumental Reason.Christine M. Korsgaard - 1997 - In Garrett Cullity & Berys Gaut (eds.), Ethics and Practical Reason. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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