ohagan - practical reason and normative agency

5/24/2018 OHagan - Practical Reason and Normative Agency

1/1

49The Journal of Value Inquiry38: 4959, 2004.C 2004Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Practical Identity and the Constitution of Agency

EMER OHAGANDepartment of Philosophy, University of Saskatchewan, 9 Campus Drive,

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7N 5A5, Canada; e-mail: [email protected]

Why do what we have reason to do? This question expresses a thought had

by most of us at one time or another, a thought most likely to arise when the

prospect of living up to our reasons seems onerous or overwhelming. Having

judged that we ought to do the selfless act and forego some pleasure, we may

be led to question the legislative force of our own judgments. Of course,

we may not be so led. Most often we do not question our own judgments

in this way. Having judged that we ought to give some change to a beggar

instead of stopping at the bakery for a treat, we are likely to do just that. We

do not pause, coins in hand, to consider just how it is that a rational act of

willing is depriving us of a tasty baked good. Still, we might. The normative

question, Why do what we have reason to do? challenges us to consider

how reasons for action rationally bind agents. An answer to this question will

tell us something important about the nature of reasons for action.Proponents of constitutive theories of the normative authority of reasons

for action offer a promising approach to this sort of meta-ethical question by

arguing that the normative authority of reasons is found within the practice of

reasoning itself. As reasoners, we are bound by rational standards because to

engage in reasoning just is to be accountable to rational standards. Agents,

as opposed to creatures unable to form beliefs and intentions and to act upon

them, just are those upon whom rationality makes demands. A constitutive

view of the authority of reason has the potential to provide a positive answer

to the normative question. Agents are bound by reasons because they are

reasoners. It is constitutive of agency that agents are bound by reasons. The

question of which reasons are good or overriding reasons is a separate issueto be settled by moral discussion, not by meta-theory.

There are a number of reasons that a constitutive account of the norma-

tivity of practical reasons is promising. A constitutive account makes the

normativity of moral norms unmysterious because it would have us treat

them as of a piece with the authority of norms of theoretical reasoning. As

well, it makes reasons conceptually public in the sense that their binding-

ness is not tied to particular, contingent facts about agents, but of facts con-

stitutive of agency generally. Christine Korsgaards reflective endorsement

model of practical reasons is perhaps the most prominent exemplar of a recent


2/1

50 EMER OHAGAN

constitutive argument. Part of the appeal of Korsgaards position is its appar-

ent usefulness in explaining the reality of moral norms in a metaphysically

non-mysterious and psychologically compelling way. Using Korsgaards ver-

sion of the constitutive argument, we may see both that the constitutive turn

is not consistent with taking reasons to arise out of psychological operations

of particular agents and that a constitutive view of agency needs to ground

reasons in generic facts about practical agency.

1. The Normative Question

Korsgaard proceeds by addressing a now well-known normative question.

Explanatory and justificatory features of moral theories serve different roles.

Explanatory features may be used to pick out moral actions as defined by a

theory. Justificatory features may be used to explain how we are bound by

the dictates of moral theories. To ask the normative question is to ask how

reasons for belief become reasons for action. Korsgaard puts it this way:

The normative question is a first-person question that arises for the moral

agent who must actually do what morality says. When you want to know

what a philosophers theory of normativity is, you must place yourself in

the position of anagenton whom morality is making a difficult claim. You

then ask the philosopher: must I really do this? Why must I do it? And his

answer is his answer to the normative question.1

Korsgaard goes on to set an unusually high standard of justification. An

answer to the normative question must actually allow us to succeed in address-

ing someone in the first person position, an agent who is considering whether

he ought to do what he believes morality tells him to do. Moreover, the an-

swer must appeal to our sense of our identity. Moral judgments are peculiar

among normative judgments because they are connected with our identities in

a unique way. People are willing to die to defend moral truths and this fact is

relevant to their justification. The criteria here are crucial to Korsgaards view

of justification though they are ambiguous. The demand that an answer to the

normative question be successfully addressed to the first person is ambiguousbetween two ways of understanding success, success in persuading an agent

of her obligation, as a matter of fact and success in presenting the agent with a

demonstration of her obligation whether or not the agent is thereby persuaded.

This ambiguity originates in the role that practical identity plays in

Korsgaards account of the authority of reasons. Practical identity can be

understood as the particular conditions of a persons identity, but also in the

more generic sense in which identity is a feature of personhood. Korsgaards

explanation of the authority of practical reasons shifts between an appeal to

practical identity as particular, psychological facts and practical identity as


3/1

PRACTICAL IDENTITY AND THE CONSTITUTION OF AGENCY 51

generic features of agency that incur public commitments to action; only the

generic interpretation is consistent with a constitutive account of normativity.

Korsgaard employs different and incompatible conceptions of justification.

Her demand that the justification of a moral norm be successfully addressed

to an agent in the first person is misleading and ought to be abandoned. The

justification of moral norms cannot be explained by appeal to a description

of the origin of particular psychological facts about an agent. An argument

to the effect that reasons are constitutive of agency must tie the authority of

reasons to generic features of practical reasoning, features that underwrite

commitments made in practice. Merely contingent and particular features of

agency do not lie deep enough to offer a justificatory ground for practical

norms. However, while truly general features of agency may succeed, they

are incompatible with Korsgaards unusually high first person standards for

justification of normative authority.

2. Korsgaards Answer to the Normative Question

According to Korsgaard, our reasons are normative for us because we have

reflectively endorsed them. Because we experience a gap between inclination

and reflective response that other animals do not, our lives possess a normative

dimension which the lives of non-human animals lack. Dispositions to act

become reasons to act when, through reflection, we confer authority on these

dispositions.Because, on Korsgaards view, reasons are created not discovered, their

authority is traceable to the manner in which they are formed. Reflective

endorsement is not arbitrary self-authorization because endorsements are law-

giving acts of willing. The will is a form of causality, and as such requires

its own form of law: it cannot be conceived as acting and choosing for no

reason.2 But since the will is also free, its law cannot be imposed from the

outside. According to Korsgaard, the law of the will is just the principle from

which we may allow it to make its own laws, as in the principle Act only

on maxims which we could believe at the same time, will to be universal

laws. The only constraint on maxim formation is that it has the form of a

law. The categorical imperative does not impose external constraints on thefree will, but describes the operation of a free will.3 Reflective endorsement

allows us to explain how we come to have reasons for action. It is due to

our reflective nature that we give ourselves laws; our autonomy is the source

of their normativity. The test of reflective endorsement is the test used by

actual moral agents to establish the normativity of all their particular motives

and inclinations. So the reflective endorsement test is not merely a way of

justifying morality.It is morality itself.4

Korsgaard fleshes out her thesis by explaining that while reflective endorse-

ment is the source of reasons, practical identity is the source of obligation.


4/1

52 EMER OHAGAN

Practical identities and reasons are related in important ways. Reasons are not

just abstract rules, they are meaningful expressions of our values and char-

acters. Practical identity is 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.5 Our self-conceptions are possible because of the

reflective capacities that give rise to our reasons. We have obligations because

we have personal identities in light of which particular courses of action ap-

pear to us forbidden. The thought I could not live with myself if I did that

expresses the rejection of a possible course of action as incompatible with

commitments that inform our self-conceptions. According to Korsgaard, our

reasons are normative forus both because we have conferred authority on them

through reflective endorsement and because our self-conceptions lead us, even

compel us, to act in accordance with them to maintain a unified sense of self.

Korsgaards contention that obligation always takes the form of a reaction

against the threat of a loss of identity provokes a question about the source of

obligation.6 Is the bindingness of reasons a result of an actual threat to identity,

in the form of conflict in an agents self-chosen ends, or is the experience of

threatened identity an indicator or symptom of the presence of an obligation,

but not its source? In her writings, Korsgaard suggests two different answers

that cannot be brought together into a single theory. One answer takes the

following form. Because obligation is manifest in a threatened identity, the

source of its normativity is a psychological state, a threatened self-conception.

This would make obligation psychologically real and unavoidable in thefirst person but, at best, constitutive of a contingent self-conception, not

intersubjectively binding norms. The mere fact that a propositional content

has been reflectively endorsed cannot serve as the explanation of the authority

of the reason without making what a person has reason to do depend solely on

the movement of her will. This would make Korsgaard into an instrumentalist

and would settle the question of what any person has a reason to do by way

of a psychological operation. Reflective endorsement would serve roughly

same role that identification with our desire serves in Harry Frankfurts

account of willing. But this is an inadequate account of reasons precisely

because we cannot answer that question simply by revealing facts about that

persons psychology. In any case Korsgaard explicitly rejects such a view.The second answer is that the source of normativity is practical identity in

the generic sense. On this account psychological facts about an agent will play

no role in an explanation of the authority of reasons; it will be our capacity

as reason givers and takers, not psychological facts about us that serve as

the source of normative authority. If the authority of reason is constitutive

of agency in the generic sense, then the justification of moral norms need

not address them as particular individuals. However, the justification will

not address them in the first person and so fails to meet the conditions for

justification that Korsgaard has deemed necessary.


5/1


This tension is fatal to Korsgaards account. Insofar as she makes the bind-

ing force of reasons depend on psychological operations in us rather than on

the intersubjective web of inferential commitments that gives them authority,

Korsgaards own constitutive argument fails. By making private, first per-

son reasons conceptually prior to public, intersubjective reasons, Korsgaard

undermines her own commitment to the constitutive view. Her demand that

the authority of norms be justified by appealing to the practical identities tied

to them leads Korsgaard to conflate psychological facts about agents with

the norms that establish the authority of those psychological dispositions.

Because for Korsgaard, reasons arise from reflective endorsement and obliga-

tions arise from reflective rejection, there is a conceptual difference between

having a reason for action and being obligated, a difference that undermines

her account of moral norms as intersubjectively binding. In tracing the nor-

mativity of reasons both to the normative capacity of autonomy and to the

psychological disposition of a threatened self-conception Korsgaard employs

different and incompatible conceptions of justification. Korsgaards shift be-

tween thick and thin conceptions of practical identity as fundamental to the

justification of moral norms reflects two models that we may call respectively

the persuasion model and the generic model of justification.

3. The Persuasion Model

It seems that Korsgaard must have a persuasion, or psychological, model in

mind when she argues that obligation is a form of reflective rejection. Accord-

ing to Korsgaard, obligation is possible because we have practical identities

and it comes into being when someones identity is threatened. Unconditional

obligations spring from self-conceptions that cannot be violated without criti-

cally damaging your practical identity: to violate them is to lose your integrity

and so your identity, and to no longer be who you are.7 Obligations are not,

on this view, separable from facts about an agents psychological make-up;

an obligation is made real in the mental life of an agent who has endorsed a

practical reason. If the normative question arises because an agent doubts that

obligations have normative authority over her, then to elucidate obligation inthe first person we must appeal to the ways in which the failure to do what she

takes herself to have reason to do constitutes a threat to her personal identity.

If someone is doubting that she is really obligated to do what she has reason to

do, and being obligated is experiencing a threat to her personal identity, then

establishing the reality of the obligation just amounts to making psychologi-

cally real the threat to her personal identity of which she, at the moment, fails

to feel the force. Clarifying the threat to her personal identity sounds a lot

like convincing her that there is an incompatibility across her different forms

of identity. To choose one is to forgo the other. But it would not be enough to


6/1

54 EMER OHAGAN

just point out the inconsistency, of which she may be perfectly aware, for her

problem is that at the moment she does not experience the inconsistency as a

threat. Justifying her obligation to her is really helping her feel appropriately

threatened.

While this is clearly an unsatisfactory view, Korsgaards account of the role

of the moral emotions in the authority of reasons appears to require it. Moral

emotions occur within the authoritative structure of reason. When we fail to

live up to the reasons that we have set for ourselves, we tend to experience

regret, shame, or guilt. Indeed, anticipation of such unpleasant emotions

can sometimes motivate us to do what we ought to do. In this sense, by the

operations of our own minds, we impose sanctions on ourselves. According

to Korsgaard no one who cannot impose sanctions on us is in a position to

require anythingof us. . . .[A] persons own minddoesindeed impose sanctions

on her: that when we dont do what we should, we punish ourselves, by guilt

and regret and repentance and remorse.8 Emotions are, for Korsgaard, not

simple physical or psychic sensations, but cognitive phenomena. They are

perceptions of reasons.

On this interpretation, an answer to the normative question clearly involves

first person persuasion and the appeal to practical identity that Korsgaard de-

mands. An example will help us to see why the persuasion account fails. A

friends frustration with library policies, excessive late fees and the poor avail-

ability of a much-needed book inclines her toward stealing it. Exasperated,

she says: I am completely fed up; I cannot see how something as abstract as amoral principle can require me not to take the book and require that I continue

to be inconvenienced in this way. We know that her considered judgment is

that it would be wrong to steal the book and confront her with this conflict.

If you steal it, you will regret it, we might point out. You do not really

believe it is okay to steal a book because it would convenience you. We are

clarifying the threat to her identity by pointing out that a stealing maxim is

not consistent with her moral principles; her sense of herself as honest cannot

exist side by side with her sense of herself as an opportunist. This example

allows us to see two problems with the persuasion model.

It might seem that the focus on the regret your friend is likely to experience

implies that the authority of reason lies in its capacity to punish, in which caseits authority would dependon what, as a matter of psychological fact, functions

as a punishment. This would make the authority of reasons problematically

psychological. In response to this sort of worry, Korsgaard replies that the

authority of reasons does not depend on the experience of the negative moral

emotions, but it absolutely implies it. A mind that could not perceive its

reasons, after all, could not function as a mind at all. 9 This suggests that the

power to sanction arises because reason has authority. But she has just said

that without the power to sanction reason would lack authority, so we have

come in a circle.


7/1


Moreover, the anticipation of regret cannot by itself supply the normative

authority required. Because our friend is blinded by frustration, she is fail-

ing to feel the authority of the moral norms she espouses. She may fail to

experience the conflict as a threat to her unified self-conception although you

are able to identify it. Her relationship to her anticipated regret must itself

be normatively charged for it to succeed. Our attempt to clarify things might

lead her to reply I know that I will regret it tomorrow, but right now I do not

care. I can regret it tomorrow while I read the book in the comfort of my own

home. If the regret is really strong and unpleasant, I will dull my experience

with alcohol. The possibility of this response shows that our tendency to

punish ourselves with guilt and shame cannot be the source of the authority

of reasons. What is important about the negative emotions is not their un-

pleasantnessper se. Negative emotions are important because they represent

reasons that the agent already has, reasons that can serve as guides for action.

Regret can only serve in this capacity if it functions as a genuine indicator of

a reason, and it need not in every case. If, when contemplating whether to go

out some evening, an agent recognizes that she will regret her decision to do

so, but will also regret her decision to stay home, it should become apparent

that her anticipated regret does not indicate the presence of a reason. Instead

it indicates that her regret system is not functioning properly.

Although in places Korsgaard suggests that the authority of reasons derive

from their power to sanction, in other places she makes it clear that such a

solution would be unsatisfactory. The problem with the persuasion modelas an answer to the normative question is that it makes the justification of

moral reasons depend on agents having been properly educated into, and so

motivated by, appropriate emotionally persuasive tendencies. This presup-

poses the normativity it is supposed to explain. If a successful explanation

of how a doubtful agent is obligated depends on the facts that she is disposed

to care about emotions she is likely to experience and that she is disposed

to experience those emotions as having a particular normative force, then its

very success depends on the norms in question already being in place.

The persuasion account, being circular, fails to explain the authority of

reasons. Korsgaards claim that the justification of moral norms must appeal

to our sense of who we are must then be unpacked as a feature of our genericidentity. However, this more promising approach cannot meet Korsgaards

own criteria for justification.

4. The Generic Model

Just as there is textual evidence supporting the persuasion model, there is

also textual evidence suggesting that Korsgaard sees it as improbable. In

an argument intended to show that instrumental accounts of practical reason

presuppose the normativity of generalizable principles, she notes the folly of


8/11

56 EMER OHAGAN

attempts to persuade a skeptic that certain principles of reason are intrinsically

normative. Just as it is a hopeless task to persuade someone that she has reason

to believe in basic principles of theoretical reason, for example, that she has

reason to accept the principle of non-contradiction, it is a hopeless task to try

to persuade someone of basic principles of practical reason, for example, that

she has reason to take the means to her ends.10 The persuasive task is wrong-

headed because the norms for which we require justification are themselves

constitutive of and internal to the practice of reasoning itself.

The generic model would have us locate the constitutive feature of rational

activity in generic features of practical reasoning. On this view, the normative

authority of reasons rests on purely generic features of practical identity in

virtue of which we are agents with rational commitments. On this view, an

account of obligation will outline the reasons an agent takes herself to have,

the values implicit in them, and the prohibitions they imply.

Korsgaards position appears to require the generic model to explain at least

two features of the rational commitments implicit in reasons. On her account,

by committing ourselves to an end we thereby commit ourselves to the means

to the end. Giving ourselves a reason is a way of understanding ourselves

as a form of causality: willing is regarding yourself as the cause of the end

in questionas the one who will bring it about. This distinguishes willing

from mere wanting or wishing or desiring.11 According to Korsgaard, when

we take ourselves to have a reason to act you adopt a purpose and implicitly a

means to attaining that purpose. A maxim that, if universalized, would thwartthe purpose for which it was adopted, entails a contradiction. Hence, when

we take ourselves to have a reason to do something, we commit ourselves

to the means necessary for doing it. This could not be a psychological fact

about an individual agent of the sort suggested by the persuasion model but

is implicated in the very idea of having a reason.

As well, by their nature, reasons involve a universalizability test that incor-

porates a commitment to the propriety of a judgment over time. In reflective

endorsement, what is endorsed is not a psychological state, but a response

to a set of conditions taken to be productive of a reason for action. The au-

thority we lend to a reason by endorsing it is something for which we make

ourselves responsible. By now judging that we have reason to do something,we are committing yourself to the propriety of doing it under the relevant

circumstances in the future or else revising your judgment.

These two features are essential parts of Korsgaards position. Her flirtation

with the psychological reality of obligation must therefore be taken to be an

exercise in moral phenomenology, and not a part of the justificatory enterprise.

Clearly, the generic model more adequately accounts for Korsgaards com-

mitments. The problem is that this account of justification cannot be squared

with her demand that the justification of moral reasons allow us to succeed in

addressing someone in the first person by way of that agents practical identity.


9/11


Practical identity could only play a role in establishing the authority of reasons

in the most abstract and formal way. Her demand that the normative question

be answered in a way that successfully addresses the agent in the first person

is clearly a rhetorical flourish that allows her position to appear to meet a

requirement that it cannot really meet.

It is a mistake to explain justificatory notions such as obligation in terms

of the psychological constitution of particular agents. Korsgaard is led to this

mistake by her distinction between reflective endorsement and obligation.

According to Korsgaard, reflective endorsement generates reasons whereas

reflective rejection generates obligation. As a result, she makes normativity

depend on the normative capacity of autonomy and the psychological dispo-

sition of a threatened self-conception. Korsgaard cannot have it both ways.

A threat to a persons identity is only normative for her if she takes a norma-

tive attitude toward it, and so mere description of a state in which an agents

personal identity is threatened cannot explain the nature of obligation. We

may think of ourselves as both generous and compassionate and yet walk

hurriedly past a beggar on the way to the bakery. Our obligation to the beg-

gar is not explained by noting that our guilt confirms a tension between our

self-conception and our reasons for action in this case, nor is it discharged

when we dull that feeling of tension with a few drinks later that evening.

The weight of Korsgaards argument must fall on the more generic version of

the constitutive argument for the authority of reasons; the generic model of

justification offers a better explanation of the bindingness of moral norms.It might here be objected that the most promising sort of constitutive argu-

ment is not based on the generic model that carefully keeps the psychological

and generic interpretations of practical identity separate, but on, Korsgaards

transcendental argument that is supposed to unify them. Unless she can show

that the first person commitments implicit in reflective endorsement impose

commitments on reasoners generally, reflective endorsement will yield only

agent-relative reasons and thus end in relativism. To this end Korsgaard offers

a transcendental argument. Her tack is to try to show that having a practical

identity commits us to valuing humanity, which commits us to valuing other

persons reasons for action. Unfortunately, her argument is circular.

We are the sorts of creatures, writes Korsgaard, who act for reasons. Havingreasons requires that we have values and practical identities. Because we

have practical identities we are committed to valuing our humanity, since

it is our humanity that makes it possible for us to have practical identities.

Thus, our own humanity and the humanity of others is valuable. With this

argument Korsgaard purports to supply a transcendental foundation for the

intersubjectivity of reasons by showing that if we value anything at all, if

we acknowledge the existence of practical reasons, then we must value our

humanity as an end in itself. Valuing humanity carries with it obligations to

others, which is tantamount to being open to their reasons for action.


10/

58 EMER OHAGAN

Korsgaard is right that if we start with an essentially private conception of

reasons and try to build intersubjective reasons out of it, we can never bridge

the gap to intersubjective reasons. All our obligations, including obligations

which seem to originate in the moral demands that others legitimately place

on us, will be obligations to ourselves to treat others in accord with the value

we have placed on them. This is not what obligations are like. Korsgaard is

committed to the view that reasons, like language, cannot be strictly private

and still communicable, and thus is committed to the view that reasons are

public in the same way that language must be. We give each other reasons, she

claims, in much the same way that we give ourselves reasons. To the egoist

challenge that we need not treat the demands of others as reasons unless we

have some further personal reason to do, Korsgaard replies that reason-giving

interactions are instances of confronting or reminding the other of the value

of our humanity. How would you like it if I did that to you? causes the

other person to think I would dislike it, which forces him to acknowledge

the value of our humanity.

While Korsgaard is right to argue that reasons must be shareable in princi-

ple, and in this sense public, her account of what obligates, namely reflection in

the first person, makes the bindingness of reasons independent of their public-

ity. Korsgaard, in effect, tries to build public reasons out of an aggregate of the

private reflective acts of endorsers who are tied together by the transcendental

fact of their humanity, making the intersubjectivity of reasons the product of

the essentially private activity of autonomous agents. But the intersubjectivityof reasons cannot be constructed out of individual acts of reflection and tran-

scendental glue. Insofar as individual acts of reflection constitute reasons for

action, they are already part of the social practice of reason giving and taking.

Korsgaards transcendental argument fails because it presupposes what it is

supposed to explain, making the fact of the humanity of another person serve

as a norm, a reason that binds rational agents. A skeptic might accept that other

agents instantiate the humanity Korsgaard talks about, but deny that this fact

gives him a reason to respond one way or another. It need not give a skeptic

a reason because on the reflective endorsement model, a thought or judgment

serves as a reason only once reflectively endorsed. Korsgaards appeal to the

transcendental value of humanity amounts to an attempt to give the skeptic areason to have reasons. This is folly. Reasons are not intersubjective because

we have a moral obligation to recognize the humanity of other agents. They

are intersubjective because they function within the public practice of reason

giving and taking. The public character of reasons is a conceptual fact about

them qua reasons, not a consequence of a moral imperative. Our reasons

are not constructed out of private acts of endorsement. We learn to identify

our psychological states as reason giving only by acquiring a competency, by

mastering their role and significance in a public network of reasons, in light

of which our psychological states can be experienced as reliable symptoms


11/


of the presence of reasons to which we are already committed. A skeptic

already has the reasons that Korsgaard is trying to defend and is simply being

perverse in denying them.

The transcendental argument is supposed to show us that we are rationally

committed to valuing humanity because we are agents. But such a com-

mitment has nothing to do with a thick conception of practical identity, nor

with our tendencies to be moved by the need for a unified self-conception.

The transcendental argument itself allows us to see this; feeling the force of

our commitment to valuing humanity has nothing to do with the source or

justification of the commitment.

5. Conclusion

Korsgaards naturalized Kantianism has the great virtue of being able toilluminate features of our moral psychology that Kants own position doesnot. Unfortunately the illumination is the result of her attempt to straddleincompatible positions. Korsgaard tries to make psychological facts transmitnormative authority to moral reasons. But her attempt to identify the nor-mative authority of reasons by psychologizing them turns out to presupposethe constitutive features of agency it was intended to justify. Because, on aconstitutive view, reasons as rational commitments already have normativeforce, the misleading psychology should be abandoned. An adequate consti-tutive theory of the normative authority of reasons for action requires that we

ground that authority on the practice of reasoning itself.

12

Notes

1. See Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge, England: Cambridge

University Press, 1996), p. 16.

2. Ibid., pp. 9798.

3. Ibid., p. 98.

4. Ibid., p. 89.

5. Ibid., p. 101.

6. Ibid., p. 102.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., p. 151.9. Ibid.

10. Christine Korsgaard, The Normativity of Instrumental Reason, in Garrett Cullitty and

Berys Gaut, eds., Ethics and Practical Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997),

p. 248.

11. Christine Korsgaard, Kants Formula of Universal Law, in C.M. Korsgaard, Creating the

Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 94.

12. I thank Eric Dayton and Arthur Ripstein for commenting on earlier drafts of this paper.

ohagan - practical reason and normative agency

Documents