Principled Tyranny: Can Korsgaard Explain Evil Action?

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Notes

1 This paper was written during my time as a Rothermere Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and as a Postdoctoral Fellow with the ERC-Funded Distortions of Normativity Project at the University of Vienna. It benefitted from discussion with Ieva Vasilionite at Vilnius University, Mike Ridge and Matthew Chrisman at Edinburgh, and Herlinde Pauer-Studer in Vienna.

2 Christine Korsgaard, Sources of Normativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1996), pp. 98–9.

3 Ibid., p. 99.

4 Christine Korsgaard, ‘Autonomy from the Second Person Within: A Commentary on Stephen Darwall’s The Second-Person Standpoint’, Ethics, 118 (October 2007): 8–23, at p. 12. My thanks to Herlinde Pauer-Studer for helpful discussion on this point.

5 The judgment that X is evil is an old one, but apt in this context. Normally Kantians focus on good or bad intentions, or right and wrong actions. Evil, instead, is a judgment of an agent rather than of an agent’s actions or intentions. As such, it is apt in the current context, if unusual.

6 Korsgaard’s argument against the democratic constitution mirrors her opposition to the idea that one can have a particularist approach to volition. See Self-Constitution, pp. 72–5.

7 In this context, erotic desire is actually repetitive. While we ordinarily use ‘erotic’ as a sexual term, in the Socratic context ordinary lust is an appetite, while an erotic desire is a deeper and not irrational search for completeness. See Plato, Symposium, 204d–206a.

8 Italics in original.

9 There is a key distinction between universalizing the maxim ‘be indifferent to suffering’ and the maxim ‘one ought to be indifferent to suffering.’ The first is much harder to successfully universalize, since one would have to eliminate or control most ordinary responses to pain. To universalize the second, however, one must simply believe that one’s ordinary responses to pain are an unfortunate evolutionary response that one ought to overcome. For the former, failure undermines the maxim, while for the latter, failure simply provides one with a reason to feel that you have done something wrong.

10 Immanuel Kant, ‘Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals’, in Immanuel Kant Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) at 4:423.

11 Barbara Herman, ‘Mutual Aid and Respect for Persons’, Ethics 94 (4) (July 1984): 577–602, esp. pp. 580–90.

12 A good test for this would be whether the converse of the original maxim could itself be universalized. If there are some times when one would resist a universal requirement of benevolence for oneself – when one wants to succeed or fail on one’s own merits or simply not to be helped, though need and opportunity arise – then it would seem that the categorical imperative is silent on whether one should be benevolent or non-benevolent, or at least that the maxim is underdescribed. While this is not, and indeed contradicts, Herman’s approach, it nonetheless recommends itself to the would-be Kantian. For Herman’s approach see ‘Mutual Aid and Respect for Persons’, p. 581.

13 Italics in original.