Abstract
In Self-Constitution, I argue that the principles governing action are “constitutive standards” of agency, standards that arise from the nature of agency itself. To be an agent is to be autonomously efficacious, and the categorical and hypothetical imperatives arise from those two attributes. These principles are also “constitutive” of agency in two more specific ways. First, they meet the “constitution requirement”: the object must meet the standard in question, at least to some extent, in order to be the kind of object that it is. Second, they meet the “self-constitution requirement”: the object makes itself into the kind of object that it is by conforming to the standard. That is, the agent makes herself into an agent, and into the particular agent who she is, by conforming to those standards. Some neo-Aristotelians believe that Aristotelian virtues are constitutive standards. In this paper, I first ask why moral philosophers should focus on the virtues at all, considering the views of David Hume, Philippa Foot, and Aristotle. I then ask whether Aristotelian virtues meet the constitution requirement, and suggest that there are grounds for this view in the Nicomachean Ethics. But Aristotelian virtues do not meet the self-constitution requirement, which leaves Aristotle unable to explain moral responsibility. I end by examining the role that Aristotelian virtues could play in a Kantian ethic.
Notes on contributor
Christine M. Korsgaard is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard. She is the author of The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge, 1996), Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge, 1996), The Constitution of Agency (Oxford, 2008), Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity (Oxford, 2009), and Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals (Oxford, 2018).
Notes
1 It is because of my appeal to the constitution requirement that I identified my view in Self-Constitution as a form of Platonism. To say that an object fits under a certain concept only to the extent that it conforms to the constitutive standards given by that concept is essentially the same as to say that the object gets its identity from its participation in a form that represents a perfect version of that kind of object.
2 In earlier work I treated “internal” and “constitutive” as more or less synonymous, but in this essay I am using “internal” to name a broader category of standards.
3 See Plato Citation1997, 353 b–c in the Stephanus numbers found in the margins of most translations; Aristotle Citation1984a, 2.6, 1106a14ff; NE 6.2, 1139a18. References to Aristotle will be given using the standard Bekker page, column and line numbers.
4 I am using the word “principles” in a way that ranges both over intentions and Kantian maxims.
6 Foot Citation2001, 12. I have added the comparisons to Hume.
7 The everything else that has to be equal is that there is no prudential or moral cost to these actions that would make it seem to me as if they were not worth doing.
8 See Kant Citation1998, section I and my analysis of the argument in Korsgaard Citation1996b, 43–76 and Korsgaard Citation2008d, 176–187. References to Kant’s Groundwork and The Metaphysics of Morals will be given by the page numbers of the relevant volume of Kants gesammelte Schriften, which appear in the margins of most translations.
10 See Kant Citation1998, 4, 399–401. Kant creates confusion by using the word “maxim” in two different ways. Sometimes he uses it to refer to what we might call a first-order maxim, doing a certain act for a certain end, which we adopt on further grounds. When he gives examples in Groundwork II of agents who ask themselves whether their maxims can serve as universal laws, he is using the term that way. At other times he uses it to refer to an agent’s total motivational state, a maxim along with the grounds on which it has been chosen. That’s how he’s using it when he says, in the passages referred to, that the difference between naturally sympathetic action and beneficent action from duty does not rest “in the purpose to be attained by the action” but “in the maxim in accordance with which it is decided upon.” (Kant Citation1998; 4, 399).
14 For defense of the view that ergon means how something does what it does, see Korsgaard Citation2008b.
16 There is a parallel in the theoretical case. Any agent – any animal in Aristotle’s sense – must form some sort of a representation of the environment. Non-rational animals do that through perception. Rational animals do it by constructing the demonstrations that constitute scientific knowledge, episteme.
17 For an earlier defense of this reading, see Korsgaard Citation2008c.
21 See Aristotle Citation1984a, 7.9 1152a4–6; see also 7.8 1151a11–13 and 7.8 1151a6–7.
22 In this part of the paper I draw heavily on the parallel discussion in Korsgaard Citation2014, although I have changed some of the terminology.
23 This formulation needs modification, at least for people (there might not be much more to it for simple animals), because of the problem of deviant causal chains. In Davidson’s famous example, a climber holding another climber by a rope has the thought that he could make his own position more secure by dropping the rope, and finds the thought that he might do such thing so unnerving that he drops the rope. Kant defines agency as the capacity to be, by means of one’s representations, the cause of the object of those representations. (See Kant Citation1996, 6, 211) In this case, the climber’s representation (“I could just drop the rope … ”) is the cause of the object of his representation (he drops the rope), yet this is not something that he intentionally does – in Kant’s terms, he is not the cause. I leave aside this problem for now.
24 I once asked Michael Bratman whether an intention produced by a post-hypnotic suggestion would be just as much the person’s own intention as any other, and he said yes. For further discussion see Korsgaard Citation2014, 200–202.
26 Aristotle, Citation1984a, 3.5, 1114a31–1114b3. The translation has “him” rather than “them.”
29 See the references in note 21.
30 The conception of agency that I am describing here does not support as “deep” a conception of moral responsibility as some of the traditional defenders of free will hoped to defend. It would not, for instance, justify an omnipotent God in consigning a bad person to eternal damnation. For that, it would matter how we came to follow the principles that make us efficacious. I do not regard this as a loss.
34 See Kant Citation1965, 178. A 134/B173 in the pagination of the A and B editions found in the margins of most translations.
35 See, for instance, the discussion at Kant Citation1998, 4, 403–404.
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