It is the most striking fact about human life that we have values. We think of ways that things could be better, more perfect, and so of course different, than they are; and of ways that we ourselves could be better, more perfect, and so of course different, than we are. Why should this be so? Where do we get these ideas that outstrip the world we experience and seem to call it into question, to render judgment on it, to say that it does not measure up, that it is not what it ought to be? Clearly we do not get them from experience, at least not by any simple route. And it is puzzling too that these ideas of a world different from our own call out to us, telling us that things should be like them rather than the way they are, and that we should make them so.

INTRODUCTION

Over the course of the last two lectures I have sketched the way in which the normative question took shape in the debates of modern moral philosophy. Voluntarists try to explain normativity in what is in some sense the most natural way: we are subject to laws, including the laws of morality, because we are subject to lawgivers. But when we ask why we should be subject to those lawgivers, an infinite regress threatens. Realists try to block that regress by postulating the existence of entities — objective values, reasons, or obligations — whose intrinsic normativity forbids further questioning. But why should we believe in these entities? In the end, it seems, we will be prepared to assert that such entities exist only because — and only if — we are already confident that the claims of morality are justified.

My commentators have raised many important questions about, and made some very forceful objections to, what I have had to say in these lectures. I can only wish that I could give satisfactory responses to them all. In what follows, I address just a few of the points which they have raised. Specifically, in section 11 address the question why we must will in accordance with a universal law. In section 2 I discuss some ways in which, according to my commentators, my account of obligation departs from Kant's, to its detriment, and I try to defend myself both against the claims of departure and of detriment. In section 3 I discuss the status of desire, both in Kant's account and in my own. In section 4 I take up the question whether my focus on the idea of identity makes my account of moral motivation unattractively egoistic. Finally in section 5 I consider some issues about the relationship between giving a psychological explanation of the sense of obligation, and giving a justification of obligation itself.

AN OLD QUESTION RAISED AGAIN: THE UNIVERSALIZABILITY REQUIREMENT

Near the beginning of lecture 3 (3.2.3), I cited the argument by which Kant undertakes to establish that we must submit our maxims to a test of universalizability.

INTRODUCTION

In this lecture I address three apparently unconnected worries to which my argument in the last lecture gives rise. First, I will discuss a. familiar objection to the type of argument which I have offered: the objection that valuing your own humanity does not commit you to valuing that of others. I will argue that this objection does not hold. It is based upon a false view about reasons, the view that they are private mental entities. This response, which invokes Wittgenstein's ideas, will lead me into a discussion of die question of the normative status of pain, and that will put me in a position to address another familiar objection to Kantian theories: the objection that basing all value upon the value of humanity gives no moral standing to the other animals. I will argue that the other animals do have moral standing and that a natural extension of the sort of argument I have been presenting can accommodate that fact. That argument in turn will lead me to some reflections about the natural and in particular biological sources of value, and I will move from those to a discussion of the question of normative scepticism.

OBLIGATING ONE ANOTHER

In the last lecture I argued that we must value our own humanity, and so that we must treat our human identity as a form of practical, normative identity.

THE NORMATIVE QUESTION

Korsgaard says that the normative question (which I shall label [N]) is necessarily formulable in different ways. It may be helpful to her argument to spell out more fully the relations between some of the formulations. For instance, there are significant differences between [N1] ‘What justifies the claims that morality makes on us?’ (1.4.3), and [N2] ‘Is there anything we must do?’ (1.1.1, 1.3). [N2] is at least broader than [N1], since there are non–moral forms of normativity. Korsgaard accepts this, and indeed uses the notion of means–end normativity to elucidate (via the idea of the will's relation to itself) the moral sort of normativity. But this does not seem to allow enough for non–moral forms of normativity (prudential, aesthetic, etc.) which, like the moral sort, can equally give trouble with inclination. It is not entirely clear to me whether Korsgaard thinks that there is a problem about the nature of normativity before we ever get to the specifics of morality. (Perhaps there is a Kantian preconception hovering here, in the idea that it is only the opposition of morality to inclination that really puts the nature of normativity on the line.)

I take it that the reflective question [R] ‘Can morality survive reflection?’ provides a way of approaching [N1] ‘What justifies morality's claims on us?’ But [N1] and [R] line up neatly with each other only if two things are granted.

Christine Korsgaard has provided us with an illuminating analysis of the problem of the normativity of ethics. She observes that it is the reflective character of human consciousness that gives us the problem of the normative — the fact that unlike other animals, we can fix our attention on ourselves and become aware of our intentions, desires, beliefs, and attitudes, and of how they were formed. But it is not awareness alone that does it; a further aspect of our reflective consciousness is involved, which can appropriately be called freedom. Here is what she says:

The new data provided by reflection always face us, in other words, with a new decision.

The normative problem does not arise with regard to everything we observe about ourselves: we cannot decide whether or not to be mortal, for example (though we may have to decide how to feel about it). It is only beliefs, and acts, or intentions that face us with the problem of choice, and it is in our response to this problem that values and reasons reveal themselves.

Normativity pervades our lives. We not merely have beliefs: we claim that we and others ought to hold certain beliefs. We not merely have desires: we claim that we and others ought to act on some of them, but not on others. We assume that what somebody believes or does may be judged reasonable or unreasonable, right or wrong, good or bad, that it is answerable to standards or norms. So far, so commonplace; but we have only to go a little further to find ourselves on the high seas of moral philosophy.

We will find ourselves at sea because there is huge disagreement about the source and the authority of norms on which we all constantly rely. The Tanner Lectures provide an outstanding opportunity to address and discuss such fundamental ethical questions. Thanks to the generous support of the Tanner Trustees, Tanner Lectures on Human Values are given at a total of eight different universities each year. The 1992 Tanner Lectures in Cambridge were given by Christine Korsgaard. Her lectures were followed by comments by G. A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel, and Bernard Williams, and by extended and moughtful discussion by a large audience. Thanks to the President and Fellows of Clare Hall, the occasion was congenial as well as invigorating. Since then texts have been exchanged, revised and refined and Christine Korsgaard has added a reply to her commentators.

INTRODUCTION

In 1625, in his book On the Law of War and Peace, Hugo Grotius asserted that human beings would have obligations ‘even if we should concede that which cannot be conceded without the utmost wickedness, that there is no God, or that the affairs of men are of no concern to Him’. But two of his followers, Thomas Hobbes and Samuel Pufendorf, thought that Grotius was wrong. However socially useful moral conduct might be, they argued, it is not really obligatory unless some sovereign authority, backed by the power of sanctions, lays it down as the law. Others in turn disagreed with them, and so the argument began.

Ever since then, modern moral philosophers have been engaged in a debate about the ‘foundations’ of morality. We need to be shown, it is often urged, that morality is ‘real’ or ‘objective’. The early rationalists, Samuel Clarke and Richard Price, thought that they knew exactly what they meant by this. Hobbes had said that there is no right or wrong in the state of nature, and to them, this meant that Tightness is mere invention or convention, not something real.

In her third lecture Professor Korsgaard distinguishes between what she calls ‘the categorical imperative’ and ‘the moral law’ (3.2.4). The categorical imperative imposes a minimal condition on free choice: such choice must be guided by a principle we have given ourselves which has the form of a general rule or law (3.2.3). A free will must choose a maxim it can regard as a law. What Korsgaard calls ‘the moral law’, then, is a further specification of what this law which I give myself must be: it must be the kind of thing ‘all rational beings could agree to act on together in a workable cooperative system’ (3.2.4). As Professor Korsgaard quite rightly points out, Kant doesn't make this distinction and she suggests that awareness of the distinction will allow us to see a certain incompleteness in Kant's argument. He wants to show that any free will is bound by the moral law but he, in fact, establishes only the weaker claim that we are bound by the categorical imperative.

Korsgaard's argument, then, has two parts. First, she defends the bits of Kant where he got it right: normativity arises from the structure of the free will and the free will must stand under the categorical imperative. Second, she completes Kant's argument, showing that autonomous human agents stand not only under the categorical imperative but also under the moral law.

I'll start with the first part, the part that is supposed to parallel Kant's own discussion.

INTRODUCTION

At the end of the last lecture I argued that normativity is a problem for human beings because of our reflective nature. Even if we are inclined to believe that an action is right and even if we are inclined to be motivated by that fact, it is always possible for us to call our beliefs and motives into question. This is why, after all, we seek a philosophical foundation for ethics in the first place: because we are afraid that the true explanation of why we have moral beliefs and motives might not be one that sustains them. Morality might not survive reflection.

The view I am going to describe in this lecture takes its starting point from that thought. It applies one of the best rules of philosophical methodology: that a clear statement of the problem is also a statement of the solution. If the problem is that morality might not survive reflection, then the solution is that it might. If we find upon reflecting on the true moral dieory that we still are inclined to endorse the claims that morality makes on us, then morality will be normative. I call this way of establishing normativity the ‘reflective endorsement’ method.

You might think that, if you make a law, then that law binds you, because you made it. For, if you will the law, then how can you deny that it binds you, without contradicting your own will? But you might also think the opposite. You might think that, if you are the author of the law, then it cannot bind you. For how can it have authority over you when you have authority over it? How can it bind you when you, the lawmaker, can change it, at will, whenever you like?

Now, in that pair of arguments mutually contradictory conclusions are drawn from the selfsame premiss: the premiss that you make the law. So at least one of the arguments is invalid. But, even if they are both invalid, they might still be unignorable, because they might have elements of truth in them. They might be healthy argument–embryos out of which sound arguments could develop. And, whatever else is true, each of the arguments is sufficiently persuasive that, mutually contradictory though they are, each was affirmed in Hobbes's Leviathan, in much the form in which I just stated them.

There are, by my count, four arguments in Hobbes for the conclusion that the citizen is obliged to obey the law. Three of the arguments don't matter here.