The Normative Question

Preliminary statement: We want an account of the normative force of normative claims that normative conviction will survive. Mandeville's theory as an example of a theory such that our commitment to moral practices would not survive the belief that it was true.

What justifies the claims that morality makes on us?

Why is it a problem? The demands of morality can be hard

How hard?

A Theory of Moral Concepts (TMC)

What are the practical and psychological effects of moral ideas (PPEMI)? Korsgaard's challenge:

The PPEMI provide two kinds of constraints on a TMC (if it is to be a successful normative theory): to both explain and justify the PPEMI.

Skeptics provide explanations that don't justify (which Gibbard refers to as debunking explanations).

Example of evolutionary ethics that would explain action without justifying it.

Three Conditions for Adequacy for a Successful Normative Theory

(1) It must address someone who is asking the question about their own situation.

(2) It must be transparent.

(3) It must appeal to our sense of identity. Why?

Key claim: It must show us that doing the wrong thing is sometimes as bad as or worse than death?

"If moral claims are worth dying for, then violating them must be, in a similar way, worse than death"(18).

Is this true? Can morality require one to accept certain death? What about less stringent moral requirements? Do the involve a loss of identity?

Voluntarism

Grotius as a moral realist.

Puffendorf and Hobbes as the first modern moral philosophers.

The distinction between the content of morality and the source of its obligatoriness.

Why are Puffendorf and Hobbes voluntarists?

Hobbes's distinction between counsel and law. (Compare Korsgaard's example of the logic requirement.)

What is the "fatal flaw" in Hobbes's and Puffendorf's accounts?

The Regress Problem

Question: Why should I do what morality tells me to do?

Suppose we offer an answer: You should do what morality tells you to do because morality has property X.

Any answer invites the reply: Why should I do something that has property X?

For the Voluntarist, X = is commanded by someone with power over you.

Reply: Why should I do what is commanded by someone with power over me?

And that leads to a regress.

As Korsgaard characterizes the position of the substantive realist, the substantive realist refuses to answer the initial question. They refuse to start the regress.

Korsgaard is dissatisfied with the realist position, because she thinks she has an answer that will not generate a regress.

Korsgaard's Normative Project: To find a property X that stops the regress, because, presumably, property X both explains and justifies the demands of morality.

Substantive Realism

What does Korsgaard mean when she says the realist's response is "to dig in his heels"(30)?

What does she mean when she says that the realist brings the regress to an end "by fiat"(33)?

An important distinction for Korsgaard: Intrinsic reasonableness vs. the subject determining herself to do what is reasonable.

Key example: instrumental (means-end) rationality.

Facts about what we ought to do "inherit their normativity from principles which spring from the nature of the will—the principles of practical reasoning"(36). No need for intrinsically normative actions or other entities. Why not?

Aren't there principles of means/end rationality? Wouldn't our wills be defective if we did not choose in accordance with those principles—at least, in non-moral cases?

Korsgaard's Reply to Nagel and Pritchard

What is her reply to Nagel?

All that Nagel supposes is that reasons are objective. Is Korsgaard denying objective reasons? Consider again her discussion of means-end reasoning.

Why does Pritchard think that moral philosophy rests on a mistake? What is Korsgaard's reply to Pritchard?

We need to pay close attention to whether she herself makes the "mistake" that Pritchard warns against.

The issue between Korsgaard and the normative realist: Is the normative question request for knowledge? Does the ability of our moral judgments to survive reflection depend on their being moral knowledge?

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