Ep. 370: Christine Korsgaard on the History of Ethics (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, then thought better of it. Our question for episode 370 is something like, how are facts related to moral obligation? We read the first two lectures from Christine Korsgaard's the Sources of Normativity lectures delivered in 1992 and published in 1996. More information about the text and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, both explanatorily and normatively adequate in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:42 Seth: This is Seth Paskin marveling about the striking fact that I actually have values in Austin, Texas.

0:49 Wes: This is Wes Alwan reflectively endorsing my location, which is Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:56 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, nominally normative, in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:00 Mark: All right, we're continuing on our run on contemporary, semi contemporary moral theory. Wes, you had gotten ahead of us, finishing the Philippa Foot and going right onto this. And we're going to do two full episodes on this figure that you probably never heard of, because the one today is all about the history of philosophy, the history of ethics specifically. You know, I was thinking we were going to go back, go talk about Clark, the guy that Hume is responding to. But she explains Clark well enough. I don't think we have to do Clark now. And there's a number of other things, you know, interestingly, putting Hume and other folks into perspective to eventually get to some sort of Kantianism, which is her view that we can talk about next time.

1:46 Wes: Yeah, I had known about Korsgaard for a very long time because if you've ever looked at any Kant secondary literature, Korsgaard will be referred to as the big Kantian. And I had always just had this kind of prejudiced view of her as probably being dry and boring. You know, with Kant come certain associations of.

2:05 Seth: I have no idea what you're talking about.

2:07 Wes: Lacking.

2:08 Dylan: She was Kantian and Kantian.

2:09 Wes: That was your assumption, lacking in warmth and. But I was surprised to find that this book is so well written, at least for me. It was just hard to put down. And I found that quite rare. I find that especially rare with analytic philosophy. And the other thing I liked about this book is that it is, unlike a lot of analytic philosophy, very historically engaged, but it's not engaged historically for the sake of scholarship. In some ways, it resembles a very clear ethical version of Hegel's Phenomenology, because she's going through different historical positions and showing very precisely how they build on one another, how you can critique what one position from the perspective of the previous position.

By the end of this book, she's going to show how they all can be synthesized. That's why I make the comparison to Hegel. We're actually not going to leave behind any of these positions, which include. She's going to talk about voluntarism and Hobbes and Pufendorf. Had anyone heard of this guy? She's going to talk about Hume and Mill and realists like Clark. And they're all going to turn out, they're all going to have a point and they can all be synthesized, strangely enough, with Kant. So I think, you know, what I like about this book is that reading this, I'm like, well, I guess I didn't really understand Hobbes at all.

Really could have used this sort of lesson a long time ago. And the way, you know, historically, all these. These positions, dialogue with each other. So I don't know if you guys feel the same way, but that was mine.

3:45 Mark: Well, I thought about Hegel's phenomenology as well. Like, what if Hegel, instead of doing his style, had presented the history of metaphysics clearly, identifying the authors and quoting from them and cogently going from one to the next. Yeah, I definitely thought that.

4:00 Dylan: Well, I didn't think of Hegel's phenomenology, but I see why you would think of it. I think she's amazing. In fact, my wife doesn't read a lot of philosophy, but to me, it was a book for someone who's intellectually engaged. I would point them to this book as a way to frame and understand these questions about morality. And I agree that she does a masterful job of situating it historically. So you, you know, you get quotes from these different authors, but she's so good at summarizing and just explaining that I don't even know. I mean, it matters, of course, that she brings up Hobbes and Clark and sort of goes through the history of it.

But it really is at the service of articulating sort of the landscape of positions about morality that isn't just historical, but is sort of covering the different directions you might go so you understand what the problem is that people are trying to solve and why they might argue for one particular way or another. And that I found. That's a genuinely masterful kind of scholarship that I agree, Wes. There's something uniquely special about it. I think it's fantastic.

5:21 Seth: Yeah, it's the cliche, like, she brings it to life. She animates the figures and the Ideas to make them relevant. I think the opening paragraph, basically the opening maybe two paragraphs is like, you know, as strong as any book I can recall reading.

5:37 Mark: Do it. Give it to us, Seth.

5:39 Wes: And the introduction or the.

5:41 Seth: In the prologue.

5:43 Mark: Yeah, introduction is written by someone else. This is a weird book in that there are the first four lectures, four essays are by her, plus there's a five page prologue, and then there's lectures by other people in the book. So the whole book is like 300 pages, but she only wrote what, 100? We still read like 90 pages for today. This is a lot. And we're going to get to up to 167.

6:06 Wes: Yeah. It'll be like 70 pages for the next reading.

6:11 Mark: For her positive view.

6:12 Wes: Yeah. And then I tried to read those other lectures, by the way, and I mean, I tried to read those responses and it just so typically analytic. I just couldn't do it, like immediately moving away from her style. I couldn't stay with it. Yeah. Seth, you want to read?

6:27 Seth: Yeah. So in the prologue, which is called Excellence and Obligation, a Very concise History of Western Metaphysics, 387 BC to 1887 AD she gives a quote by Nietzsche on bad conscience. And then she says, 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 questions, 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 Plato became Plato when Socrates made him see the problem. I won't read the rest of that second paragraph, but I just think as like kind of the opening salvo of a book, you're immediately like, we talk about ethics, you think you're talking about morals and ethics, you think you're talking about the is ought distinction or whatever.

And she just lays it out. It's like, isn't it weird that we don't just think of things the way they are, but we think of different things and then we want the world to Be like those different things. Isn't that the strangest phenomenon that you can imagine? And I'm like, yeah, it kind of is. Yeah.

7:58 Mark: She locates this as a modern thing, that even though she's going to talk about Plato and Aristotle here, she kind of gets off them. She maybe touches on them a quote here and there throughout the rest of the book. But she thinks that some fundamental reversal has happened that she describes here that it's not that for the ancients, or at least for Plato and Aristotle, they were dissatisfied with what they saw. They thought that reality, the world, well, maybe not as they saw it, but the world as they thought it, that was the good. So of course, we've talked about this with.

We've done a lot of play. D'oh. And we've talked about, well, the highest form is the form of the good. And that sort of motivates everything else. We can sort of understand how. Well, like a form like heat, hotness would be. Well, something. If you have more hotness, you're sort of going toward the essence of hotness. You could talk about the quality of the hotness in terms of how hot something is or how much of the. This ness. That particular thing happens. So they're all sort of working toward the ultimate full version of themselves. And so that's a way of saying that the good is the highest.

But to actually say straight up that, oh, you know, despite what you may see, reality right now is the good. If things could just show themselves to be what they fully, truly internally are. I don't know. I hadn't put thought of Plato even in that simple a way. I'm not sure if that's a misleading way of describing Plato.

9:20 Wes: Yeah, I mean, she says Plato and Aristotle thought that value was more real than fact.

9:25 Seth: Yep.

9:26 Wes: That's what the world really is at bottom. And what we see in things, you know, what we see in the material world is imperfect entities trying to be better. Right. The chair is trying to be the. The form of the chair, the real chair live up to the form. So the essence of things is value on that view.

9:45 Mark: Yeah.

9:46 Wes: And then the flip in the modern world is to say, well, no, actually essence is all material. And then we have to try to locate value in that world. And this, you know, this parallels, of course, the problem that we saw so much in the German idealists, which is once we become naturalists, once the modern scientific worldview comes on the scene, then how do we make place for freedom in light of determinism? And how do we make place for Consciousness itself.

10:19 Mark: Right.

10:20 Wes: So we get the problem of consciousness with this, the advent of the scientific worldview as well.

10:25 Dylan: I guess she doesn't frame it this way, but isn't the way we just recapitulated that the difference between sort of the ancient Platonic, Aristotelian conception, flipping it, is that in the end also going to have to do with understanding us as fallen entities?

10:43 Wes: Yeah, it kind of lines up with.

10:45 Dylan: At least lines up with it. Right.

10:46 Wes: The Christian worldview.

10:48 Dylan: Yes.

10:49 Wes: Where we are, you know, she says we, as you know, under the Christian point of view, we become resistant matter. And the form that's trying to be imposed on us comes from God as lawgiver. We saw this kind of synergy. Right. I don't know. I hate that I'm using that word so much lately. But we saw it when it came to laws of nature. Right. So there's a weird way in which the Christian point of view and the modern scientific view can line up. And that comes with wanting to say that there are these laws of nature that are transcendent that then get imposed on contingent reality. And you can do that for science as well as for ethics.

11:31 Mark: So if we can try to characterize some of the major steps in her argument through these couple of chapters before we completely disappear into the text, I think that might be helpful so people will know where we are going. So it's. I characterize the question here. How are facts related to moral obligations? So it's an is ought distinction thing here. And this relates to. Right. Naturalism. This is with the switch up. So we're no longer thinking that the world is primarily some sort of mysterious essence, but the world is just this, it's matter.

So it's the modern scientific worldview. And she capitalizes this all the time. And so all these different philosophers that she's going to discuss in these two main chapters are going to be people who are trying in one way or another to figure out, as you were saying, how obligation, how normativity can fit in this world of things, things that are just inert, things that are not necessarily pointed in any particular way. So you could just say, as she characterizes Hobbes as well, you have to have somebody commanding. You have to have a God, or in Hobbs case, you have to have the sovereign right.

There is no ethics. Ethics is just something that we make up, or it rather it gets generated. As soon as you have somebody who's going to beat the out of you if you don't do what they ask. Well, that creates a Normativity, right there. That's all. That's the only place that we could get it is by authority, with sanction. And then she's looking at people who, like Clark, Samuel Clark that we keep mentioning, who says, no, actually it's. There's a certain part of matter that has normativity in it. And so we described this previously as fittingness.

Right. Two things fit together. That's a physical property, or, you know, we can use it analogically on how, like somebody does something nice to you. Well, gratitude toward that just fits with that. So there's just these facts about the world that we can just say are moral facts and we should just pay attention to those moral facts. And then last time we heard with Hume in our discussions, he rejects that there's not moral facts in the world. It's just that we react to things in certain ways. And so we try to build an ethics on that. She also, what is the next step?

Looks at people who point to human nature and saying, well, you know, we have a certain things that make us happy, things that seem to be our excellence, our flourishing. Let's just point to that. So these are all just different ways in which we can like try to fit normativity into the world. And she, I think, wants to make a fundamental break with the idea that there is some fact. I think she's going the direction that we just were outlining in Philippa Foot to say it's not that you have to have a fact that you were referring to, like there's a moral fact in the world.

And that's what justifies my belief, even a fact about human nature. It's just that the act of reasoning, the act of forming our will and deciding this is a sufficient reason for me to act, can bring things to bear that are sufficient to convince us that there is something that is objectively right and to get us to actually do that thing without having any metaphysical assumptions. So it's not that there is an is and we get an odd out of it. The ought has to be something that we bring in.

14:36 Wes: Yeah, I mean, the way we begin is, you know, again with this modern scientific worldview. And there in the world of matter, we don't find right. If we look at things empirically, we're not going to discover little values jumping around in the world or the way we discover rabbits or atoms or whatever you might think of. This is a point that Hume makes himself. If you looked at an act of murder just from the standpoint of empirical reality, someone stabbing someone, you're not going to find anything inherently ethical or unethical about that until you look to human nature.

And human sentiments has to have something to do with our reactions to such events in and of themselves. They are just purely mechanical. Very similar point is made by Hobbes. Right. They're. They are pivoting off this kind of mechanistic view of the world. So then the question is where normativity comes from. And that's not the explanation of how, just how do we explain psychologically why human beings have these normative dispositions? That's an easy mistake to make, especially with Hume. If you think that explaining our dispositions in some way explains normativity, it doesn't.

It'll turn out we've got to do more than that. And Hobbes saw that. So he wants to say, well, if we're going to get normativity from somewhere, it has to come from the authority of this sovereign, which is grounded in sanction. And Korsgaard's point, which I think this is why I thought I didn't really understand Hobbes after reading her, is that what he's talking about? There is not the content of norms which is independent. Right. So there can be natural laws in a way about what's good or bad for us. That can be a matter of nature. But those things aren't necessarily normative, as we discussed over and over again on the show.

Someone could say, well, you ought to do it because it'll make you happy. You can say, well, what if I don't want to be happy, why ought I do it? Right? There's always that question. So Hobbes wants to give us a stopping point to the regress of that type of question in the authority of a sovereign. But it doesn't mean that anything that the sovereign dictates would be that we have to think of that as good for us. He's just applying the normative force. The content of the norms comes from elsewhere.

17:06 Seth: Yeah, there's a nice little passage on 27 where she. Let me sum up. Hobbes and Pufendorf believed that the content of morality is given by natural reason. What morality demands of us is what it is reasonable for us, at least as a group to do. The rules of morality are the rules that make social life possible, and social life is necessary for human beings. And Hobbes and Pufendorf clearly suppose that in many cases this consideration could be motivationally sufficient as well. Pufendorf especially says that in the absence of obligation, we would still do what is Right, because it is useful.

The legislator is not invoked to supply the content of morality or even to explain why people are often motivated to do what is right. The legislator is necessary to make obligation possible, that is, to make morality normative. We don't typically parse out the obligatory nature. We talk about morality and we just in many senses, assume we're talking about what's right. When we talk about what's right, we also are automatically talking about what you should do. But it's an interesting, you know, she teases out this, this very fine distinction.

You can talk about what's right or what's moral, what's necessary, in a wholly abstract, you know, scientific, logical way, without talking about any sense that anybody should act that way or that you should be. That any one individual should be obligated to do it. And I think that ties us back to the thread we've been on with Hume and his respondents that I think, you know, Hume was very sensitive to this, that not easy. It's possible to talk about morality, but you're not answering the question of why we should do it. And earlier on, before she gets to this point, she says, you know, if there weren't circumstances where doing what you should do or doing what's morally correct would be hard or involve a sacrifice or something, you might not ever ask this question.

But the reality of the situation is, and this was part of what makes this whole thing strange, we have these things in our world, in our social sphere, in our lives, that call upon us to act in ways that we might not want to or don't want to, or might hurt us or might cause us to sacrifice something. And we have to take them seriously and ask ourselves, why should I make that sacrifice? Why should I do that thing? And she's going to spend a lot of time talking about, like, that's a really tough question to answer, but that's part of the key question.

Making content for morality is one thing, but figuring out how you can instill obligation in it is something completely different.

19:45 Dylan: Is that different than saying that we have choices? And so there isn't an answer that you'd always come up with to direct your action. And so when I think about this question of normativity and obligation and stuff, there's the one fact, like in the sort of crisis of modern science or the worldview of modern science that we said earlier, that there aren't morality particles or ethical particles that you are using to measure this or however. But that's really one example of a solution that you'd get to if you had experiments or if you had events that always ended up in the same way.

And you don't have that kind of thing going on necessarily. And you sort of, on the face of it, it doesn't seem like there is a, a necessary link between our behaviors and our actions. And then you have the question, then you have like, well, this notion of, well, I have choices to make and so, well, which choice ought I pick? And that whole notion of value that you quoted at the beginning, which that value, is it really anything different than I have choices to make? And the question is which choice to make?

21:01 Wes: And, well, you have to be able to reflect on it from some other point of view. Well, you can reflect on it from its own point of view, it turns out, but so you can reflect on it from the point of view of self interest. You can reflect on it from the point of view of how it affects others, since we have natural moral sympathies with others. But the point is that we can always ask why, as Seth was pointing out. And this is going back to, you know, maybe we can go back to this section on the problem, starting on page 10 and 11, but where she makes these distinctions.

But we can always ask why. So if someone says, well, the right thing to do is not to steal that, and I can always say, well, why? If I don't steal that, I'm going to go hungry. Or I could give some other reason. And that's where the whole game begins. And one solution, of course, the one that Mark gave a good description of, is what she calls substantive moral reason, where I just appeal to. I say, well, there's facts about the matter out there in the world. It's a matter of what is fitting, or so on. And I can just appeal to that if I can discover those things and I can regulate my action that way.

And that's going to turn out not to work. But there are other ways to apply an independent standard. It's not just going to be I can choose whatever I want, Right?

22:19 Mark: Practical reasoning doesn't have to point to an object and say, I'm doing this because that object indicates that, you know, it has the shouldness and I'm just following its shouldness.

22:30 Dylan: Yes, and I think you're right. We should talk about the problem, her formulation of the problem. But one way of describing the bulk of the chapters that we read are different ways of coming to a solution that's acceptable. And part of that is the criteria for acceptability.

22:48 Wes: I mean, one of the other weird Things about normativity is even if I did discover the shouldness particles, I could ask why? Why should I do it anyway? And I think this is what Moore calls the open question argument. Any naturalistic solution is not going to work because I can just re raise the question in light of a natural observational solution. And this is one version of realism, the intuitionist version where I have to appeal to something non natural which is a like. Like appealing to a Platonic form. And that's supposed to suppose in a way supposed to bring this open question to an end.

23:23 Mark: The way that Seth, you were saying it earlier, you know, you could figure out what's right but then still have to figure out like well why should I do it? And that it's really hard to. Because the word right seems to have the normativity built right into it. So really if we're saying there's a descriptive task and then there's applying normativity or obligation to it, we probably want to use ideally not the word right. It could be like what society calls right or you know, some things go in box A and some things go in box B. Some things make people happy, some things don't.

23:57 Wes: It has to be right from the standpoint of my own natural dispositions. This has to be a pre reflective sense of what I think is right

24:05 Mark: according to any theory. I'm just. If we're talking the most general ways about any moral theory that you might come up with, then like so the basic whatever God says is right is right. So there's the things that God says is right and the things that God says is wrong. And you could still, you know, we. Existentialism is sort of where we ran into this verse. Like even if God was there making those commands, like why should I listen to God? God's just another. Is it just his power makes them right? It seems like that values are more free floating.

We have, as Dylan was saying, this choice is. It seems like it's inescapable. But if there's something that makes it actually obligatory, then yes, okay, we could still choose. But it would be more like choice for Augustine. You could choose the good or you could choose the evil. It's not that you could choose whatever. And there's no, you know, we're in the existentialist post moral world.

24:56 Seth: I mean this was getting me back actually to the foot when I was thinking about it. It's so. I get what you're saying, Mark. It'd be difficult. But if we want to explain or describe the moral situation using non normative terms, and then save normativity for talking about the obligatory aspect of it. It's going to be hard. I mean, that's not going to be an easy thing to do. But I was thinking more in response to what Dylan was saying earlier about choice in this particular situation. The concept of obligation somehow is going to tie back to an individual who makes a choice, Choice A or choice B, whatever choice they make, being in a position to justify it.

Obligation is connected to the notion of justification. And justification for an individual can be kind of loosely construed as, you know, having reasons for. And so our idea of obligation that's associated, it's like, okay, this is the right thing to do, or this is the moral thing to do, or this is what a good person would do. Now why should I do it? Then it becomes, well, I want to be a good person or I want it. You know, you can kind of see the chain of reasoning. And maybe this is what all that Foot meant about practical reason. And maybe I overreacted in our part three, Mark, when I was railing about that aspect of it.

26:24 Wes: I think it's helpful to look at 12 and 13. She's trying to tell us what the problem is. And she starts by talking about a theory of moral concepts. And moral concepts are precisely those concepts, right, which motivate us to act in certain ways. They have that practical dimension. And if we're going to have an adequate theory of moral concepts, we want to do two things. We want to explain, we want to say how it is that they have this influence. And so we can give a kind of explanatory psychological theory, for instance, like Hume does, to that effect.

And we might want to say, well, to motivate they have to involve desire, whatever, however, we want to go on in that direction, but we also have to do something else. And I think this is often missed. And why? She'll say why? The normative question often slips through the cracks. We have to give a criterion of justificatory adequacy, which is what Seth was just talking about. Justification is going to come into the picture. So she'll say on 13 whether we are justified in according this kind of importance to morality, which as Mark pointed out, is confusing, right, because we're already saying, well, this would be the moral thing to do.

And then we're asking the question, what should we really do? Should I comply with morality? Right. So I get this metamoral, meta ethical question, so to speak, in relation to the ethical. And in many cases, right. Once we move past Hobbes and the. And the realists. In many cases, that questioning of what I ought to do on first blush is a questioning of the things that I'm naturally inclined to think are right and wrong, whether because that's innate in human nature, as Hume thought, or because we've been habituated in certain ways as Mill thought.

That's what's going on. So the need for normative justification is there because I can always ask that why question. It's not enough for you to tell me that God commands this. It's also not even enough for my conscience to tell me that this is the right thing. I need some level of reflection above that.

28:33 Dylan: So it's really the skeptical instinct, Right?

28:36 Wes: Yeah. She goes on to talk about skepticism right after that. Yeah.

28:40 Mark: One of the things you'd brought up, Dylan, is about are the moral rules. I don't think you use the word determinative. But do they always tell you what to do? Do they under. Determine which. I think that's part of the first task here, this explanatory. So we're trying to say which are the ones. And again, to make this concrete, we just did Hume. So Hume says these are the ones that we approve of. And why do we approve of them? Well, he doesn't say it's because of evolution or something, but, you know, it's generally because of human nature. Maybe some.

Some of it has to do with our culture, but. So there's a causal story and there's also the content. Which box are they in, the yes box or the no box? And that. That is all part of explanatory adequacy. But then the normative adequacy, pointing out that there's actually more to it than that. And we got to that at the end of our Hume discussion. Okay, now we've got things. We see that we have these sentiments. Why should we approve of these sentiments? If it was just evolution, like evolution wants me to go have sex with as many people as possible, do I, because I'm programmed that way, I should approve of that.

So this is her.

29:50 Wes: Well, let's think of a. Yeah, reflective

29:52 Mark: endorsement is going to be ultimately her.

29:54 Wes: Let's think of a harder. A harder example. Right? Because it. Okay, what if evolution says you should be nice to everyone? I think is, you know, the evolutionary theory might still be inadequate because you might find that you're a pushover. In other words, you can reflect on. You could say, well, I'm so evolutionarily predetermined to be Nice to people to do the right thing. Let's say that I couldn't stop doing it even if I thought about it and figured out, well, this is really bad for me. But the point is the justificatory adequacy of knowing that this has certain causes, whether evolutionary or psychological.

Whatever scientific domain we want to examine that from, that explanatory adequacy is not going to support justificatory adequacy because from some perspective, I might find out that the thing that I'm programmed to do is just not a good thing for me. It might make me miserable, right? Not a good thing for me. From some other point of view or even from the moral point of view, right. You can get an internal conflict, oddly enough.

30:56 Dylan: I mean, there are other normative questions that aren't ethical. And she sort of points at this fact that there's normativity and normativity thinking that goes on in all kinds of things that aren't just ethical and logic, epistemology, aesthetics. Yeah, yeah, Aesthetics is a good example. One that's sort of ethical. Adjacent to me, that feels helpful in this kind of thing is thinking about health. And everything that you would say, well, you have very, very physical things that would drive you to say to want to eat or to need to drink, right?

But then you have choices to make. In some of those cases, you ultimately have choices about what to eat and what to drink and when to eat and when to drink. And there's this correlation with how you feel. And so then you very quickly get into this notion of choosing to do things to make you healthy. And those end up being sort of normative questions about, well, what should you be doing to make you healthy and what does health look like? And then you get to, I think what Wes is talking about, that what those solutions are and even what is healthy ends up depending on individual people.

If you say, well, you need to go walk 10,000 steps a day, right? But if you don't have any legs, you're not going to go do that, right? You say, well, I just. I didn't mean that. I didn't mean literally go walk 10,000 steps a day. You need to do something like that. It's going to depend upon what healthy looks like, is going to have a strong dependence on the body that you have. And so I think you end up. Maybe I'm off on a tangent, but this question of what's the content and what's the reason for the explanatory piece and the justificatory piece, I Think it's helpful for me to think about it in terms of health as well.

32:47 Mark: Well, and that seems like, you know, we keep referring to that in, in any of our ethics episodes as it seems like that's an is that contains an odd right. Because it is like is it healthy? Is it? And she is, along with every other really good, most of the other really good ethicists we read, going to take that into account. So the last, the last person she considers after Hume before sort of wrapping up this section, she's going to launch into her own view, which I'll admit that I don't completely know if I was right in characterizing that as we are abandoning. I know that there it is a matter of giving reasons without pointing to a metaphysical thing, but it's got to be more to it than that.

33:26 Wes: Well, it's still within the domain of reflective endorsement. Right. Which we already have with Hume.

33:31 Dylan: Yep.

33:31 Wes: It's just the Kantian version of reflective endorsement. So we've moved away from Clark. We're going to reject substantive moral realism. But the question is, and this is what Dylan was getting at, is whether we on reflection endorse the moral motive that we have. And we can use health as a criterion, we can use happiness as a criterion, we can use selfish interest as a criterion. These are legitimate points of view from which to assess morality. And it just turns out, and this is part of the argument that Hume was making, that actually. Yeah. From a selfish perspective, morality is good for me.

34:10 Dylan: Yeah.

34:10 Wes: Which is not to say that it's normative. Right. Normativity just boils down to self interest. That's not what that's saying. It's saying that we happen to have these moral impulses which in many cases are selfless and are self sacrificing. But even if, if we examined it from this other non moral point of view, which I think health and goodness by the way, are pre moral in this scheme.

34:36 Mark: Yep.

34:36 Wes: Even though they're using the word good. Right?

34:38 Dylan: Yep.

34:39 Wes: They're good in the premoral Nietzsche sense. But the virtue ethics sense.

34:43 Seth: Yeah.

34:43 Wes: Even if I take this other non moral point of view, I get the same answer. And that's where I say, okay, I've done that reflection from that point of view and I can endorse this thing that I was already inclined to do because my conscience tells me to do it or because society is telling me to do it or whatever.

35:02 Dylan: Yeah.

35:02 Mark: The final step after Hume, before she gets to her own, is Bernard Williams, who is a fellow that maybe will read on his own. Or maybe we'll think that what she has said about him is quite enough here. But he's the only one that's explicitly going Aristotelian and saying that there is what you were calling premoral. Those are actually the essence of the moral is does this alleged morality that this particular culture is foisting, does this cause us to flourish or not? So it's exactly, you know, how we took Nietzsche's critique of morality, et cetera.

Nietzsche is not saying all morality is junk. He's saying this particular morality that's been handed down to me does not jibe with these premoral things like health and vigor and flourishing. And so I condemn it. I condemn Christianity. And so that's where Bernard Williams is coming from, except he's using it that we have lots of cultures to pick from. We have lots of strains within a particular culture to pick from. We have lots. Should we advocate for traditional male, female roles? Should we be hyper masculine? Well, let's just put it. Give it the flourishing test.

Because I think that there's no serious question, well, fine, I'm flourishing. Why do I want to flourish? Right. Isn't that kind of built in?

36:14 Dylan: That's what an Aristotelian would say.

36:16 Mark: Sure.

36:17 Wes: Right. You could ask, why do you want to flourish? Yeah, but remember, this is, in a way, from your own point of view because it's reflective. So maybe you're a person who doesn't like flourishing and you do the reflective endorsement test and find out that, well, morality is conducive to flourishing and therefore I'm going to reject it on reflection, because I'm just this perverse person who doesn't want to flourish. That could happen. But human beings, it turns out, in general, aren't designed that way.

36:47 Mark: I think maybe flourishing is another one of those words like, right where it is, you know, the normative component is built in. So instead of asking, do I want to flourish? It's more asking, well, does this behavior constitute flourishing? You've given me some evidence. You know, it seems to make me more vigorous. I seem to be more happy with my life. But maybe that's not the point. Maybe the point should be to serve God and completely empty myself in the service of that one thing. You know, we can always at least keep asking the question that seems to be where she's going to ultimately go with her, that she thinks this is actually, even though you've never thought of Kant this way, this explains what the Kantian categorical imperative is, is that you Just continue to question until you're beyond anything empirical at all.

37:31 Wes: Well, yeah, she's going to take what Hume said about the sentiments, and she's just going to lift it up to the level of the will. That's what she thinks Kant does. So it's still that human nature. It's just about the nature of the will as opposed to the sentiments. So we get the same reflective endorsement procedure. That's where all this is headed. So, yeah, I think you get a lot of this by the time you get to Hume.

37:52 Mark: So if we explain what that concept, reflective endorsement is, that's the whole title of the second lecture that she thinks is in Hume, is in Williams, and is in what she's going to advocate for, which is just that on reflection, would we endorse this thing? Do we endorse this thing? And that's why I'm saying, well, you could always reflect further.

38:12 Wes: So the way she puts it on page 49 is, even if we're inclined to believe an action is right and motivated by that right, that's just our natural inclination, we can always say, well, is that motive? Is that the right motive to have? Right. This is what we've been saying and what she calls the reflective endorsement method, abbreviated in my notes as rem, conveniently because it's repeated so many times. Basically, we see if we're still inclined to endorse those moral claims, the ones that we were naturally inclined to from the beginning, but if we reflect on them, are we going to still be inclined to endorse them? And then we got to figure out, okay, so from what standpoint can we engage in this kind of reflection? It turns out there are various standpoints.

39:03 Mark: Given the rem, will we stand in the place where we live?

39:07 Wes: So in other words, in the next section 2.1.2, she's going to characterize Hume. She's going to say the normative question. It's not whether. Right. Once you say we have certain natural human sentiments, then the question isn't as per the substance. Moral realists do these. Are they true in the sense of lining up with an external reality? That's not the question. The question is, on reflection, do we have reason to be glad that we have such sentiments? Is morality good for us? That is the ultimate quote question.

39:37 Dylan: Isn't that what's meant by grounding morality in human nature?

39:44 Wes: Yeah, because what's good for us depends on how we're structured.

39:47 Dylan: Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, she makes this nice link between the sentimentalists like Hume and like, for instance, Aristotle, that since morality is grounded in human sentiments, the normative question cannot be whether it dictates, whether its dictates are true. Instead it is whether we have reason to be glad that we have such sentiments and to allow ourselves to be governed by them. The question is whether morality is a good thing for us. And then she points out that some of the classical Greek philosophers, in particular Aristotle, did this as well in grounding morality in human nature.

40:22 Seth: Yeah.

40:23 Wes: They reject realism and ground morality in human dispositions. And then the question is whether we ought to endorse those dispositions on reflection.

40:32 Dylan: And we probably, I guess maybe in part two, go back to the restating the problem, even though realism gets rejected in this whole account. What is the realist argument?

40:46 Mark: Yeah, I recall her having a kind of hard to follow but really interesting response to that. Not just that, the argument from queerness, which I didn't remember that name, but that we've used before of like, what could these normative things be? That Wes was saying, we don't see little normativities jumping around in the world. So that's always been my suspicion, but that's not really a definitive argument and it certainly is not an argument against. Well, yeah, so is G.E. moore, who said, well, okay, there is a special kind of thing I think I came out of when learning about G.E.

moore in undergrad, thinking, oh, I was wrong about naturalism like that. Naturalism is sort of a crude predisposition, you know, on the par with the many things that we've said about scientism in this. Like, of course you want to be pro science, of course you want. But, hmm, maybe you have to think about obligation and normativity and say, well, there's. That's not all there is in the world is atoms in the void. There's just to talk about the human world, not the supernatural world, but the human world, you have to talk about some peculiar non natural things.

But even that she thinks doesn't work.

41:56 Wes: Yeah, it doesn't work. We ultimately need this method of reflective endorsement because if there are these natural normative entities out there and we discover them, we could still ask the question, but must I really do this? That's basically. It just doesn't terminate that question, which is part of the point that Moore was making.

42:16 Dylan: Yeah, yeah. It doesn't hold any force on us.

42:19 Seth: Right.

42:19 Dylan: This is the problem of morality and the whole. And the question of having choices. It's maybe this is all. This is my physicist way of putting it, but if you're on the earth and you Throw something out the window, it's going to fall to the ground. And if it doesn't fall to the ground, you're going to come up with some other reason, some other cause that's going to say that it took the path that it took. And that's just not true in morality.

42:45 Wes: The moral realist ultimately just has to say to you, if you ask the question, why is it right? They're going to say, well, didn't you intuit that moral particle correctly? And that's all they can say. And if you don't see that, then you're stuck.

42:57 Dylan: And also, part of the counter to the realist is that I'm still completely left with the problem of whether. Of why I should do the right thing at all. It's missing that just justif. The just. The justific. Justific. I. I swear I said it like four times earlier. Now I can't pronounce it.

43:23 Wes: She'll say, I'm 39. Yeah, realism, actually substantive moral realism just refuses to answer the normative question. Yeah, it just says it's not possible in a way. So we're just going to buy fiat, end that, regress if we can.

43:38 Mark: You always have to end somewhere.

43:40 Dylan: Yeah. We're gonna look quizzically at you and say, really? You're asking that question?

43:44 Mark: Yeah.

43:44 Seth: Well, is she kind of. I didn't think about this while I was reading her, but listening to you all in the last 10 minutes or so, she's sort of making the point of like, it's all well and good to talk about what, you know, what's the right thing to do, whatever. But the reason why she wants to bring it back to Kant is that he's the one who's actually focused on obligation, which is really ultimately the critical question. And it just never occurred to me to think about it this way. I mean, it's. Mark, I think I told you. I was like, well, if she's gonna, you know, be a Kantian, I don't know I'm gonna be hostile and all this because I have this thing about duty and all this, but if I'm gonna have to. If Korsgaard is gonna make me genuflect to Wes after 16 years of doing this podcast, I don't know how I'm gonna feel about that.

44:33 Mark: I stand behind Wes not being more a epistemological Kantian than a moral content. I feel like that's never been your big torch, right, Wes?

44:42 Dylan: Or.

44:42 Wes: No, it's not. I mean, I don't really even think Epistemologically anymore. That's my torch. But yeah, Korsgaard is going to give you. Wow, you're going to. It's going to blow your mind in the second half. But anyway, what I want to say here too, just is to answer this question of how she's criticizing the moral realist, she's going to want to also say that the moral realist doesn't tell us why we're actually using these normative terms. They're going to say, okay, why do we use normative terms? Because there are things with normative properties out there in the world. And then ethics becomes this epistemological and theoretical exercise, right? The practical gets kind of subsumed into

45:25 Mark: the ethical, into the ethical or the theoretical.

45:30 Wes: Theoretical. The practical gets, yeah, incorporated into the theoretical and the epistemological. And so, right. The substantive moral realist thinks that. And the skeptic agrees, by the way, that the function of normative concepts is like other concepts, explanation and description. But normative concepts are for actually for figuring out what we should believe, right? Epistemic norms and what we should do, ethical norms. And that is always going to involve self conscious rationality. It's always going to involve reflection on her point of view. If you don't get to that point of reflection where someone is actually trying to answer that question that they could always ask why should I do this? Then you're not really addressing the nature of normative moral concepts.

46:20 Mark: All right, well, if this was confusing to you, fear not. We have another hour on just the first half of the book before we even get to her view to hear more about her take on Hume. We might have finished Hobbes and Pufendorf, but everything after that we still have plenty more to say about. So please come back next week if you don't want to wait till next week. Become a partially Examined Life supporter. PartiallyExaminedLife.com support. There are a number of options for doing that. If you do it through our website or through Patreon, then you should see it as the next thing in your feed or at least very soon. Otherwise, if you support us through Apple or don't support us at all, we'll just talk to you next week.

46:55 Wes: Thanks, thanks.

46:56 Dylan: Thanks.