Ep. 371: Christine Korsgaard on Normativity (Part One)

0:00 Mark: This fall, I will be teaching a new online class, Foundational Texts in Political Philosophy. Learn more about it and express your interest@priallyexaminelife.com class. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by. Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 371 is something like, how are we subject to moral obligations? Continuing to discuss Christine's The Sources of Normativity, now moving toward positive view in lectures three and four. The lectures were delivered in 1992, published in 1996. This is Mark Linsenmayer taking two to make a reason in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:48 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, intrinsically and not extrinsically motivated. In Austin, Texas.

0:54 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, trying to figure out which of my impulses count as reasons. In Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:59 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey just trying to make sense of the noise in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:04 Mark: All right, so we get the neo. Well, she attacks someone as a Neo Kantian. So she's not a Neo Kantian, but she says she is giving something she had described in the previous chapters, that the outcome of this reflective endorsement view ends up being something like Kantianism, where you are your own authority. And she actually even says that the very first set of views that she considered, the voluntarists like Hobbes, that say we only have obligations because there is a boss that commands things of us, that that's actually in some way correct.

It's just that you are the boss. Your deliberating self is the boss of your acting self. And it's a legitimate authority. It can put sanctions on you, can make you feel guilty. And so, yeah, that's the way it works. And there's. Even though it's just me doing it to myself, there's still. Because we're doing it with reasons which are inherently public.

2:01 Wes: Right?

2:01 Mark: She gives this Wittgenstein private language argument sort of thing for why when you are giving reasons to yourself, you're not just doing something very solipsistic. This really is invoking the third person, the public, to command yourself. And the thing that she's adding to Kantianism is something about identities that you have certain identities among which is your identity as a human being. And there are obligations that go with those identities. There are things those identities rule out that were you to do this thing, you would no longer be that kind of creature.

And we value our identities. We need them. So that's how we boss ourselves around. As you say, are you an American citizen? Are you a Member of your family, well, then you better be faithful to your country, to your family, to humanity at large. The one about humanity at large underlies all the rest of them. So, yeah, we are committed to these identities and therefore we have to obey our own commands.

3:00 Dylan: Yeah. I want to rephrase what you just said about the way in which you talk about obligations, because the way you just phrased it makes me think of the way in which we talk about obligation as an external force on us all the time. Whereas I think it's coming through in this way. And the way it works is that it's definitional. And so it's an obligation in the sense that we are defined by our obligations. We become real and human beings and ourselves through our obligations. And to say that we're obligated to something doesn't mean that something else is forcing us to do anything.

It comes out, I guess, in the law question, you know, you're legislating yourself. But I think it's very easy to slip into the notion that I am obligated because I have something that I have to do because of something extrinsic. It really comes down to that I am not who I am. I am who and what I am by what I do and what I say I ought to do.

4:09 Seth: It's like I kind of am in the neighborhood. Dylan just described it. But you have, you can call them identities or you can call them roles. So like you said, you're an American and you're a man or a woman and you're a parent or you're not, or you're. You're variously, you have all these different roles that you play, all these different identities, and then each of them gives you reasons to act in a certain way in a given particular situation. And you make the choice about which of those reasons you want to accept and to drive or motivate your action, which is a de facto way of choosing an identity.

4:58 Dylan: Yep.

4:59 Seth: So to speak. Yeah.

5:00 Mark: Right. So when you're having a moral conflict, it's often because you have multiple identities that are saying, you know, my family member is doing something illegal, should I go with the identity that is a family member or should go, Should I go with the identity of law abiding citizen? And, you know, those can just be difficult. She does believe that there are Antigone kind of situations, moral tragedy situations. It's one of the things that makes life hard.

5:27 Seth: She says, absolutely.

5:29 Mark: And so that was heartening to me because I usually, I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment, but I usually take it as a reductio against morality as a single thing with a single rule that's going to solve everything. But she does think that you're, you know, we cannot help but be human beings and be sort of citizens of the world. And that is the identity that allows us to have any other identities at all. So we could examine whether this is actually the case and what she actually says about that. But. So this does end up. So if the, the family.

6:00 Wes: Well, it's the. What supplies normativity to other identities.

6:03 Mark: Yes.

6:04 Seth: So.

6:04 Mark: So if the family member in question.

6:06 Wes: Yeah.

6:06 Mark: Is a murderer, then like not murdering is something that actually should override my identity as a family member.

6:13 Wes: Yeah. Some identities cannot be actually normative, like being an assassin, for instance. They're not consistent with the identity of being a human being who values humanity. So you can't just choose any identity you like. But we should remember the whole exercise here is to figure out where normativity comes from. And she had started out with Hobbesian voluntarism and the idea that obligation must be grounded in an authority that can sanction us. Which on the face of it seems like a weird sort of view. Right. If you take it as, in the Hobbesian sense as well, authority.

Because the sovereign can punish us, we're obligated to do anything they want us to do, no matter how horrible that is. Although, as we see in this lecture, these lectures, she'll show the sense in which there's an insight there to that. But by the end of the first two lectures, we had gotten to the point where we had rejected a variety of positions, including voluntarism and a certain kind of realism. And the problem with voluntarism was if authority comes from the sovereign, then what sanctions the sovereign? What gives the sovereign his normativity?

And if we become realist and say, well, there are these inherently normative entities out in the world, and that's where normativity comes from. We're not really just giving a reason, we're just blocking the regress by fiat. So we landed on this idea of reflexive endorsement. We landed on this idea that normativity somehow comes out of the structure of human self consciousness, where we have impulses on one level, and then reflectively, we can see whether or not we're going to transform those impulses into reasons to act by seeing if we can endorse them.

And the criterion for that endorsement is whether they're good for us or whether they, from some point of view or another other than Morality other than the moral point of view, but also from the moral point of view, whether we can justify them as good for us. It could even be from the standpoint of self interest. But none of that got us to moral obligation. And so that's what these lectures three and four are going to do for us. Lecture three is going to try and get us, cash us out a concept of obligation to ourselves. And then lecture four will try and get us obligations to others.

And the pathway to obligations to ourselves in lecture three is, as you guys pointed out, this connection to identity. So we need to say what it is that is so bad about doing the wrong thing, so to speak. And that must be sourced, she thinks, and is something analogous to self preservation. And we'll even get a grounding in pain and pleasure because pain is a perception of a threat to our physical existence. And likewise with morality, certain actions are a threat to, to certain types of identity.

9:04 Mark: As a side note, I sure wish I had this when I was writing my undergrad thesis. So I probably have mentioned on earlier shows in my undergrad thesis, the thing that my advisor Peter Railton, one of the big writers in this area said was original and exciting was that whenever you make a normative claim, you're underlyingly making an identity claim about yourself. So when you say, you know, I should obey the Ten Commandments, you're saying I am a child of God, I should, you know, you're making some. And I sort of just left it implicit that like some of these identity claims, like I am a child of God, are probably embarrassing and metaphysically untenable and that some of them are tenable.

But I didn't even run with that and I didn't even like go into real life moral examples. It was just purely a metaethics paper. And she is just so cogently and in a down to earth way that relates to all the relevant literature saying how identities connect with obligations and how the various identities interact. That man, I wish, you know, I was writing it in 1993, but after these lectures were given, but before they were put in a book.

10:12 Wes: So, and we saw, we saw foreshadowing of this right in Hume with what I call the scope problem. Because not every creature is so constituted as to be subject to morality. And so we knew from the very beginning that we need to have a certain kind of constitution to be subject to moral norms. And that's a clue that normativity is very, very closely connected to the structure and the kinds of creatures that we are or the constitution of our minds, as Hume would put it.

10:43 Seth: The other thing that's really cool about this is the concept of identity includes. It's implicit in the concept of identity is something like scope as well, Wes, but in a different sense. So when you identify as the member of a specific family, the scope is the people in your immediate family. When you identify as an American, let's say, or a Brit or whatever, the scope is all the people in your country. And if you identify as a citizen of the world, right, or a person of the kingdom of ends, as she points out, talking about Kant, then it's kind of the universal kingdom or something like that.

But the idea being it helps explain conflict of reasons. And it also, I don't think it helps resolve the conflict of reasons per se, but what it does is help explain why there could be a conflict based on scope. And then that also helps explain why certain kinds of identities are just excluded from the moral right. Because if you say, look, I'm a member of the human species or I'm a member of the entire world of conscious moral beings, there are going to be certain identities that are just going to come into conflict with that. Being a parent won't, being an assassin will.

And so you can begin to piece together why you would be able to make claims about identities and then also why you would be able to talk about conflict between identities which, you know, as Mark said, aren't resolvable by appeal to anything else. And then, you know, the other piece of it is because she is sort of turning this into a Kantian exercise is she says, when you make the choice to act on a reason that's provided by identity A or identity B, you're essentially obligating yourself, which is the same thing as saying you're making that reason a law for yourself.

And it helped me, against my 20 years of apparently ad hominem bias against Kant to understand that concept. You know, that she says, by virtue of being a reflexive consciousness, you have, in a sense, two identities. You have the identity as a legislator, somebody who's telling yourself what to do, and you have the identity of the person who's doing what they're being obligated or told to do. And so you're in this kind of weird split consciousness. But when you do make that decision, you're essentially saying, this is the law for me. And presumably, and this is worth maybe another different conversation of if somebody else was in the same situation as me and had the same identities as me, this is what I would think they would have to do as well or should do.

13:39 Dylan: Yeah, I think you can go a lot further than that, Seth. Yeah, and I also, I find it very powerful about the nature of obligation as defining who we are. But I don't know that it in the end does all the work and I don't know that that work can get done that one might want it to to sort out things about the kinds of lives we ought to live. Like even the, Wes, you opened with, well, you know, being an assassin is not a identity on the table because it annihilates the obligation we have as human beings and that's how we're constituted and that kind of thing.

Or even just something a little bit less extreme, like just being an extreme partisan of a given sub community of humanity doesn't seem to be excluded at all. And not that it should be. I'm just saying that it's not just conflict, it's just what kinds of obligations and what kinds of accountability do we hold each other to in our law givingness. And that comes down to. It seems unavoidable that it comes down to a certain amount of agreement on those reasons and the reasons for that universal flourishing is a good. Those things that are good for me and it's not clear that it's inconsistent in a way that isn't totally admissible that I would or totally just sort of just part of the landscape that I would say, well, certain kinds of people, I don't really care about their flourishing.

15:11 Mark: So we're edging toward her putting forward of Kant's categorical imperative and why it should. You know, making something a law to yourself means that it should be, you know, as Kant says, something that everybody could do and that it. This is if it doesn't mean exactly the same thing as the moral law. And she makes a distinction between the categorical imperative and the moral law that Kant does not. It at least means that we should not be doing these assassin like things. I found that the most difficult part of the reading and I definitely think we should look very closely at the text in there.

One thing that was, you know, a very down to earth thing that she expresses late in the paper that I find surprising. You know, these identities we've seen, they all provide prima facie reasons to do something and therefore prima facie obligations not to do certain things. And these reasons are public, as we've said again, the Wittgensteinian argument that she gives we really need to look at very closely because it's. There's a lot to it. But the way, the same way that I obligate myself, other people can obligate me. So just somebody calling my name, just somebody giving me reasons, somebody, even an animal.

So she is able to get animals into here in a way that Kant does not. An animal expressing, you know, squealing in pain puts a prima facie obligation on me. I can choose to ignore that, but it's one of the things that is in the mix. So if you are. So where's obligation come from? What sort of metaphysically weird thing like, well, anybody saying anything to you is putting a moral obligation on you, which, you know, might be very overru if they're telling you to do something horrible or unreasonable or whatever. But like that's where obligation comes from.

It's very basic.

16:52 Dylan: Well, and the way you described it, I think highlights the way in which obligation is like any other kind of impulse or something you would detect with your senses. And in this respect, we are structurally biologically capable of sensing obligation. Right. And so the kinds of things that. It's basically another kind of stimuli that comes to us through language.

17:19 Seth: Yeah, and you just said the magic word there, Dylan. Language. I mean, we really need to work through the argument itself. But essentially, you know, she says that the use of language, the structure of language, the way in which we communicate is inherently obligatory and not necessarily morally obligatory. But because she talks about. I gotta tell you, this resonated so hard with me because, you know, I'm constantly in search of silence, like I'm trying to get away from seven year olds and others in my household, just so I like, don't hear noise and Daddy, Daddy, Daddy. Or here, look at this. Hey, I drew an axolotl.

18:02 Dylan: Isn't the problem that you're not hearing noise?

18:05 Seth: Yes, I'm sorry, I'm hearing language. Sorry I said noise, but it's like, and I use the term, it's like colonization. You're colonizing my brain with your words and you're making it so I'm not allowed to have my own thoughts. It's like I can't not pay attention and I can't not be thinking or it's like we have this thing with language, but also our relationship to other human beings where we're just naturally oriented towards them when they speak or when they call for our attention. You can't avoid that. You can't just completely ignore it. And so talking about the power of, of language and it just, that resonated really, really deeply with me.

18:47 Mark: And it sounds very un-Kantian that you don't think of like what is more empirical than like just things, you know, like animals bleating in front of you and is going to say, well you know, look, that's not coming from a place that has to oblig directly. You have no moral responsibility to them. Whereas Korsgaard is saying that even our responding to humans and their actual language is derivative is related to how we would respond to anybody, you know, whether they're using language or not. Whenever we get the sense that somebody has a concern is in trouble, it is something that is potentially my concern does not sound very.

I mean maybe Kant would come up with that as a result, but it seems that it is not an immediate phenomenological thing. That's like what the weak pre rational people would do who don't know any moral philosophy and don't know how to do moral reasoning is just to react to the kid drowning in the puddle in front of them. That's a very just a natural instinctive thing. That's you know, moral reflection takes more than that. But she wants to say that Kant ultimately will or you know, her version of Kantianism, which she says at the beginning, like I want to tweak Kantianism in a couple significant ways.

But she doesn't as part of the summary at least say well here's what I didn't like about Kant or something like that, other than the animals thing specifically that I noticed. Should we just get into lecture three here?

20:09 Wes: Yeah, let's get into it. Maybe a good place to start is 3.2.2 because this is, I think we've already kind of discussed her introduction in 3.2.1. She's just giving us a reprising the fact that self consciousness gives us normative problems because it's divides us into two, the reflective part of us and our impulses. And then we can see whether or not we want to endorse. Should I yield to an impulse to do something, for instance? That's sort of the principal moral question. And the solution is that we might turn desires into reasons to act.

20:44 Mark: Yeah, I just wanted to throw in, I really like her formulation. The word reason refers to a kind of reflective success, right? That we have these desires. Which one am I going to go with when I say well that I'm hungry and that's the reason that I'm going to go, okay, well I've made it into a reason so I can stop. And she says as exclamations the terms good, right? They mean I'm satisfied, I'm happy. I'm committed. You've convinced me. Let's go. They mean the work of reflection is done. That's kind of cool.

21:14 Wes: And then she'll get us into. There's a kind of freedom involved in reflective endorsement. And this is 3.2.2. And this is a bit of a thorny, thorny spot because she wants to defend a sense of freedom that determinism doesn't undermine. And I don't know that we need to go into the very specific arguments. Someone might say, well, if causal determinism is true, your action could be predicted in certain ways. It would be written from the beginning of all time because you'd just be a cog in the machine and everything would unfold according to natural laws, as it must.

And the same thing with you wouldn't have the ability to do otherwise. Very classic problem for philosophical theories of morality because we couldn't do otherwise. And we can't be responsible if we can't do otherwise. And she wants to kind of save a concept of freedom that is different from responsibility and is not sort of set up from this third person point of view where we want to say, oh, well, there's something special about human entities where even from this third person scientific point of view we can treat them as these outside of the causal order in some sense.

No, we are inside of the causal order if we're looking at things from this third person scientific point of view. But from the first person point of view, when we're inside a deliberative process, we still have to do this thing where we say, okay, am I going to do this? I have this impulse to do something, am I going to act on the impulse? There's a type of freedom in that deliberative process that I think she doesn't think is undermined by the scientific worldview, as she calls it.

22:53 Mark: I would love to have asked her why she just completely avoids the word phenomenological. It's too much historical baggage with that word. But yeah, throughout there's this theme of, yeah, we want ethics to be naturalistic, we want it to be compatible with natural science. But natural science is all about describing things from a third person perspective. And so part of our ontology, the stuff that we admit that actually exists, has to be things that are required to explain, to make sense of, are what happens from the first person point of view. So yes, we do have freedom. Reasons are an inherently normative thing that it's not like there are reasons floating out in the world, but like as we experience the world, reasons are there and they are inherently normative. And this is just ends up being really important.

23:39 Wes: The way she puts this in this section, she'll say the freedom discovered in reflection is not a theoretical property which can also be seen by scientists considering the agent's deliberations. Third, personally and from the outside side, it is from within the deliberative perspective that we see our desires as providing suggestions which we may take or leave. You will say this means that our freedom is only, quote, unquote, is not real. Only if you have defined the real as what can be identified by scientists looking at things. Third, personally and from the outside.

But reasons turn out to be real even if we can give scientific explanations of thought and behavior. This is a point I've kind of harped on in the show many times before, because I think it originally comes from Kant's groundwork for the metaphysics of morals. And it applies just as much to theoretical reflection as to practical reflection. Right. If a scientist has an insight when Einstein discovers that E equals MC squared or something like that, the fact that he's having that insight and has reasoned his way to a conclusion is not undermined by the fact that we could give a third person account of how he arrives at that conclusion, which only involves saying, well, this one brain state follows from another brain state.

The same thing, with maybe a more simpler example, an arithmetic calculation. When you say, well, why are you saying two plus two equals four? Well, I counted it and that's what it seems like. And someone will say, no, it's not because you did the calculation. It's because you had the brain states corresponding to 2 plus 2 and then the brain state corresponding to 4. And one must follow from another by a law of nature. Those are two different orders of explanation. And that third person explanation does not undermine the first person point of view.

We still do the arithmetic calculation. We still make scientific discoveries. We still make decisions deliberatively when we want to act.

25:25 Dylan: We still act with freedom when we're doing our reasoning.

25:29 Wes: Yeah, under this conception of freedom, which just means being reason responsive, right?

25:33 Dylan: Yeah. And I really liked this as well. And I think it's a wonderful articulation of how we manifest how our reasoning is a manifestation of our freedom. I did wonder, or maybe it doesn't matter to the extent to which we don't act in exercising our freedom. So putting aside for a second the question of whether or not our reasons are determined, it doesn't seem the case that all of our actions are choices based on reason or are reasoned even In a weak sense of the word. She says at the beginning, on 3, 2, 2. If the bidding from the outside is desire, then the point is that the reflective mind must endorse the desire before it can act on it.

It must say to itself that the desire is a reason. As Kant puts it, we must make it our maxim to act on the desire. Although we may do what desire bids us, we do it freely. So that seems to go too far. It doesn't seem to. Well, I'd like to hear more about. It's not what she says applies. Seems very clearly applies to us being actors capable of freedom because we're capable of reason. But that doesn't seem to be the same thing, is that every act that we commit is an act of freedom and every act we commit is an act based on reason.

26:59 Mark: So again, reason is where just deliberation stops. So even if you just do something impulsively, it's not that you have stopped and deliberated, it is that you got to the answer so fast, I'm going to endorse that desire and you just went with it. So that is an application of reason you elevated.

27:17 Seth: No, wait, wait, wait.

27:19 Wes: Yeah. No, no, no, no. She will explicitly agree with Mark on this absurd. You've endorsed, right? So you, even when you fail to do any deliberation, even when you fail to think, even when you're just doing everything that desire demands, she thinks that the absence of deliberation there and conscious reflective endorsement, really you are just on a certain level endorsing those desires because that's what we do as self conscious creatures and you're making those desires in the reasons. So even if it doesn't look like our prototypical picture of reasoning, it's a very short circuited and crude form of reasoning.

27:58 Dylan: No, but it's still going too far, right? Because there are plenty of studies that show that we have physical actions that we commit without it going through our reasoning faculties at all. Now you could go and say our entire nervous system is part of our reasoning and such that every physical action that is committed by a human being, it doesn't stand up that every action of a human being, every activity of us physically is reason in that way.

28:26 Wes: Yeah, I don't think she would say that. I think that's. We can agree on that.

28:30 Dylan: That's what we're going down to, like every choice, even as unconscious as it possibly could be. Just playing out what Mark said, even as before we even thought about it, we've actually implicitly reasoned about it.

28:42 Mark: This sounds like Sartre, that even our sort of spontaneous acts are free. But yes, I want to hear from Seth because this was the whole. We had a part three to our foot episode, just he and I. And this was Seth's whole beef on that was that even Foot, in addition to Korsgaard, was too focused on this model of people typically reasoning, yeah, go seth.

29:01 Seth: Well, I'm 100% with Dylan on this one because if you're going to talk about morality relying on reflective consciousness and the engagement of reflective consciousness, if we can show that people act pre reflectively or without reflective consciousness, then we can essentially defeat that and say there are actions that we can say don't count as deliberative. And this constant focus on practical rationality, the idea that that's how people just function. And you know, I had the same argument when we were talking about foot was just. But that's not how people act all

29:38 Mark: the time or even most of the time.

29:40 Seth: Most of the time, yeah.

29:41 Dylan: Well, I mean, I don't know about. I mean, to me it's lopsided. I mean, it's one thing to. And I really like the manifestation of freedom argument. And it's clearly part of the powers of us as human beings. It doesn't seem to be me to be the only way in which our activities are run. And that to me is like one of the sources of the problem of being a human being.

30:03 Wes: Yeah, I don't think we should get bogged down in this, but we should just remind ourselves that this is a very minimalistic conception of what it means to reason. All it means is at some point I stopped and asked myself, am I going to do this right? I'm in a bar, I'm drunk, someone just got in my way. I'm as like obliterated as you can be. And it's out of my, you know, as irrational as I can be. Am I going to punch this person? I think even this obliterated drunkard will probably. Some part of themselves is going to say, okay, am I going to go down this path or am I not going to go down this path?

30:38 Dylan: No, I agree with you.

30:39 Wes: It might just be purely reflexive and maybe we should even think of it as a spectrum. Right? So there's certainly things that are, as Dylan and Seth, you're pointing out, are just involuntary behaviors. But if there's any little daylight creeps in where you say to yourself, okay, am I going to do this or am I going to not? Then you're in the domain of reason, of choices.

30:55 Mark: Let's say that the reason.

30:56 Wes: Because you're determining whether a desire is going to be a reason. That's just all it means. Is my desire going to be a reason to act or not?

31:04 Seth: You know, I don't disagree with that. But given that she's made the connection between practical rationality, choice reasons and identity, I mean, I feel pretty strongly that it's not thin because I could cash it out in those terms and just say there are times when one of our identities just asserts itself and we don't choose it, it chooses us and it forces us to. Or we just act in an Aristotelian way out of habit. And I would want to say in those circumstances, look, we're not engaging the reflective consciousness and we're not making a choice. The choice is being made for us. It's not extrinsic. And maybe you could still talk about the legislator and not. But it somehow functions differently than the way we're trying to describe right now.

31:49 Wes: I will say as a person with a lot of bad habits that I'm still usually asking myself question, you know, should I be doing what I'm doing when I act on this bad habit

31:58 Seth: and you're bad consciousness?

31:59 Wes: That's after decades of doing the thing. I'm still asking the question. But anyway, this is just a little step in a big, big argument where you're defending freedom in one tiny section.

32:11 Dylan: Well, I think it's critical, right? I mean, I think the defending of freedom and us the capabilities of this. I think Seth's raising the second point right. There's the question of the lack of reflective reason that's exercising our freedom. That comes with the development of habits and good or bad or whatever. And in fact, one way to understand the development of habit in Aristotle is so that we have to exercise our freedom less often. We can rely on our ability to more mechanically do things as a positive thing. That's what the power of developing good habits is.

Or to the extent that we have habits ingrained that are on reflection, not good habits, as Wes points out, they can be very hard to break because they're very hard to tune ourselves. That's a little bit different than other kinds of ways of getting in the way of our ability to make reflective choices. I think you're right. Wes is probably on a spectrum. You know, when I think of a narcotic addict and the way in which they are struggling with making the choices they quote, unquote, want to make, I think that to me it's what it means to be Enslaved to something is that you have lost your freedom and that there are circumstances in your environment and in your life that are making the possibility of you exercising your freedom, exercising your full humanity severely attenuated.

And the hint of that struggle, I think, is a little bit of what I would. And maybe she's written about it. Otherwise, it's not really the focus of this book. This focus of this book is more about the. Essentially the metaphysics of obligation, the metaphysics of the possibility that we have morality. And in that way, it's really, really awesome. But I also want to hear more about the struggle that is, you know, why we have authority over other people in addition to ourselves, and how that leads to us, the ways in which we make those choices, and then the complications of what it is about us, ourselves constitute as human beings who can engage in reasoned behavior that can lead us to also have that attenuated so that we can become less of who we are.

34:29 Mark: Sounds like you want to do that David Foster Wallace addiction episode after all that. You want to hear more about the phenomenology of choice. I do want to. I know we haven't gotten to the identity stuff in here.

34:39 Wes: Let's just try to get to the categorical imperative. We're just starting this off one session ahead. There's just three sections here to get us from freedom to the categorical imperative, but go ahead.

34:52 Mark: Yeah, just, you know, by saying that we. We bring in identity here. That does sound like it has to do with explicit reasoning.

35:00 Dylan: Right.

35:01 Mark: That I'm thinking about. But she makes it really clear as she goes on in the book, that even animals have this issue of identity, and they're clearly not reflecting on their identity. So this is going to be something. We just need to watch out for that. Because making an obligation statement implicates some identity that we have. It doesn't mean that we are bringing in that identity as an explicit point of reflection. It doesn't mean that we're thinking the thoughts. Because I am a citizen, I should not do, like. We're definitely not doing that most of the time, but.

So this is a challenge for her, and this was a challenge for me in writing my undergrad thesis because I didn't want to say that every time somebody makes a should claim they are thinking, but somehow I wanted to say it logically implies an ontological claim. And that's probably not enough for her. So, yeah, we have to figure out how the identity stuff fits in here.

35:48 Wes: Animals can have reasons, remember, they just perceive their reasons. They can't Reflectively, the prototypical reason is a pain. Pain or pleasure is the prototypical reason. And they have standing unless we decide that we can reject them. And on the Kantian view, we reject them if we can't make a universal law of them. Which leads us into the next section. So she's going to try in 3.2.3 she's going to try to tell us how the reason why we need to talk about freedom in the first place is there's got to be a sense in which normativity is derived from the will's lawfulness we saw in the previous chapters. Reflective endorsement is going to make a desire reason, and it's not going to depend on some inherently normative entity out

36:30 Mark: there in the world.

36:31 Wes: And it's not going to inherit normativity from some other place. The buck has to stop somewhere. And it stops with the will. And really what it stops with is the idea that the will can be a law to itself. This is on the way to us, our identities, laws to us. So the idea is that the will just must to be free. The will just must have the form of a law, and that this somehow ends the regress that we've seen with normativity. So we want free will as something that's not determined by an alien cause, but must act according to some law or another. The law that it gives itself, which

37:14 Mark: could just be the law of I'm going to obey whatever desire is top of mind. Like it doesn't mean inherently. This is an extra step that she introduced of expanding the scope of the law to including the considerations of everybody else or even myself over time. Even that.

37:33 Wes: Right. So the I is a big factor here. Act only in the maxim which I or we, depending on the formulation, could will to be a law. And that's why identity is implicated.

37:43 Mark: Right.

37:43 Wes: What kind of. I could make it a law or not make it a law. A wanton. If I'm a wanton, then the law of the wanton is my law. I just do whatever I want. But ultimately that's not going to be consistent. That sort of law and identity is not going to be consistent with moral obligation because. Right. So I can't just choose any identity and say, okay, there you go, I have a moral obligation now that has to be sourced or rooted in our humanity and the, you know, the value of our humanity. She makes even a distinction in 3.2.4 between the categorical imperative and the moral law.

Because what she gives us with the categorical imperative, and this is something Kant is often criticized for is something that is kind of empty and formal. How do we get the content out of morality, out of it? And Kant has often been criticized for that. And she's going to say, well, you have to define your domain. And again, this leads into identity. Are you a member of the kingdom of ends for this purpose or some other domain? And the moral law shall say, comes from thinking of ourselves as a member of the kingdom of ends, which is to say part of a cooperative system.

So that the maxims that I would agree to under those circumstances are those that rational beings could agree to if they want to act together within a cooperative system. So that law of free will, as she's described, it's not the moral law, it's the categorical imperative. To get the moral law, we have to go a little bit further and start talking about being a member of the kingdom of ends or part of humanity, as Hume puts it. But in other words, we have to be doing things qua human.

39:20 Mark: I think Dylan was saying earlier that there we could still have the idea of I'm acting in a cooperative system without taking everybody's interests into account. Right. That I could just be, you know, like one among Nietzsche's masters that. Well, I respect the other masters. I'm in cooperation with them. My reasons are public, but I just don't consider the mass of humanity to be actually members of the moral community. I don't consider that they're beneath contempt. So it seems like you could get intersubjectivity without actually having morality.

39:53 Dylan: I mean, and you would disagree with it, but I mean, I think that would be an account for certain kinds of nationalism. Sure. Do you just exclude other human beings by some category from your moral community?

40:06 Mark: Right. So you said, why an assassin? Although an assassin actually is way better than a racist because like, you know, a genocidal maniac. Because assassins just. It's just who. Who they've been paid to target. That's the only person who's. So if we want to say that, you know, your. Your fundamental identity as a member of the kingdom of ends rules out you're being assassin. It definitely rules out you're being a, you know, slaveholding or genocidal or whatever, you know, I'm going to dismiss a whole group of people as beneath contempt.

40:35 Dylan: It's just business.

40:37 Mark: Well, you obey the laws. I'm sorry, I've been watching the John Wick movies.

40:44 Seth: I mean, but doesn't this go back to the whole means ends. The kingdom of ends means you're treating everybody as an end, not just as a means. And there's certain things that are just going to be excluded from that. You can't selectively decide that some parts of humanity are means and some are ends based on your identity associations.

41:06 Dylan: But isn't that rest on you accepting the inconsistency of saying that all these folks are human beings and as such they have status as the same identity as you? And so that universality argument rests on you making a categorical argument about what all of those entities are part of. And you say, well, you have to, because of a consistency claim on how you're identifying all those people. And I'm just saying that you get out of that by saying that they're not part of that community, straight up. I mean, this is, in fact, it becomes stronger in the case of identity because you then have identities that you would say, I mean, this is what a racist does, right? This is what a white nationalist does.

41:51 Seth: Well, I understand that, but they're also. She's talking about, and I think Kant's talking about a kind of like, and we had this before, you know, with Foot, about a kind of species identification. It's like you can't be anti your own species. At least they don't think you can rationally be hostile to or rationally deny that certain members of your species have the same kind of moral agency that you do.

42:20 Dylan: And that's saying rationally just means, in this case, just consistency. You would be inconsistent and you'd be saying something like two plus two equals five. That's what you would be saying.

42:31 Mark: So all this was just about this distinction that Kant does not make, that she is making between the categorical imperative on the one hand, which is just that the will must have a law. She says that the will must have a law because the will is free. It must be its own law. And nothing determines what that law will be. All it has to be is a law. Now consider the content of the categorical imperative as represented by the formula of universal law. The categorical imperative merely tells us to choose a law. Its only constraint on our choice is that has the form of a law, which we just assume, because we call it the categorical imperative, that it is filled out by this thought experiment.

What if everybody did this and she's saying that's not actually inherent in that. If you actually just look at what the term means and how he introduces it, that there is a gap between that and this eventual interpretation that he gives of treating everybody as end in themselves, that the law is something that we could pass in the kingdom of ends. Just that there is a gap there. So I think maybe we should start with that point and see if we fully understand it with our second part, because we're out of time for part one. You can get the second part already.

Should be in your feed or very soon in your feed. If you are Partially Examined Life supporter through our website or through Patreon, you can learn about those options@partiallyexaminedlife.com support if you're supporting us through the Apple podcast app or not supporting us at all. We're just happy to have you here. But you'll have to wait until next week to hear part two. Thanks.

44:00 Wes: Thanks.

44:00 Seth: Bye.