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

0:11 Mark: You're listening to the partially examined life, episode 371, part two, finishing up our treatment of Christine Korsgaard's the Sources of Normativity. We're in the maybe 3.2.4. So we're still into the third lecture there around page 99, where she's explicating Kant and trying to really make Kant. You know, it's like she's teaching us as we're undergrads and she's trying to teach us basic Kant and not just give us. Here's the formula to remember, but I want you to understand, like, why this is actually true. I want to really pitch this to you in a very direct way. And so if I want to make decisions at all and make them in a way that seems free to me, then I need to have my will be ruled by a law, any law, but just a law. So this seems like a very peculiar thing. It just means I need to have reasons.

1:06 Wes: Someone's got to be the ruler. Right.

1:08 Mark: Otherwise you're just. Just reacting.

1:10 Wes: It's either going to be heteronomy, right? Yep. It's going to be objects ruling you, you responding just by impulse to objects. Or it's going to be a ruler, it's going to be a king or this or that. So we have to find somewhere where the buck stops. The ruler is where the buck stops, the regress stops. And there's only one way to do that without ending up enslaved to some external principle. And that's to make use of a law that we produce ourselves. And that's what autonomy means. Right. So it's. Nomos is law, and that's the. Autonomy just means the law comes from us. And it's a.

1:44 Dylan: It's.

1:45 Wes: Yeah, it's a clever workaround. It's like a little loophole in the system where we think we might. Okay, maybe we can be free after all. It's not that we can be free of all constraints, of course we can't. We can't be free of causal laws and reasoning. Of course we're kind of bound to reasons if we're reasoning. So we never escape being bound to something. We just want to be bound by the right thing. And that would be the law that we ourselves produce.

2:07 Dylan: And doesn't it work both ways? There's the weak version, which if I take her first couple chapters is basically going through and saying, well, realism doesn't work and external legislation doesn't work and we are self moving entities, we are autonomous. So we are in kind of a weak sense, we are creating the thing. We are laws unto ourselves. We are doing things that involve us making choices about what to do. We're autonomous. And then there's a stronger sense of, well, what choices ought we make? I guess this is what we ended the last one on, right, is that the categorical imperative would be. There would be just the structural content of it. As autonomous beings, we have our own law. We have to, because that's what it means to be autonomous.

3:02 Mark: So it seems like we could still change our minds though, like at a given time. If I am saying what I'm doing is not just jumping after the thing that is providing the stimulus at the moment, I'm not just chasing an impulse, but I'm making a deliberative choice, a deliberate choice, then I'm saying that there is a reason for it. And that is to say that it is driven by a law. But does that commit me then to be, to obey that law throughout the rest of my life that she says we have multiple identities. Well, right now I'm doing this thing. Let's just say that every notion of a law implicates an identity, that there is something associated with that.

I just at least think that it's okay for me that given the kind of creature I am to be doing this thing that I'm choosing to do right now. But then maybe the next day I choose something that's not quite in accord with that. There's some other thing, you know, I deserve to treat myself now and again. Oh, but I'm also a person who wants to be on a diet or whatever, you know, and I can kind of. And we can see how that's inconsistent, but that still I'm making deliberative choices each time my freedom is not being radically stolen from me like the addict that we were talking about in part one.

So this doesn't Seem just saying that there has to be a reason and let's call that a law that we get all the way to. We certainly don't get all the way to morality. And which is what she's pointing out here, that it doesn't get us to the moral law just like it is a law.

4:24 Wes: Right. This is an early step in trying to figure out how we can derive the concept of an obligation to ourself. And then it won't even be till the next lecture until we have obligations

4:34 Dylan: to others and the content of those obligations. Right. So I think I said it this way. It's like right now we're at this sort of metaphysical, structural level that actually doesn't have any content necessarily of what the actual things we ought to be doing are.

4:52 Wes: Yeah. And so the content. So I think this is a good segue to practical identity. So in this session she calls the solution. In 3.3.1, she'll start to make this connection, which we've already made, between law and practical identity. So basically what the practical identity is something that we will cease to have if we stop acting in certain ways. So that the law is, if we want to be this sort of thing, this sort of entity, or have this sort of identity, then we continue to act in certain ways in the same way, you know, should bring up the analogy later on, that an animal has to be engaged in certain work, right.

To stay itself. Any entity does. We got to do the work if we want to stay the thing that we are. Otherwise it's annihilated. And so, I mean, I think psychologically this is a very important insight because when we're doing things, often what's pulling us against simply operating according to pleasure is this, I think, idea that we could be annihilated. Not physically necessarily, although that can happen, but psychologically, am I going to cease to be me if I engage in this pattern of behavior? She does say, you know, as Mark just pointed out in 3.3.2, she's going to point out there's, you know, there's some identity shedding that we can do.

We can break. You know, we can, first of all, right, sometimes we might want to go a good soldier who obeys orders, but a good human being doesn't massacre the innocent. And we might have to shed that good soldier identity in order to be a good human being, but in other cases we can shed the identity of being a dieter. You know, just this once, because I'm going to return to the diet later on. It doesn't nest not every misstep completely destroys your identity. And that, that is a big, big problem for morality, as will be conflicts between various practical identities which are not always resolvable.

And the human identity doesn't always win out against the other practical identities. We'll find out later on in the book. Sometimes it's the case that it's better to adhere to some more local practical identity than to the human identity. So some moral conflicts aren't easily resolved. I mean, they may not be resol solvable at all. But yeah, all these complications enter into this which make morality not such an easy thing.

7:20 Dylan: I found myself thinking a lot about necessity and she brings up the word necessity as well. But in this context I don't think this is new in any way. But the necessity is a kind of logical or moral necessity, which doesn't mean that it can't be the other way. There's a consistency or something like that. But it's not like it can't happen. It's not like it's a physical non necessity. And I think there looms behind some of these moral questions. Isn't there a way out that gets you to physical necessity, that things couldn't happen any other way and it ends up being just not the case? Even if you talk about it being necessary, it's necessary in the context of, well, your identity or consistency or something like that.

8:08 Wes: The other interesting thing here, and this is 3.3.3, is that we right in the same way, the categorical imperative doesn't give us the moral law necessarily. Our reflective structure, our self consciousness doesn't tell us which identity we should have. It just says we got to have some. Because in order to make choices, in order to make decisions, we have to identify with some law governing choices. And question of which identity we should have is a larger one. Of course that rests in what it means to be human.

8:40 Seth: Just on this theme, there's a nice quote on 102. Since we haven't cited the text all that much, let me just go ahead and throw this out there and we can move on. It is the conceptions of ourselves that are most important to us that give rise to unconditional obligations. For to violate them is to lose your integrity and so your identity and is to no longer be who you are. That is, it is to no longer be able to think of yourself under the description under which you value yourself and find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking.

It is for all practical purposes to be dead, or worse than dead. When an action cannot be performed without loss of some fundamental part of one's identity and an agent could just as well be dead, then the obligation not to do it is unconditional and complete. If reasons arise from reflective endorsement, then obligation arises from reflective rejection. That's yet another example of just really brilliant and articulate writing on her part.

9:41 Dylan: Well, it makes me think of both the times in which, Wes, you were talking about how one of the problems and challenges of morality would be that there might be times when we don't live up to these things or that we might change what those reflective endorsements were or what those identities were. And there might be times where that makes sense, where we give it up. And the way she describes this makes me think about the ways in which people's identity and then them having to change it or give it up results in really well, results in terrible depression and a soul crushing conflict for them.

They're an athlete that's defined themselves in terms of their work and that they get older and they can't do that thing anymore, or you've lost your job and you can't find that same job or that particular job was the source of your strongest points of your identity. And now that phrase if for all practical purposes better to be dead or worse than dead, sounds to me a lot like what all kinds of people go through when they have a loss of something in their lives that has to do with effectively losing their identity.

10:52 Mark: I want to dwell on the for a second on this connection between obligation and identity because I think I tend to dismiss identity claims as being, you know, I can figure out what to do. I can figure out, you know, have a happy life without getting hung up on being a member of this family, being this ethnicity, being having this job in particular. Because I just feel like, you know, I don't know, I have more self confidence than that or something. But she just wants to say that. So here's the quote on this is a little earlier than what Seth was reading page 100 right at the beginning of the solution.

The reflective structure of the mind is a source of quote unquote self consciousness because it forces us to have a conception of ourselves. As Kant argued, this is a fact about what it is like to be reflectively conscious does not prove the existence of a metaphysical self from a third person point of view. Outside of the deliberative standpoint, it may look as what happens when someone makes a choice, is the strongest of his conflicting desires, wins. But that isn't the way it is for you. When you deliberate when you deliberate as if there were something over and above all your desires, something which is you and which chooses which desire to act on this means the principle or law by which you determine your actions is the one which you regard as being expressive of yourself.

So it's the notion that there is, phenomenologically, as if there were a transcendental ego outside of space and time making these choices, even though there's no metaphysical implications of that, but also that then further, that it has to be beefed up and defined in order to actually help us make choices. That it can't just be, well, I'm just me. I just make the choices I want to make. You know, that you have to identify yourself as something in particular. Do we have any problem with that?

12:36 Wes: Ultimately, it could be as just as a human being, which is when we get to. And that's the pivot that she takes later on, towards the end of this lecture, when she addresses this worry about relativism that we've had in 3.4.4. And she points out that identity is constituted differently in different social worlds. So, for instance, in one world we might see sin as the principal thing, in another, dishonor, and in another sort of moral wrongness in the Enlightenment liberal sense. So if dishonor is our thing, then our identity is closely tied to what our reputation is in the eyes of others and in the eyes of a particular local, limited social world.

And the question is, can I choose between that and a more Enlightenment conception? Is one better than the other? And she's going to say, yeah, the Enlightenment conceptions turns out to be better. We don't want to live in an honor society. And so why, how do we do that? 3.4.5 starts to give us the criteria. We can rank identities depending on whether or not they promote flourishing or health or however you want to put that standard. And then that's why, you know, right, the Enlightenment morality is better than honor and honor society or nationalism, for instance.

Why not just say, yeah, I'm an American, and be a virulent nationalist who looks down on all other identities? We're going to reject that as well. So by 3.4.7, we're getting this idea that the normative force of practical identities must be grounded in human identity. Because these roles that we have in various group memberships that we have, they're contingent and we got to have them if we have reasons to act. We can not have these more thick, practical identities. We can't just be abstract, autonomous moral entities, but they still have to be.

If we're to be moral, they have to be anchored in this larger human identity.

14:38 Mark: Yes. We even had the return of Rawls versus Sandel.

14:42 Wes: Yes, I purposely skipped that, but thanks. Right. She gives a nice little critique of communitarianism in like 200 words that it took me 10,000 words to do.

14:52 Seth: So.

14:52 Wes: Yeah, just that.

14:54 Mark: Yes. Sandel says who he had on the show, that we owe things to people because these concrete identities, we're part of actual communities. And like. Oh, yes, yes, yes, that's true. You do have to have thick identities. But the fact that you have to have a thick identity, that is part of our identity as just a human being.

15:13 Wes: Yeah.

15:13 Mark: So you're already relying on a universalist ethics to ground your adherence to particularist population specific local ethics. Which again, doesn't mean that the larger one always wins out in any given conflict.

15:27 Seth: It doesn't mean it wins that. It just means that to be a human being is to have that larger universalist. I mean, she says somewhere in here, I'm sure I have a quote I could find. But the content of those particular identities is just something that. It doesn't matter which one you have, but you have to have something. There has to be something that it is to be you that you have to identify with by virtue simply of being a human being by participating in this community of this larger identity. I mean, that's kind of just stated without argument, but I find it hard to object.

16:03 Dylan: Isn't that a consequence? I mean, there's something about the evolution of us socially and when we talk about it being Enlightenment values. Right. The Enlightenment values was an argument being made for the primacy of individual flourishing as being a value that would hone what our obligations ought to be. And rooting that in a claim that we have something in common amongst all of us just by the fact that we're human beings. And certainly as a fact of the matter, that was an argument that had to be made in a. I also agree with it, but it's not at all patently clear that that is something that we're bringing to the table.

16:52 Wes: So the way this ends. It's a very interesting idea, which is that she'll say the value of humanity is basically implicit in every choice. So this is where again, the buck stops with normativity. This is where the regress ends. Now it ends with identity and it ends especially with the. The identity is something we value and especially with our human identity when we are figuring out whether or not to endorse an Impulse and act on it. What is the ultimate value at stake there? Is it what God wants, for instance? No, it's about how we value ourselves.

The goodness is not out there in the objects, right? Likewise, we're not going to be like a Moorean realist about this. There's some none natural property that's in the object that's good and that's why choose it. It's the good is me. I am what's good. And the goodness of my actions or the objects of my actions are derivative of my value, the value of my identities, practical identities, but ultimately of my human identity. And if we don't do that, if we can't find a somewhere to that some place from which to derive that value, then we can't act at all.

So. So as reflective animals, right? There's gotta be something that's normative. There's gotta be something that allows us to go to say whether or not we're gonna act on the impulse and ultimately our humanity is it.

18:21 Mark: And I like this. The penultimate section of this is on personal relationships in particular. Sort of as a, you know, as a subdivision of local identity of, you know, identifying yourself as someone's friend that when you are in a relationship with someone of any sort, then you adopt their ends as your own to some degree. And that just is going to be transitioning ourselves. This is part of how, this is a key part of how we identify ourselves. That it's much, I don't know that I identify, I understand so much with like, oh, I don't feel my cultural identity in the way that I used to.

And this is going to get me depressed. But if you like lose your family members, if you lose your spouse, like you're going to go in a tailspin. Like what? Even, even if you're not thinking it in terms of like what am I if not this person's husband or something like that, or if not this person's father. Even if you're not thinking of those terms, I think that it sort of comes down to, right, this other person living in my house with me is what kept me civilized, right? Is what kept me feeling like I had to get up in the morning, present myself in a coherent way in a.

A way that would not be just, you know, a total slob or whatever.

19:32 Wes: Kim's okay, right? You're getting worried. Everything's good, okay?

19:36 Mark: Yes. But she's about to go on a multi week trip.

19:38 Wes: Oh, okay. Three weeks of savagery. Lord of the Flies for Mark There's

19:44 Seth: a really nice short story. I think it's by Steinbeck. I've tried to find it again. I remember reading it when I was like, you know, in my 20s, but about a farmer in the Midwest or, you know, in the Dust bowl or whatever, lives with his wife on this farm in isolation. And once a year he goes by himself to San Francisco and he just has a bender and then he comes back home and he's back to his normal everyday farmer's life and his wife dies and he goes to San Francisco and has his bender and it just never comes back. Right. Without his wife, he didn't have this essential guiding principle in his life.

And it's really poignant because you get it. There's a sense in which you live not just for yourself, but for other people, particularly, you know, if you're a parent. And it's just so true that we're social creatures in that respect, but it's not just that we're social creatures, it's that our identity is bound up in others. You know, the University of Chicago Press just has been sending out new publications for us, trying to get the authors on this podcast. And there was one that I asked for the copy of was. And it's basically arguing that our notion of personhood is just the post enlightenment individual notion of personhood is wrong.

And that we need to think of our notion of personhood that is extended and connected in this way. And I think it's really true.

21:11 Wes: But so, so stale.

21:13 Dylan: Isn't that the Sandel argument?

21:16 Wes: So stale. No, but who needs a categorical imperative when you have a wife? The concubinatorial imperative.

21:24 Mark: Oh, my God.

21:25 Wes: I think Dylan was rolling his eyes before I even like got the second syllable. How about the fourth lecture? Yes.

21:35 Mark: The Origin of Value and the Scope of Obligation. Why value others? Right. Just because you're. To coherently make decisions, they have to have reason. There has to be some sort of rationale, a law behind them. Why does that. Why do we have to extend the scope to other people? Well, we've said a little about this of, you know what, an identity could involve other people and typically does involve other people. And also just the fact that you're giving yourself reasons. Well, that these just that notion of reason is itself a public notion involves at least one other person. At least it involves a language, a public language.

22:10 Wes: So, yeah, the question is how we've seen why we must value our own humanity as the squared humanity is important. Right. It's not just that I value me, Wes, when I make a decision. But I value myself qua practical identity, qua teacher, qua human, ultimately. Right. It's got to be a matter of some sort of identity, but most fundamentally, my humanity. But then why? What does that have to do with obligations to others, with valuating the humanity of others? And so she's going to tell us how to do that. And it's not going to be, as she points out in 4.2.1.

It's not just that we're going to go from. We're going to do something which philosophers traditionally have tried to do, which is we'll start out by talking about our own private reasons for doing things and especially what's in our self interest, and see if we can explain how our interest in others and our reasons for taking humanity of others seriously is somehow derivative of or related to our own personal private reasons. So this is on page 132 to 133. She'll talk about how traditionally philosophers want to start with a source of rational norms.

That's uncontroversial, right? We want to be in the domain of the prudential, as they would call it. And self interest seems to be uncontroversial. Morality is a difficult thing, it seems. It's hard to explain morality, but it's not hard to explain how self interest could be a source of rational norms in the sense that of hypothetical norms. Like if I want to get something, I have to do, you know, if I want to get Y, I have to do X to get it. I can be a rational creature in that sense without necessarily being a moral creature. But maybe we can derive morality out of that prudential position.

And she's going to. This is the thing she's going to say doesn't work.

24:01 Mark: Yeah. Reasons have to be public in their essence. We don't have to start. If we start at the prudential and try to extend out, then we're never actually going to get there. But that's like starting with solipsism and then trying to ground the existence of other people. Where in fact, epistemologically, I don't think she brings up this connection, but you know, we've seen this in several of our readings where even to have a notion of myself, I have to actually have a notion of other people. Like. Like if I was truly the only conscious creature in the universe, I would have not have a sense of self. There would be no reason. So the whole Hegelian some, you know, you have to treat me in a certain way. And that is a way that I develop my self identity in dialogue with your recognition of me, etc, so comparably.

24:50 Wes: Yeah, yeah. Neo-Kantians and Hobbesians, according to her, have the same sort of problem. They quote someone 33 both assume that an individual agent has private reasons, I.e. reasons that are normative, that have normative force for her. And they try to argue that those private reasons give the individual some reason to take the private reasons of other people into account. Well, it's in my self interest to take other people's reasons seriously. For the neo Kantians, it's well, on pain of contradiction, I must take other people's reasons into account if I'm taking my own reasons into account.

This is always the weird, unsatisfying thing about Kant, which we're going to find out in the next episode. His use of this idea of contradiction, which is clever in many ways, but in other ways unsatisfying. In any case, whether it's a neo Kantian or neo Hobbesian, they're trying to construct the public character of reasons, starting from the assumption that reasons are private. And in other words, they're trying to give a reason, say that we have reason to share our reasons, and here are the reasons we have to share reasons. But that's not going to work.

And she's going to want to use this fancy argument from Wittgenstein to show that we can actually have reasons in common at a ground level. In the same way that we can have meanings in common and in the same way that meanings must be in common. Right. They can't simply be purely private. Likewise, reasons can't be purely private.

26:16 Dylan: Yeah, it's not just that we can have reasons in common, it's that all reasons are in common. Right.

26:21 Wes: Well, in principle they have to be shareable, let's put it that way. In the same way, yes, we can have our own personal language. Yeah, that's not what Wittgenstein's saying. But in principle it has to be communicable.

26:32 Seth: Yeah, yeah, that's actually what she says on 138, 139. So should we dread this, the private language argument? Should we at least summarize it? I have a visceral, negative emotional reaction when people talk about late Wittgenstein and I can't quite put my finger on why it is. I guess it's just that I feel like they venerate him and it feels like he's saying stuff that's ridiculously obvious and it's been said by other people,

27:03 Wes: but really it never feels obvious to me. I don't know, it's confusing. And every time I come back to it, I'm like, oh, that's the thing

27:11 Seth: is I think maybe there's something there and I'm just too stupid to get it. But I also just annoys the shit out of me when they're like, you know, Wittgenstein says, if suicide's allowed, everything's allowed. And if nothing is permitted, if something's not permitted, suicide's not permitted. And you're like, is that deep or just idiotic?

27:30 Dylan: Well, the reason it's annoying, it's like, it's like the nerd who raises his hand and tries to one up you at the back of class and saying, you know, I just this second, yes,

27:41 Seth: you know, he was definitely the nerd. Anyway, I think we should try to outline it and maybe it would help me.

27:49 Dylan: She gives a Great summary on 137.

27:51 Seth: Let's do it. Read it.

27:53 Dylan: So, regarding possibility of private language, Wittgenstein argued that there couldn't be any such language. One way to understand his argument goes like this. Meaning is relational because it is a normative notion. To say that X means Y is to say that one ought to take X for Y. And this requires two a legislator to lay it down that one must take X for Y and a citizen to obey. And the relation between these two is not merely causal because the citizen can disobey. There must be a possibility of misunderstanding or mistake, since it is a relation in which one gives a law to another.

It takes two to make a meaning. So you cannot peer inwardly at an essentially private and incommunicable sensation and say, that is what I mean by S. And so in that way means something. For if that is what you mean by S, then when you call something S, it must be that. And if you call something else S, you must be wrong. But if what you call S is just that sensation which makes you feel like saying S, and it cannot be identified in any other way, then you cannot be wrong, as Wittgenstein puts it. But if I impress it on myself, that is, I impress upon myself that S will be my name.

For the sensation can only mean this process brings it about, that I remember the connection right in the future, but in the present case I have no criterion for correctness. One would like to say whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we cannot talk about right. So the idea of a private language is inconsistent with the normativity of Meaning,

29:38 Seth: okay, the normativity of meaning here means that the mere possibility of error means that meaning is relational and that there's this, what she calls the normative element, because normativity in meaning introduces the possibility of error or truth and falsity, something like that. And normativity with respect to reasons. There's another aspect, but she's going to make that analogy, right, that reasons have the same structure as meaning, they're inherently relational. And because of the possibility of it's not error in the case of reasons. Now I can't remember exactly how she says it, but.

30:21 Mark: Well, what's going to complicate this is that as we've said, you are your own lawmaker. So it does seem like isn't she gonna have a private language argument with that? But it's the distinction between that it's you being mediated through others back to yourself. So you as thinker are in a public space using public reasons, using words, and you are guiding over the acting person. So it's still you, but there's, you know, it's the thing that has desires and chooses a thing. Well, how is it going to choose the thing? Well, it listens, it gives up its autonomy to.

This is not the right way to put it because this is the definition of autonomy. It gives up its decision making power to thinking that because you're a person, because you're deliberate, you have the capacity to deliberate. Then you don't just act and chase after the impulse that's there. You say, let's turn this over to the thinker. And then that part of you comes in and you at least, even though it doesn't always come in explicitly, it's not always, when we think about this relationship to ourselves, insofar as we have personal integrity, then we say, yes, I should actually think about what I do before I do it.

So we cede authority to this essentially public thinking part of ourselves.

31:36 Seth: Right? Meanings are fixed communally. You can't by fiat, out of self interest, fix the meaning for something and then because ultimately it would not be communicable for it to be communicable, it has to be fixed communally. Everybody has to understand and agree to it to some extent.

31:54 Wes: It gets complicated, right, because as Mark pointed out, you can be divided in yourself between legislator and obeyer. And also your mind works across time as a community of different temporal slices. So what Wittgenstein is not saying is not that we can't make up our own little Middle Earth language, it just has to have the form of language in the same way that morality has to have the form of law, right? Or reasons for action have to have the form of a law. So I can't take a specific little sensation token that happened at time T1 and give it a proper name.

I'm going to call that Jack. Because it's critical to the private language argument, right, that you're not just giving translatable concept terms. It's not like I'm just using a Klingon word for pain or something like that, or for itch. It's that I'm giving these unique signifiers to sensation tokens and basically not making them concept words is the problem. So if I'm going to make something into a concept word, then when I'm using at that given moment, if it's an itch, it's not up to me whether at some future time whether something is an itch.

Get what I'm saying? I don't want to buy this sentence. It gets very complicated, but it gives you an idea of where normativity comes in.

33:07 Mark: So you could name your individual sensation that you had right then, Jack. But then if it comes later, you have a similar sensation and you want to call that Jack also. You also want to use that term, Jack. Then there should be some criterion of like, well, why is that a Jack? And you should be able to explain that to somebody.

33:22 Seth: Yes.

33:23 Mark: So that then when the third time comes, you could be wrong.

33:26 Dylan: You could say, well, I mean, that is the way you just said it is clarifying that the act of saying one thing is like another is a reasonable act. It's an act of reason. And otherwise, the sheer turning the multiplicity of the world into categories or concepts of things means that you are engaging in something that's communicable in language. I think that's the argument that ends up being here.

33:54 Seth: Yeah, definitely. And this, I mean, this is going to go. We mentioned this early part of first episode about. It makes more sense when she makes the analogy between using the private language argument with respect to meanings and talking about reasons. We talked about this before. The idea that part of what it is for something to be a reason and to have reasons is that you could explain or justify if somebody said, why did you do that? Like, in essence, acting normatively is acting in such a way that you have a reason for your decision. And presumably it's a reason that you could defend or explain and that other people would understand.

34:33 Wes: So anyway, you know, and this gives us our stepping stone to the idea that, like, meanings reasons are these inherently public entities? And in the same way, when I hear a person speak a language, I can't hear noise. As she says, I might have to try really hard to not understand what's being said in the language. When someone gives me a reason that obligates me in a way, it's immediate. It's very much like a meaning my consciousness can be intruded upon. So 4.2.9, she'll say, maybe 4.2.6 is a better place to start. She starts writing in a way like Wittgenstein at this point, she has these smaller and smaller sections.

It's like aphoristically here, I think it's really funny. Yeah. But basically she'll say, yeah, at 4.2.6, you can always intrude on my consciousness because it's impossible to hear language as noise. Or as she puts it, the space of linguistic consciousness is essentially public. In the same way that we can get into people's heads with language, we can get into their heads with reasons. And that's why we. Why we can obligate people. And 4.2.7, she gives this great example of calling someone's name. Even calling someone's name obligates them in a sense.

If I call out your name, I make you stop in your tracks. I have obligated you. I've given you a reason to stop. And if you don't, generally you're gonna give an excuse or maybe you'll feel guilty. Yeah, this is the amount of guilt I feel. Right. I have to walk around a certain section of Cambridge on a regular basis where one of my offices is, and it's like I'm getting accosted by homeless people constantly, and it's impossible for me to be immune to it. Right. I might ignore them, but they take a psychological toll. Ignoring people takes a psychological toll.

He's been obligated.

36:31 Mark: Well, and I want to get political for a second here because I feel like Trump is doing something really interesting, sort of denial of the private language argument that, you know, he explicitly has said, like, well, if something bad happened in the economy, it's Biden's fault. If it's good happened, then it's my fault. Like, definitionally, you know, so he's constantly putting out these inconsistent things. This is, you know, this term why gaslighting is so just out, because it intrudes on your mental space and tries to pressure you to believe conflicting things and to just adjust your standards to what he is saying to his. So you just want to completely shut that out and just not even listen to him talk at all if you want to.

37:15 Wes: He's psychotic. You know, if you're a clinician and you look at his tweets and language, he's psychotic. He's a psychotic person. And yeah, you're intruded upon by that. It's. You feel like you're crazy being subjected to it.

37:29 Mark: We have a philosophical explanation of Trump derangement syndrome and it's a real thing. We are being deranged by this assault

37:36 Wes: because he is deranged.

37:38 Dylan: But.

37:39 Wes: 4.2.8. And I'm only hurrying because we're almost out of time. So this is a critical point where others reasons can have the same standing as our own desires. And we don't need a reason for that.

37:50 Seth: Right.

37:50 Wes: We don't need to do what neo Hobbesians or neo Kantians did and try to have some. Try to connect my private reasons to your reasons in some way. Your reasons just are my reasons at a fundamental level, they have the same standing as my desires. When they pop up, I can. Am I going to endorse the desire and act on it? Okay, maybe, maybe not. When your reason pops up for me, am I going to act on it? Maybe, maybe not. But they have that standing. They have to be considered.

38:19 Dylan: This is the content behind the psychological toll of ignoring things that are being communicated to you because we have to

38:28 Wes: decide what we're going to do with it.

38:31 Dylan: Yeah. And isn't the same thing also true where we do to ourselves of things that we notice? There's the language that there's the presence of people or the calling out to us. And the same thing would be true of things that we notice are wrong or that we ought to act on because we can't help noticing them. We notice them and then we have to choose, not choose to ignore them. And that might be. You gave the examples of homeless people, but there might be other kinds of things, right?

38:59 Seth: Yeah. She says it nicely at page 145. Human beings are social animals in a deep way. It is not just that we go in for friendship or prefer to live in swarms or packs. The space of linguistic consciousness, the space in which meanings and reasons exist, is a space that we occupy together. You know, just in the same way that you can't just choose to ignore that it started raining. I mean, I guess you can, but you can't. It intrudes upon your consciousness and the consciousnesses of everybody else around you. It's the same thing with. Essentially she's saying language Language is a social sphere that we live in.

39:39 Dylan: It makes me think of the problem that we've encountered over and over and over again of going from mere sensation or the cacophony of sensations in the world. And then they intrude on us because we're processing them in certain way. Because, of course, there's other sensations we have that may not be processing. And this is putting those social obligations or the interactions with other people, their language, in that realm of other kinds of sensations that we are processing.

40:14 Seth: That's an interesting point, Dylan. It's like we're tuned. It's like the radio is broadcasting all of the stations at once. Some of it is weather and some of it is light, and some of it is this. But we're tuned in to the language station, and it's like we're filtering everything out for some specific input. And it's not something that you can. I mean, I suppose Buddhists, maybe people meditate. Maybe you can figure out how to tune yourself out. Maybe this is what creative people do, and they just are able to block out all stimulus and focus on the creative act. But it's oddly, the capability itself is obligatory.

40:53 Dylan: It's part of our powers, right? This gets to. What makes us distinct as human beings is this is part of our endowment.

41:02 Wes: So the question of how to get moral obligations from all of this, she tells us at 4.2.10 and probably one of the more complicated arguments that she gives. So we know how we can be obligated to ourselves in the previous lecture, but how can we obligate others? It's true that we can get others, right? We occupy the space of linguistic consciousness together, and our reasons are other people's reasons and vice versa. But that doesn't mean that someone has to reflectively endorse. Right? We don't have morality yet. And the argument she makes in 4.2.10, it sounds very simple because it involves just saying to someone, if someone is hitting me, I say to them, hey, how would you like it if I did that to you?

And she takes that example and gives a brilliant kind of phenomenological account of the profound importance of that, which is to say that when we do that, we're prompting someone to share our reason, right? So I don't want you to do that to me, not just because I'm me, but because I'm a human being. I value myself qua human. So imagine how you would feel being hit by me, right? And you're not just thinking about that? Well, I wouldn't like that because I'm me. I'm this particular person who doesn't like pain. That's not what it's about. You wouldn't like that qua human.

So at the moment that you realize that you wouldn't like being hit because it's an assault on your humanity, yours and my humanity get identified. We have the same reason you not wanting to be hit. It's not just you wanting not to be hit. It's a human being not wanting to be hit. And so you can understand my objection is a human being is being hit. And neither of us wants that something like that.

42:47 Dylan: So how do we deal with cruelty? Is that something that just confirms this argument that the existence of cruelty confirms this particular notion of moral obligation and how we get to obligation to others? Because we are recognizing that what we're doing is causing harm and we're doing it anyway because we're acceding to a different. The part of the desire that wants to inflict harm.

43:19 Seth: Yeah, this is a problem. She said on page 126. Insofar as the importance of having a practical identity comes from the value of humanity, it does not make sense to identify oneself in ways that are inconsistent with the value of humanity. And I made a note, I was like, and yet this happens all the time. Like this is in fact exactly how people act all the time. You guys know how I feel about the history of human civilization and, and all the terrible things that I think people do.

43:51 Wes: Really, I have so much more of a positive impression of it. I don't.

43:55 Seth: I mean, I think what's going to happen is we can now give a reason those people are immoral because they don't adhere to the value of humanity or whatever. They're adopting an identity which is inconsistent with yada yada. So we can condemn them. We have reasons for condemning them morally, but that's not an explanation of, of why they do it. There's still going to have to be. Like we had in the every episode I feel like we've talked about this, is that there's like, well, there's something defective about them, right?

44:23 Wes: Or even worse, their reasoning is moralized often, and it's moralized. And they are often in defense of an identity. Right? So look at nationalism and the way Hitler writes in Mein Kampf. He's, you know, he's genocidal and murderous, but his rationale is that the most important thing in the world is his German identity and identity. And he's not even German, he's Austrian. But the most important thing is his German identity and the existence of Jews is an assault on them. So he has to eliminate the threat to his identity. You can see how morality, it gets so complicated because people are doing the most horrific thing, are acting from a standpoint, subjectively that feels very, very self righteous.

Which is a different case than the one Dylan brought up of sadism. The Scheler's case of where empathy is required for sadism. We have to know how the other person is feeling and then get off on it. So it can't just be that we're not capable of doing that. That's an important part of it. But the position of self righteousness is a whole other problem.

45:28 Mark: So we just put on our calendar that we're going to do a little nightcap discussion. And I think connecting Foot and Korsgaard on the one hand with Stein and Scheler might be a good thing to try to do a little bit that. Because that's where my mind is going, you know, how do we account for cruelty? Well, Scheler had an idea of cruelty, Stein had this. You know, Stein's picture of how we empathize with another person matches up a little bit with what Korsgaard is identifying with what the bully might go through that you are saying, you know, think about what if you're successful in convincing them to stop hitting you.

But there's definitely a lot more to say about all this stuff. I think we've got, I guess, any final conclusions about Korsgaard? Do we feel like we have her thesis, the identity stuff? Was there something lingering that we can deal with very briefly or that you just want to get out there?

46:20 Dylan: I wouldn't have any content, but what I would say is that it is probably one of the best and most accessible books on very interesting and challenging philosophy topics that I've read. I think, Wes, you said it was one of the best things you've ever read in your life. And I agree with you. I think that's a phenomenal set of lectures in this space. It really is. And every once in a while we get a question from somebody, well, what could I go read in philosophy? I'm sort of interested, whatever. This is now the top book on my list to point people to.

46:55 Mark: I found it a slog.

46:58 Wes: Did you really?

46:58 Mark: I'm not saying that I didn't find it very valuable in synthesizing a lot of these other ideas. And it definitely makes me want to read, you know, the Bernard Williams and the Nagels, the other things that she's reacting to because it is both accessible enough for someone who doesn't know philosophy that explains all this stuff, you know, gives the anti communitarians, anti Sandel thing, it gives the private language argument in a very concise way. But it is also like doing its scholarly job. It's not a piece of popular philosophy. And I just think that that is a hard thing.

So in that, insofar as it was doing its scholarly job and really like dwelling on some of these things, I felt like, you know, if it was purely aimed at the masses thing, it probably could have moved faster and gotten its point out and been less painful on a page by page experience. But. So I think there's no pleasing everybody, let's put it that way.

47:52 Wes: It's interesting. It's not because there's a lot of analytic philosophy that doesn't do it for me. And even trying to read past her final lecture and look at some of the objections, I'm just like, oh my God, now I'm just in the pit again. This is horrific. And just something about her writing, I find it so compelling. And she arouses some curiosity in me and some hope that, okay, someone is actually might actually answer this question that I have that probably can't be answered. But this is very intriguing. It's like a mystery or a page turner. I want to keep going to see what she has to say about this. It's a rare experience for me these days with philosophy.

48:30 Seth: Totally. So I'm with Wes and Dylan on this. I think her secret is that she explains things using common sense language in a common sense way. She doesn't have to introduce jargon and start saying, well, you know, if all X's were P's and you know, like this sort of. It's just like Kant was saying this. And this is like having this feeling. And when you have that feeling, you're doing this and you're like, oh, yeah, I guess I am. You know, it's just super clear, very. And at the end of it you're like, okay, now I understand it totally. And she boiled down some very, very complex things into a very straightforward.

I do want to say that I guess in the nightcap we should at least touch on this notion of pain only because it's her way of talking about having obligations to animals or bringing in kind of. We should at least mention that. But it also. She talks about the whole notion of reflexivity.

49:26 Wes: Yep. Both reflectivity and reflexivity. Both of those.

49:29 Seth: Yeah. I'm not quite sure which one I want to say. But that structure itself is important in thinking about how we think about this.

49:36 Mark: So we have been so warped by how much philosophy we have read. Because, Dylan, you read her account of the private language argument, and she said, we think that A's should refer to B, like she used. So it was clear.

49:49 Wes: No, she uses S's, but it's. It's because Wittgenstein does.

49:53 Mark: Right.

49:53 Wes: Look, I agree with Mark. I don't see this as a popular work. I just think it's a work that has. Has an exceptional attention to literary merit and quality and clarity and. And just that most philosophers, even great ones, who can be clear in their own way, they just can't pull it off in the way that she does, in my opinion. But I think this would be probably difficult for the average reader. But they could work on. Look, I was working on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason when I was 17, over spring break, unfortunately. Why did I do that? Sitting there staring at a paragraph in the analytic of the Aesthetic, or whatever it's called, and trying to figure out what he meant by intuition. But, yeah, this would take some effort, but it would reward that effort, I think.

50:35 Dylan: To me, I thought I would put it right next to Ethics of Ambiguity by Beauvoir. And it is. I agree that it's more scholarly in that respect. And you're right, Mark, to remind us of all the freaking philosophy that we've been reading over 25 years or whatever. Few guys anyway, but it's still.

50:59 Mark: The podcast has not been running for 25 years.

51:03 Dylan: I was throwing. You guys all did all that graduate school philosophy stuff, right?

51:10 Wes: For 16 years.

51:11 Mark: We're getting there. Oh, my God. All right, well, thanks, everybody, for listening. We'd love to hear your recommendations. We'll talk about the recommendations that we've already received and the footnotes and things, these other texts that people are pointing us at, what we may want to read in the future in the analytic philosophy. Absolutely. Ethics area in our nightcap. So, yes, become a supporter. And you can hear that in full. Reach out to us through Facebook, through Twitter, through the website partiallyexaminedlife.com you can comment right on the blog post associated with this episode.

And the blog posts are always. If you're. You've lost the forest for the trees, I try to give a nice summary in those. So I hope you're reading the website. And there's even other things, right. We have another person who is writing articles and curating articles, right? The website. The blog itself is a thing now. Apart from Wes. Is that okay? So, yeah, people should Definitely look@PartiallyExaminedLife.com if you haven't been there for a while. Thanks, everybody. Good night.

52:12 Wes: Good night.