Christine M. Korsgaard > Quotes

“On the other hand, when I think of other philosophers who have spent their lives developing some system, and I admire their work even though I disagree with it, I think of them as the guardians of some set of ideas and lines of thoughts that philosophers through time have found it fruitful and illuminating to think through. That seems to me a valuable thing to do, even if in the end I don’t think their views are right. But it’s a little hard to think of one’s own work in that way. After all, I believe the things that I believe.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard

“to be a person is to be constantly engaged in making yourself into that person”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity

“The principle of a good will, therefore, is to do only those actions whose maxims can be conceived as having the form of a law. If there is such a thing as moral obligation – if, as Kant himself says, “duty is not to be as such an empty delusion and a chimerical concept” (4:402) – then we must establish that our wills are governed by this principle: “I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

“If you view yourself as having a value-conferring status in virtue of of your power of rational choice, you must view anyone who has the power of rational choice as having...a value conferring status.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends

“There is something splendid about innocence; but what is bad about it, in turn, is that it cannot protect itself very well and is easily seduced. Because of this, even wisdom - which otherwise consists more in conduct than in knowledge - still needs science, not in order to learn from it but in order to provide access and durability for its precepts.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

“The reason for participating in a general will, and so for endorsing one’s identity as a citizen, is that we share the world with others who are free, not that we have confidence in their judgment. A citizen who acts on a vote that has gone the way she thinks it should may in one sense be more wholehearted than one who must submit to a vote that has not gone her way. But a citizen in whom the general will triumphs gracefully over the private will exhibits a very special kind of autonomy, which is certainly not a lesser form.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity

“Kant’s epistemic modesty—his dictum that we cannot have any knowledge beyond the scientific—is an”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“arose in the case of the person who is required to risk his life to conceal some Jews from the Nazis, was that it might seem paradoxical that you should be asked to endure evil merely to promote the existence of the species that generated that evil. This is a problem of what we might call direct reflexivity: morality may be found unsatisfactory from the moral point of view itself. Thus the”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity

“In my view, the good things in life are all ways of living life well—modes of well-functioning. Health is physical well-functioning, and to be curious and understand things is to be intellectually well-functioning, to appreciate beauty is to be perceptually well-functioning, to love and be loved is to be socially well-functioning.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“[A} maxim's legal character must be intrinsic: it must have what I shall call 'lawlike form.' this is why legal character, or universality, must be understood as lawlike form, that is, as a requirement of universalizability.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends

“must be settled by considering an agent’s practical identity. Practical identities are those under which we act: as a member of a family, or of a community, as a citizen, or as a Member of the Kingdom of Ends. Human beings cannot live without some practical sense of identity; and (if Korsgaard is right) they cannot now get far without conceiving themselves as Members of the Kingdom of Ends. In acting with the practical identity of a Member of the Kingdom of Ends the forms of normativity that can be vindicated will correspond in scope as well as in form to the moral obligations which have traditionally been seen as endorsed by Kantian reflection.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity

“a conception of “me.” But failure to pass the mirror test does not imply that an animal is not self-conscious. For one thing, many animals are not visually oriented. Imagine you are confronted with a surface which reflects back your distinctive odor. If you failed to identify that smell as “me,” would that show that you are not self-conscious? More generally, I think it can be argued that even animals who do not pass the mirror test have forms of self-consciousness. In fact, I think it can be argued that pleasure and pain are forms of self-consciousness, since what the animal who experiences these things is experiencing is the effects of the world on himself, on his own condition. In that sense, all animals are self-conscious because they can feel their existence. Again, you have self-consciousness if you have some sort of awareness”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“with “gratitude for…long service (just as if they were members of the household).”11 He remarks with apparent approval that “In Athens it was punishable to let an aged work-horse starve.”12 He tells us that: “Any action whereby we may torment animals, or let them suffer distress, or otherwise treat them without love, is demeaning to ourselves.”13 6.2.2 But as that last phrase suggests, Kant thinks that these moral duties are not owed directly to the other animals, but rather to ourselves. They are duties with respect to the treatment of animals, but not duties owed to them. In a similar way, you might imagine we have duties”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“strains their capacities. The limitation he mentions sounds vaguely as if it were drawn from the Golden Rule: we should force them to do only such work as we would force ourselves to do.8 And if they do work for us, he thinks that we should be grateful. In his course lectures, Kant sometimes told a story about the philosopher Leibniz carefully returning a grub he had been studying to the tree from which he had taken it when he was done, “lest he should be guilty of doing any harm to it.”9 Both in his lectures and in The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant has hard words for people who shoot their horses or dogs when they are no longer useful.10 Such animals should be treated, Kant insists,”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“around. For a human being, this has two distinct aspects. The unity of what we may call your “acting self”—a unity that we also call “integrity”—enables you to pursue your ends effectively and maintain your projects, commitments, relationships, and values over time.14 The unity of what we may call your “knowing self” involves the formation of an integrated conception of your environment, one that enables you to identify relations between the different parts of your environment well enough to find your way around in it. Those relations are temporal, spacial, causal, and for many animals social. By forming a unified conception of your environment, you also unify yourself as the subject of that conception. The fact that I identify with my self—with the agent of my projects and commitments and the subject of my conception of the world—means that there may be things about my body, such as its tendency to senescence, that are not good for me, even if perhaps they are good for my species or my genes. They are not good, that is, for the thing that I experience, and identify, as “me.” My functional good is what maintains the aspects of me that support my having a self.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“Any action whereby we may torment animals, or let them suffer distress, or otherwise treat them without love, is demeaning to ourselves. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, 27:710”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“In 1625, in his book On the Law of War and Peace, Hugo Grotius asserted that human beings would have obligations ‘even if we should concede that which cannot be conceded without the utmost wickedness, that there is no God, or that the affairs of men are of no concern to Him’.2 But two of his followers, Thomas Hobbes and Samuel Pufendorf, thought that Grotius was wrong.3 However socially useful moral conduct might be, they argued, it is not really obligatory unless some sovereign authority, backed by the power of sanctions, lays it down as the law. Others in turn disagreed with them, and so the argument began.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity

“other animals, but that it must be quickly and without pain, and must not be for the sake of mere sport. Recreational hunting would therefore be wrong in Kant’s view, as well as sports like dog-fighting and cock-fighting that may lead to the animal’s painful injury or death. Kant does not say why we should kill animals, and he does not discuss the question whether we may eat them, but presumably that is one of the reasons he has in mind.6 He does not think we should perform painful experiments on non-human animals “for the sake of mere speculation, when the end could also be achieved without these.”7 He thinks we may make the other animals work, but not in a way that”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“When I say that something is good-for me, even in the functional sense, the “me” that I am referring to is the embodiment of my self, a conscious subject and agent who is more or less (for, as we are about to see, this is a matter of degree) functionally unified over time.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“Strictly speaking, we do not disapprove the action because it is vicious; instead, it is vicious because we disapprove it. Since morality is grounded in human sentiments, the normative question cannot be whether its dictates are true. Instead, it is whether we have reason to”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity

“so. In any case, on a Kantian conception, what is special about human beings is not that we are the universe’s darlings, whose fate is absolutely more important than the fates of the other creatures who like us experience their own existence. It is exactly the opposite: What is special about us is the empathy that enables us to grasp that other creatures are important to themselves in just the way we are important to ourselves, and the reason that enables us to draw the conclusion that follows: that every animal must be regarded as an end in herself, whose fate matters, and matters absolutely, if anything matters at all.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“To defend the qualities that are useful to others, Hume borrows a famous argument from Joseph Butler.18 In order to be happy, we must have some desires and interests whose fulfilment will bring us satisfaction.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity

“and feeling that suggests this. We have a general discomfort in the face of wanton destructiveness, a tendency to wince when objects are broken, a sadness at the sight of uninhabited homes, an objection to the neglect or abuse of precision tools. These responses are not rooted completely in the idea of economic waste, perhaps not even in any sort of human-centered or animal-centered waste. Again it might be suggested that such feelings result from a kind of”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“But failure to pass the mirror test does not imply that an animal is not self-conscious. For one thing, many animals are not visually oriented. Imagine you are confronted with a surface which reflects back your distinctive odor. If you failed to identify that smell as “me,” would that show that you are not self-conscious? More generally, I think it can be argued that even animals who do not pass the mirror test have forms of self-consciousness. In fact, I think it can be argued”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“Abolitionists and animal rights theorists distinguish themselves from animal welfarists, whose primary concern is with the suffering we inflict on animals.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“complaint, then you have done nothing wrong. Moral standards are just the standards of conduct that we can all agree that people should adhere to. But it is not, as you might have thought, that we can all agree to this conduct, because it is morally right. Rather, it is morally right because we can all agree to it.12”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“There are a few species of organisms—the examples are controversial, but hydras, flatworms, a certain species of jellyfish (Turritopsis dohrnii) have been suggested—that apparently do always die of accidents and so are potentially, though never actually, immortal.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals

“The view I am going to describe in this lecture takes its starting point from that thought. It applies one of the best rules of philosophical methodology: that a clear statement of the problem is also a statement of the solution.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity

“Thus we find that the unconditioned condition of the goodness of anything is rational nature...To play this role, however, rational nature must itself be something of unconditional value--and end in itself.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends

“A good person does the right thing for what Pufendorf calls an intrinsic motive:”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity