The Constitution of Agency: Essays on Practical Reason and Moral Psychology – By Christine M. Korsgaard

Abstract

IN 1996 CHRISTINE KORSGAARD published not only Creating the Kingdom of Ends, a collection of papers on Kant and Kantian ethics, but also The Sources of Normativity, a revised version of her 1992 Tanner Lectures. Both volumes were, and still are, essential reading for moral philosophers. The papers she published in the 1980s and early 1990s were an important part of the enriched understanding that then emerged of both Kant's own ethics and the possibilities of developing Kantian ideas in a contemporary context. In contrast, The Sources of Normativity pointed in another direction; it was still clearly a work in Kantian ethics, but much more of a departure with respect to Kant, introducing the notion of practical identity and relying on a version of Wittgenstein's private language argument in order to establish the intersubjective validity of reasons for action.Her current book, The Constitution of Agency, is similar to Creating the Kingdom of Ends in that it is a collection of papers and it has already been followed up by the publication of her revised 2002 Locke Lectures, Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity. Both books continue the turn in Korsgaard's thought where she is less interpretative and more constructive than in much of her earlier writings. It is still very much the case that Korsgaard balances on the line between the interpretative and the constructive, simply because her way of doing philosophy is by using historical figures as partners in a form of dialogue. But not only has her interpretative style always tended towards what is sometimes called rational reconstruction (where one does not shy away from using more modern terminology in order to explicate the insights that might lie beneath the surface of a historic text); her use of the history of philosophy has become increasingly Hegelian, using history to identify and trace key tensions in ethics in search of a philosophical reconciliation. Kant is still the lead character, but other philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle, also enter the stage, and although their roles are largely those of supporting characters, they are no mere foils in a drama where Kant consistently comes out on top.The first part of the present volume is entitled "The Principles of Practical Reason" and contains three papers, all of which deal with Korsgaard's core

Freedom and social practices

“…Establishing this thesis, therefore, takes us to a significant degree toward a positive conception of liberty. Of course, a full picture of freedom in this vein would include significant 17 See Korsgaard (2008) for a view with this implication.…”

Reinforcement learning and artificial agency

“…It is therefore plausible that there are forms which are more demanding than action for reasons as I understand it, for which model-based RL does not suffice, and other philosophers' accounts of what they call "action for reasons" may identify such forms. For example, Korsgaard's (2008Korsgaard's ( , 2018 view is that action for reasons requires conscious meta-cognitive reflection on one's own motives. Model-based RL does not entail this kind of reflection.…”

“…11 SeeArpaly and Schroeder (2014, pp. 60-61) for a problem case involving an isolated behavioural disposition, which they attribute toNagel (1970) andKorsgaard (2008).…”

Epistemic Consent and Doxastic Justification1

“…Flowerree (2018) has defended a view that locates the source of epistemic normativity not in the nature of belief but rather in the nature of agency. Following Korsgaard's (2008) account of action, Flowerree (2018, 305) suggests that "our understanding of an action is intelligible only if we see it as the agent engaging in movement that is guided by her representation of the world. So any description of what the agent is doing will have to include what the agent took to be true when she acted.…”