Christine Korsgaard

Christine Marion Korsgaard
Korsgaard in 2010
Born	April 9, 1952(1952-04-09)(age72) Chicago,Illinois,United States
Alma mater	Harvard University University of Illinois
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Analytic
Institutions	Harvard University
Main interests	Moral philosophy·Kantianism

Christine Marion Korsgaard,FBA(/ˈkɔːrzɡɑːrd/;born April 9, 1952) is an Americanphilosopherwho is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy Emerita atHarvard University.Her main scholarly interests are inmoral philosophyand its history; the relation of issues in moral philosophy to issues inmetaphysics,thephilosophy of mind,and the theory ofpersonal identity;the theory ofpersonal relationships;and innormativityin general.

Education and career

Korsgaard first attendedEastern Illinois Universityfor two years and transferred to receive aB.A.from theUniversity of Illinoisand aPh.Dfrom Harvard, where she was a student ofJohn Rawls.She was awarded an honorary LHDDoctor of Humane Lettersfrom theUniversity of Illinoisin 2004.She is a 1970 alumna ofHomewood-Flossmoor High Schoolin Flossmoor, Ill.

Korsgaard in 2019

She has taught atYale,theUniversity of California at Santa Barbara,and theUniversity of Chicago;since 1991 she has been a professor at Harvard University, where she was Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy, and is now emerita.

In 1996 Korsgaard published a book entitledThe Sources of Normativity,which was the revised version of herTanner Lectures on Human Values,and also a collection of her past papers onKant's moral philosophy and Kantian approaches to contemporary moral philosophy:Creating the Kingdom of Ends.In 2002, she was the first woman to give theJohn Locke Lecturesat theUniversity of Oxford,which turned into her 2009 bookSelf-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity.

She was elected a Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts & Sciencesin 2001and aCorresponding Fellow of the British Academyin 2015.She served as President of the Eastern Division of theAmerican Philosophical Associationin 2008-2009, and held a Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award from 2006-2009.

Animal rights

Korsgaard is an advocate ofanimal rights.She was avegetarianfor over 40 years and is now avegan.In 2018, Korsgaard authoredFellow Creatures: Our Obligations to Other Animalswhich argues thatKantian ethicssupports animal rights.

She has also given several lectures about animal rights, including the 2014 Uehiro Lectures on The Moral and Legal Standing of Animals.In these lectures, Korsgaard argues that importance is tethered to a creature who finds it important. While according to this view there is no "free-floating" untethered importance, there is absolute importance, which occurs when something is important to all beings. Therefore, to Korsgaard, the statement that animals are universally less important than humans is not incorrect, but incoherent. She distinguishes between the evaluative or functionalgood,where something is good because it is able to perform its function well, and the final good, where an end or a life is good. Final goods are what make things important, and a thing possesses the final good if things can be good or bad for that thing. She also distinguishes between ordinary objects such as knives, for which being sharpened is good in the sense that it helps the knife achieve its function of cutting well, organisms, which have a function to tend to their and their species' own well-functioning, and animals, a particular kind of organism which represent the world to themselves and act using this representation for the function of self-maintenance. This representation enables the animal to have self-maintenance not only as a functional good, but also as a final good. Therefore, final goods need not come frompeople,but from any animal. Korsgaard defines people as "normative self-governed beings" and says that the rational capacity to evaluate oneself and reflect on one's motives makes people different from animals. This means that while non-person animals are not responsible for their actions and do not have duties to other animals, people are and do. Further, she distinguishes between two different kinds of ends-in-of-themselves:

1. Something is an end-in-of-itself in theactive senseif it is capable of legislating ends that one must respect.
2. Something is an end-in-of-itself in thepassive senseif things that are good for it are good absolutely.

Clearly the active sense implies the passive sense, but Korsgaard departs from Kant in claiming that the converse fails. In fact, the choice to set a value on an end is made merely because one desires the end, because it is good with respect to the being making the choice; in other words, because it is a being with the final good. Therefore, when universalized using theformula of universal law,the being is committed to valuing the ends of all beings with the final good (animals). In other words, all animals are passive ends-in-of-themselves, but non-person are not active ends-in-of-themselves.

Selected publications

Books

• (2018)Fellow Creatures:Our obligations to other animals,Oxford University Press,ISBN978-0198753858.
• (2009)Self-Constitution:Agency, Identity, and Integrity,Oxford University Press.
• (2008)The Constitution of Agency,Oxford University Press.
• (1996a)The Sources of Normativity,New York: Cambridge University Press,ISBN0-521-55059-9.
• (1996b)Creating the Kingdom of Ends,New York: Cambridge University Press,ISBN0-521-49644-6.

Articles

• (1986) "Skepticism about Practical Reason,"The Journal of Philosophy83 (1): 5-25. (Reprinted in as ch.11 in Korsgaard (1996b), pp. 311–334.)
• (1997) "The Normativity of Instrumental Reason," ch. 8 inGarrett Cullity& Berys Gaut (eds.)Ethics and Practical Reason,Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 215–54. (Reprinted with Afterword in Korsgaard (2008), pp. 27–69.)

See also

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers
• List of animal rights advocates

External links

• Korsgaard's Web Page- at Harvard University.
• Interview with 3AM Magazine