Relationships and Reasons

Introduction

What makes a human life meaningful? Why should we be moral? Why should we be a good friend, lover or parent? Why should we do anything? In her Sources of Normativity, Christine Korsgaard tries to ground normativity in our human capacity for reflective self-consciousness and autonomy. Through rational reflection we can self-legislate moral laws. The source of normativity refers to the source of the binding force of reasons and obligations that guide our conduct. As Korsgaard states, "a normative claim is a claim we make on ourselves or each other about what we have reason to do or be."

Meaningfulness is what provides an answer to the question "why go on?" I follow Susan Wolf, who contends that meaningfulness constitutes a fundamental source of value, which is distinct from morality or egoism. What makes life meaningful, she argues, is "actions and patterns of action that positively engage with worthy objects of love, and to do so in a way that is independent of whether such actions maximally promote either agent's welfare or the good of the world." Meaning arises from loving objects we judge as worthy, through relationships and creative pursuits. Wolf points to examples like spending time with a loved one in the hospital, which illustrate meaningful actions driven by personal bonds of love. Korsgaard's framework does not acknowledge this separate dimension. By reducing reasons for action to moral duty or contingent desires, her view cannot account for meaningful activities motivated by love. The contrast reveals how Korsgaard's emphasis on moral identity overlooks sources of meaning tied to particular connections and projects. In a word, it is concrete intersubjectivity, rather than abstract intersubjectivity, that grounds normativity.

In this essay I argue against Christine Korsgaard's account of the intersubjectively binding source of normativity. The takeaway of my criticism is that Korsgaard's account cannot sufficiently explain meaningfulness as a dimension of value. While I agree with Korsgaard that identity and normativity are interconnected, I do not agree with Korsgaard's argument for and conception of this relationship. In contrast to Korsgaard, I argue that our practical identities and ethical relationships are the primary source of normativity, rather than our shared transcendent humanity; our reasons and obligations arise first from our social roles and relations of care, rather than from an internal legislative authority.

First, I will explicate Korsgaard's Kantian view of normativity. According to which the source of normativity lies in our humanity—specifically in our moral identity as reflective, self-conscious agents. It is our shared human identity that provides the foundation for normative claims; according to Korsgaard: "the source of normativity lies in ourselves." By reflecting on what is involved in being human, we can derive binding reasons and obligations. Next, I will critique her conception of identity and offer an alternative account tying meaning to intersubjective social roles and care. Finally, I will argue that love rather than abstract reason should be seen as the source of normativity.

I. Korsgaard's Account of Normativity

I shall now outline and criticize Korsgaard's account of the origin of normativity; specifically, how she argues that life is the source of value. I agree that life is the objective existence of value—or as I shall call it, natural normativity. However, her conception of life is insufficient, because it does not take dependence on others into account. Out of the revised conception of life that follows from my criticism, I argue, following Harry Frankfurt and Susan Wolf, that normativity must first and foremost have its basis in acts and relationships characterized by love. These acts and relationships are neither impelled by a sense of duty or general welfare, nor of self-interest. She states that these acts are done for what she (and Frankfurt) calls reasons of love. In these cases, the good of the beloved is what motivates us and gives us reasons. In Wolf's account, meaningfulness has both an objective and a subjective component. For, she says, not every object of love is worthy of love, and our judgments of worthiness is fallible. Wolf argues that meaningfulness must involve attributing objectivity to value. But she does not provide an account of where this could come from: "in claiming that meaningfulness has an objective component, I mean only to insist that something other than a radically subjective account of value must be assumed. Nonetheless, I must confess that I have no positive account of non-subjective value with which I am satisfied." Why should it be important to us that our life projects, which bring us the feeling of satisfaction, can be recognized by others to have objective worth? Wolf answers that it lies in "a need, or at least an interest or concern, to be able to see one's life as valuable in a way that can be recognized from a point of view other than one's own." In other words, we have a need for self-esteem, and a way to get this is to be esteemed by others:

"If we are engaged in projects of independent value—fighting injustice, preserving a historic building, writing a poem—then presumably others will be capable of appreciating what we are doing, too. Others may actually appreciate what we are doing, or at least appreciate the same values as the ones that motivate us. This makes us at least notionally part of a community, sharing values, to some degree, and a point of view. Even when no one knows what we are doing, or when no one appreciates it, however, the thought that it is worth doing can be important to us. The scorned artist or lonely inventor, the scientist whose research no one seems to approve, may be sustained by the thought that her work is good, and that the day may come when others understand and value it."
Attributing value to something is not only done in a speech act. We can attribute value in acting. After all, we only do what is in some sense already worth doing. We want to do something other people might find it worth doing/valuable. The most immediate form of this is tending to someone's health, for contributing to someone's life is valuable to that person. An indirect way of participating in what another might find valuable is in social practices.

II. The Communitarian Objection

On page 119, Korsgaard anticipates an objection to her claim that moral identity is more fundamental than any contingent conception of identity:

"It is urged by communitarians that people need to conceive themselves as members of smaller communities, essentially tied to particular others and traditions. This is an argument about how we human beings need to constitute our practical identities, and if it is successful what it establishes is a universal fact, namely that our practical identities must be constituted in part by particular ties and commitments. The liberal who wants to include everyone will now argue from that fact. And the communitarian himself, having reflected and reached this conclusion, now has a conception of his own identity which is universal: he is an animal that needs to live in community."
Korsgaard constructs the communitarian objection like this: the communitarian states that our practical identity is constituted by our particular personal ties, commitments, and the traditions we are born in. That is where our identity, and normativity fundamentally in fact come from.

But Korsgaard responds that the communitarian, in making that argument, has already disproven it. For, she says, in arguing that human beings need their particular ties and commitments in order to constitute a practical identity, they have argued for a conception of their practical identity which precisely does not overlap with those particular ties and commitments: namely, that of an animal that needs to live in a community with particular ties and commitments. Thus, she goes on, the values that arise from our particular practical identities derive their value from the universal fact that human beings are animals whose identity necessitates having contingent practical identities.

I shall argue that Korsgaard makes a mistake here. The mistake is that she thinks that the need for having particular practical identities must also necessarily be a motive for having them. I argue that the value of our humanity is instantiated in our particular identities. Our universal moral identity, our humanity, does not stand as an independent source of value, of importance.

Michael Stocker argues that a view like Korsgaard's—the view that, upon reflection, a fundamental motive for conforming to our practical identities must spring from conceiving of oneself as the type of animal that needs particular practical identities—runs into trouble. Speaking of utilitarian and deontological theories he says that "what is lacking in these theories is simply—or not so simply—the person." What he means is that the reasons and obligations we have towards other people must be grounded in them specifically:

"love, friendship, affection, fellow feeling, and community all require that the other person be an essential part of what is valued. The person—not merely the person's general values nor even the person-qua-producer-or-possessor-of-general-values—must be valued. The defect of these theories in regard to love, to take one case, is not that they do not value love, [...] but that they do not value the beloved."
We do not choose or maintain our particular ties and commitments because we need them. There's something not quite right when someone who remains your friend merely because they need a friend. To be clear, one might seek out relationships because we know they enrich our lives, but it is not this need that is the reason for why we love a particular person or project. Loving a friend is not the same as loving friendship. If it were so, then it would be arbitrary who or what we loved. Furthermore, it is doubtful whether it is appropriate to speak of love in such cases.

The motive for morality, in Korsgaard's picture, is ultimately maintaining one's own spiritual purity, i.e. one's abstract identity as human. For this reason, I believe that Frankfurt's account of love as the source of normativity better captures our experience of meaningfulness. For Frankfurt, love is not essentially "a response to the perceived worth of the beloved," though it could arise that way. Fundamentally, for Frankfurt, "what we love necessarily acquires value for us because we love it."

According to Frankfurt: "Love is, most centrally, a disinterested concern for the existence of what is loved, and for what is good for it." Thus it is what Williams would call a categorical desire: a desire that I have that is not conditional on my personal existence. One example is the desire for the well-being of one's children. People generally do not only desire their children's well-being so long as they themselves are alive to witness it. The flourishing of the beloved is regarded as "important in itself, apart from any bearing that it may have on any other matters."

To illustrate: when we are children, the valuing that keeps us alive is not just our own babbling and cooing. The valuing in virtue of which we stay alive is first that of our parents. Thus we could say: sustaining life is valuing (it). Of course, you might say: yes, but the baby's crying and cooing is what enables the parents to respond to its needs. But here, we should notice that a baby's intrinsic non-self-sufficiency is why it does what it does.

Conclusion

Contra Korsgaard, meaningfulness does not entirely come from within. It comes from without, from others. Not others in general, conceived abstractly as Citizens of the Kingdom of Ends, but from concrete, particular others, with whom we live. Korsgaard cannot give a positive conception of a meaningful life because in her account the goal of normativity is self-preservation of identity. The problem with this is that the answer to "why go on?" simply is: to be someone, in the abstract. We must be raised in the home of ends, roam through the town of ends, in order to become fully fledged, self-perceived, citizens of the Kingdom of Ends.

Bibliography

  • Frankfurt, Harry. The Reasons of Love. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
  • Geus, Raymond. 'Morality and Identity' in The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
  • Korsgaard, Christine. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
  • Korsgaard, Christine. Creating the Kingdom of Ends. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
  • Scheffler, Samuel. 'Fear, Death, and Confidence', in Niko Kolodny (ed.), Death and the Afterlife. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
  • Stocker, Michael. "The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories." The Journal of Philosophy 73, no. 14 (1976): 453–66.
  • Wolf, Susan. "Meaningfulness: a Third Dimension of the Good Life." Foundations of Science 21, no. 2 (2016): 253-269.