Normativity and Agency

Christine M. Korsgaard has had a profound influence on moral philosophy over the past forty years. Through her writing and teaching she has developed a distinctive, rigorous, and historically informed way of thinking about ethics, agency, and the normative dimension of human life more generally. The twelve original essays in this volume are written in her honor on the occasion of her retirement from teaching. They engage questions that recur in her work: Why are we obligated to do what morality demands? What features of our nature make us subject to moral obligation? What does it mean to be autonomous and responsible for what we do? What do we owe to nonhuman animals? Contributors include Stephen Darwall, Kyla Ebels-Duggan, Barbara Herman, Richard Moran, Japa Pallikkathayil, Faviola Rivera-Castro, T.M. Scanlon, Tamar Schapiro, Sharon Street, David Sussman, Sigrún Svavarsdóttir, and David Velleman. These essays shed light on Korsgaard's own views while staking out provocative new positions on the topics that feature centrally in her own work.

Tamar Schapiro earned her PhD at Harvard University under the guidance of Christine Korsgaard. She was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a faculty member at Stanford before taking a position at MIT in 2015. She has published articles in Ethics, The Journal of Philosophy, Nous, and The Journal of Ethics, and she is author of Feeling Like It: A Theory of Inclination and Will (Oxford, 2021). Kyla Ebels-Duggan received her PhD from Harvard University in 2007 and is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. She specializes in moral and political philosophy and has written on love, politics, responsibility, autonomy, and moral education. Her work has appeared in Ethics, The Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Studies and Philosophers' Imprint. Sharon Street received her B.A. in philosophy from Amherst College in 1995 and her Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University in 2003. Since 2002, she has taught at New York University, where she has been a full professor since 2016. She is the author of a series of articles defending a constructivist view of normativity and raising epistemological challenges for various forms of realism about normativity. In current work she is exploring the relevance of eastern meditative traditions to secular metaethics.

- 1: David Sussman: The Horizons of Humanity - 2: Sharon Street: Finite Valuers and the Problem of Vulnerability to Unmitigated Loss - 3: Kyla Ebels-Duggan: A Question of One's Own: Concepts, Conceptions, and Moral Skepticisms - 4: J. David Velleman: The Two Normativities - 5: Richard Moran: Self-Consciousness and Self-Division in Moral Psychology - 6: Tamar Schapiro: What Makes Weak-Willed Action Weak? - 7: Sigrún Svavarsdóttir: Integrity, Truth, and Value - 8: Japa Pallikkathayil: Shadows of the Self: Reflections on the Authority of Advance Directives - 9: T. M. Scanlon: Korsgaard on Responsibility - 10: Stephen Darwall: Animal Value and Right - 11: Barbara Herman: Juridical Personality and the Role of Juridical Obligation - 12: Faviola Rivera-Castro: The Social Conditions for Autonomy: Kant on Politics and Religion