Handout #7: Normative authority and Korsgaardian rationalism
Abstract
In The Sources of Normativity (1996) Christine Korsgaard provides a dialectical examination of different conceptions of the sources of normativity or reasons -- conceptions that appeal to voluntarism, realism, and reflective endorsement -- that culminates in her own Kantian or neo- Kantian conception of normativity that is grounded in autonomy. Her method is dialectical (Dialectical) inasmuch as her neo-Kantian conception is supposed to reveal the truth or grain of truth in each of the three prior conceptions. Korsgaard begins Lecture 1 with a statement of the main problems that arise in connection with the normativity of ethics. She factors normative adequacy into answers to two kinds of problems (12-13).