The Sources of Normativity Quotes

“To defend the qualities that are useful to others, Hume borrows a famous argument from Joseph Butler.18 In order to be happy, we must have some desires and interests whose fulfilment will bring us satisfaction.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity

“arose in the case of the person who is required to risk his life to conceal some Jews from the Nazis, was that it might seem paradoxical that you should be asked to endure evil merely to promote the existence of the species that generated that evil. This is a problem of what we might call direct reflexivity: morality may be found unsatisfactory from the moral point of view itself. Thus the”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity

“Strictly speaking, we do not disapprove the action because it is vicious; instead, it is vicious because we disapprove it. Since morality is grounded in human sentiments, the normative question cannot be whether its dictates are true. Instead, it is whether we have reason to”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity

“The view I am going to describe in this lecture takes its starting point from that thought. It applies one of the best rules of philosophical methodology: that a clear statement of the problem is also a statement of the solution.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity

“A good person does the right thing for what Pufendorf calls an intrinsic motive:”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity

“In 1625, in his book On the Law of War and Peace, Hugo Grotius asserted that human beings would have obligations ‘even if we should concede that which cannot be conceded without the utmost wickedness, that there is no God, or that the affairs of men are of no concern to Him’.2 But two of his followers, Thomas Hobbes and Samuel Pufendorf, thought that Grotius was wrong.3 However socially useful moral conduct might be, they argued, it is not really obligatory unless some sovereign authority, backed by the power of sanctions, lays it down as the law. Others in turn disagreed with them, and so the argument began.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity

“must be settled by considering an agent’s practical identity. Practical identities are those under which we act: as a member of a family, or of a community, as a citizen, or as a Member of the Kingdom of Ends. Human beings cannot live without some practical sense of identity; and (if Korsgaard is right) they cannot now get far without conceiving themselves as Members of the Kingdom of Ends. In acting with the practical identity of a Member of the Kingdom of Ends the forms of normativity that can be vindicated will correspond in scope as well as in form to the moral obligations which have traditionally been seen as endorsed by Kantian reflection.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity

“The reason for participating in a general will, and so for endorsing one’s identity as a citizen, is that we share the world with others who are free, not that we have confidence in their judgment. A citizen who acts on a vote that has gone the way she thinks it should may in one sense be more wholehearted than one who must submit to a vote that has not gone her way. But a citizen in whom the general will triumphs gracefully over the private will exhibits a very special kind of autonomy, which is certainly not a lesser form.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity