Ethics at the Intersection of Kant and Aristotle: an Interview with Christine M. Korsgaard by Ana Marta Gonzalez 1. AMG: You are well known among Kant Scholars for being one of the leading interpreters of a new approach to Kant’s Ethics. This approach challenges the usual charges of formalism and “rigorism” that, at least since Hegel and Schiller, have been made against every rendering of Kant’s moral philosophy. Among the authors now developing a similar approach, there are other students of Rawls, such as Barbara Herman, Thomas Hill and Andrews Reath1. Taken together, you all seem to be developing a much more “practice-oriented” account of Kant’s moral philosophy, determined not to become entangled in Kant’s characteristic “dualisms”. John Rawls once said that you don’t need to keep those dualisms in order to remain a Kantian2. This is certainly an hermeneutical option: other philosophers, such as Jaspers, took Kant’s dualisms as an expression of human finitude, thereby offering an existential or metaphysical reading of Kant. I think it is important to hold both aspects together. Otherwise, the human being could easily be reduced to a mere rational agent. I do not know whether you agree with this. In any event, contemporary ethics has been trying to rescue other dimensions of the human being. Thus, for instance, against the modern stress on autonomy, an author like Levinas has emphasized passivity and vulnerability; against our stress on external action, Iris Murdoch liked to emphasize what she called the interior “fabric of being”. You have a very powerful interpretation of Kant’s ethics along Rawls’ 1 Reath, Herman, and Korsgaard, eds., Reclaiming the History of Ethics. Essays for John Rawls, Cambridge University Press, 1997. Thomas Hill refers to Rawls’ lectures at Harvard in 1962 (Hill, Dignity and Practical Reason, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992, p. 17); Barbara Herman refers to his lectures in 1977 (Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1993, p. 50). A version of Rawls’s lectures is now available in John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, edited by Barbara Herman. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). 2 “Kant’s view is marked by a number of dualisms, in particular, the dualisms between the necessary and the contingent, form and content, reason and desire, and noumena and phenomena. To abandon these dualisms as he meant them is, for many, to abandon what is distinctive in his theory. I believe otherwise. His moral conception has a characteristic structure that is more clearly discernible when these dualisms are not taken in the sense he gave them but reinterpreted and their moral force reformulated within the scope of an empirical theory. One of the aims of A Theory of Justice was to indicate how this might be done”. “A Kantian Conception of Equality” (1975), in Collected Papers, ed. S. Freeman, H. U. Press, Cambridge, Ma., London, England, 1999, p. 264. Ana Marta González interview with Christine M. Korsgaard p. 2 lines. My question is: does your interpretation of Kant allow for seeing the human being in a way other than as a moral agent? CMK: There are two assumptions behind this question, I think. One is that the various dualisms you mention add up to one big dualism, with the necessary, the formal, the rational, and the noumenal on one side; and the contingent, substantive (i.e., content-ful), desiderative, and phenomenal on the other. The other is that if we accept this basic dualism, Kant leaves us no option but to identify the essentially human with the necessary, formal, rational, noumenal side of things, and so to see human beings as bare moral or rational agents. So the first thing I want to say is that I don’t accept the first of those two assumptions, and therefore I need not accept the second either. I think that the distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal is not an ontological distinction, but rather marks the difference between activity and passivity. We regard ourselves as noumenal insofar as we think of ourselves as active beings, and place ourselves among those forces that generate the world of appearances; we regard ourselves as phenomenal insofar as we know ourselves through inner and outer appearance. I see no reason to reject that distinction. Quite the contrary: the basic Kantian insight that the mind acts on something given to it depends on it. To put Kant’s point in Aristotelian terms, the mind imposes form, especially the form of law, on a matter or content that is given to it. This is true in both theoretical and practical philosophy. Kant thinks we contribute to the production of the world of experience in part by imposing the form of causal law on the material given to sensation, and that we create norms and values by imposing the form of law on maxims whose content is given to us by experience. But for that very reason, the distinctions between form and content, and reason and desire, should not be regarded as dualisms, since in these cases you have two items that are not rivals of some sort, but rather play functionally different roles. We need them both. Desire proposes ends: reason decides whether they are worth pursuing or not; it does that by seeing whether the substantive maxims of acting on those desires pass a test given by the formal maxim, the categorical imperative itself. I have tried to bring this out by arguing that Kant holds what I call “the constitutional model” of the 2 Ana Marta González interview with Christine M. Korsgaard p. 3 soul.3 According to this model, the function of reason is to legislate for the good of the whole; the function of desire is to make legislative proposals, prompted by the person’s empirical needs and interests. It is confused to think of a “dualism” between two distinct parts that are functionally related. So this is a different way of overcoming the supposed dualisms than that of Levinas or Murdoch, who basically accept the claim that these are dualisms but insist that in important ways human beings fall on both sides of them. To answer your final question more directly, then, my view not only allows but absolutely requires that we be something more than moral agents, since morality needs material to work on, and that comes from our empirical nature. But in one way, I go beyond Kant in insisting on the importance of our empirical identities. Kant thinks that desires are suitable to provide the content of our maxims because their satisfaction makes us happy. I think that the desires and interests that give content to our maxims spring from what I call our empirical or contingent “practical identities,” the roles and relationships in terms of which we define ourselves and find our lives to be worth living. (The notion of practical identity is introduced in The Sources of Normativity, §3.3.1; in Self-Constitution, currently in Lecture Four, I try to explain why human beings must have such identities.) These identities give rise to duties and obligations; they are sources of necessity in our lives, just as the moral law is. So it is essential to my story that each of us has, and must have, individual and culturally situated ways of identifying herself that are important to her. 2. AMG: Very much in line with Kant’s –and Rawls’- own doctrine of the primacy of practical reason, you have defined Moral philosophy as “the extension and refinement of ordinary practical deliberation, the search for practical reasons”4, and have taken Kant as a prominent example of this way of doing moral philosophy: “Kant’s arguments are not about us; they are addressed to us”5. It is from this perspective, I think, that you have reviewed the traditional approaches to the Categorical Imperative, trying to develop other aspects perhaps neglected in the 3 In “Self-Constitution in the Ethics of Plato and Kant” ( The Journal of Ethics, 3, 1999: pp. 1-29) and in Lecture Five of the current version of Self-Constitution: Action, Identity, and Integrity. The current version consists in a set of lectures given in 2002 as the Locke Lectures at Oxford; a book version is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. 4 Korsgaard, C., Creating the Kingdom of Ends (CKE), Cambridge University Press, 1996, xii. 3 Ana Marta González interview with Christine M. Korsgaard p. 4 past: for instance, the particular role of the Hypothetical Imperative in practical deliberation or its complementarity –rather than opposition- to the Categorical Imperative6. You have also shown how the different formulas of the Categorical Imperative –especially the formula of Humanity- account for significant moral differences in the way we deliberate about particular actions. Yet, on the whole, your focus on practical reason seems intended to highlight the central role of the concept of “rational nature” in Kant’s moral philosophy. This has been criticized7 as not being very Kantian. What do you have to say about this? CMK: In the passages from Jerry Cohen’s commentary to which you refer, he criticizes me for saying that morality is derived from human or rational nature. It is the “nature” part of that phrase to which Cohen objects. He appeals to the well-known passages in the Groundwork in which Kant says that the argument for the moral law must not be derived from anything specific to human nature or even human reason. I don’t think that I make the mistake Kant is discussing there - appealing to contingent psychological facts about human beings.