YTL Annual Lecture 2024: Christine Korsgaard

The Yeoh Tiong Lay Centre for Politics, Philosophy and Law is delighted to host Professor Christine Korsgaard to deliver the centre's annual lecture for 2024.

Title

The Value of the Individual

Abstract

Kant believed that every human being is end in itself, characterized by an inner worth or dignity that makes us the proper objects of moral treatment. In the Groundwork, Kant explains many of our duties by arguing that their violation would involve treating a human being as a mere means. But we cannot explain all of our duties that way. Nor can we explain what exactly is wrong with treating people that way unless we have a positive account of what it means to be an end in itself and of what sort of treatment that calls for. Kant doesn’t tell us enough.

I find a clue to what Kant could mean in his claim that individuals who are ends in themselves have incomparable value. I detach the claim from Kant’s own view that what gives you incomparable value is the capacity for morality and instead argue that it is based in the capacity to lead a life that is good or bad for you. To treat someone as an end in itself is to evaluate the events and conditions of that person’s life in accordance with the value they have for her. I explain why this conception of the value of the individual rules out the aggregation of value across the boundaries between individuals and show how it can be linked to John Taurek’s attackon aggregation. I also explain how this conception of the value of the individual is connected to the idea that individuals have rights.

Author Bio

Christine M. Korsgaard is Arthur Kingsley Porter Research Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. She took her BA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1974 and her PhD at Harvard in 1981. She held positions at Yale University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Chicago before returning to Harvard. She is the author of Creating the Kingdom of Ends, a defense of Kant’s moral philosophy; The Sources of Normativity, about the development of modern ideas of obligation; The Constitution of Agency, papers on practical reason and moral psychology; Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity, an account of morality based in the nature of human action, and Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals, a Kantian defense of the moral standing of animals. She is currently at work on The Natural History of the Good, a book about the place of value in nature.