Class 7.2: Cooperation
We’ve now spent two weeks reading and thinking about issues about moral responsibility, in order to help us start to think about what it is for conflicts to be personal, and about what makes some conflicts feel more personally than others. In weeks eight and nine we are going to move on to think more generally about what is involved in treating someone as a person. Today’s topic, reading, and class are sort of a transitional topic. Our reading will start with the idea of responsibility and end with a hypothesis about what is involved in treating someone else as a person.
Christine Korsgaard
The author of today’s reading, Christine Korsgaard, taught for many years first at the University of Chicago and then at Harvard University, from which she retired in just the last few years. Korsgaard is known as one of the most important contemporary moral philosophers and the most influential contemporary interpreter of the moral philosophy of the historical philosopher Immanuel Kant. Korsgaard’s contributions to moral philosophy, in turn, typically come out of her attempts to think through what Kant would or should have said about various questions. In our reading for today, she tries to say what she thinks Kant thinks it is to see or treat yourself as a responsible agent.
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant is one of the most influential and important philosophers in the history of philosophy in the European tradition. He lived and taught in the city of Konigsberg in Prussia, and for most of his life lived a very bland life lecturing to undergraduates and not publishing very much research. But he was a late bloomer. In his fifties, he started publishing a series of books that went on to be enormously influential, transforming the trajectory of philosophy. About a hundred years after Kant, there was a cultural split between the ways that philosophy was pursued and practiced in continental Europe versus as practiced in English in Britain and North America, and Kant is generally considered the last really important historical philosopher who remained influential in both of these traditions. According to some views, he is the most important writer in the history of philosophy, or one of the two most important, along with Aristotle. So all of this is just a long preface to say that he is a big deal.
One of the most important ideas in Kant’s philosophy is that we can think about the world in two different ways, which he describes as there being “two worlds” - a world of “things-in-themselves”, which he calls “noumena”, and a world of “things-as-they-are-experienced”, which he calls “phenomena”. The distinction between these two worlds is really important, in Kant’s work, for helping us to understand why different kinds of knowledge are possible in math and science, for example, and for explaining why morality is important and requires treating other people with respect and dignity. In her article that we are reading today, Korsgaard is trying to give a very appealing, simple, explanation of what this distinction amounts to, for Kant.
Creating the Kingdom of Ends
Our reading for today is an article called “Creating the Kingdom of Ends: Reciprocity and Responsibility in Interpersonal Relations”. It is an important article about what is involved in seeing yourself as a responsible agent capable of making choices that affect the world, and about what it takes to see someone else as a similarly responsible agent. Remember that Korsgaard is not writing this paper for undergraduate students - though she would not be shy about expecting undergraduates like you to be capable of grasping its ideas. She is writing for people who she expects to be broadly familiar with some background knowledge about Kant, about Strawson, and about some other points of reference. She also knows that some of her central ideas will be more interesting if you are already aware of some other interpretations of Kant, so that you can tell whether her interpretation is more plausible. So don’t get intimidated by the text, but try as you read to focus on the questions, “what does Korsgaard think it is to hold someone responsible?” and “what is the difference between thinking practically and thinking theoretically?” and “is it harder to think practically about someone else than about myself?”
Quiz Time!