The Sources of Normativity

Your reasons express your identity, your nature; your obligations spring from what that identity forbids. [...] For to violate them is to lose your integrity and so your identity, and to no longer be who you are. That is, it is to no longer be able to think of yourself under the description under which you value yourself and find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking. It is to be for all practical purposes dead or worse than dead.

Korsgaard seeks to answer the "normative question": what justifies the claims that morality makes on us? In addition to addressing how and why moral ideas can have important practical and psychological effects on us, she also attempts to justify granting this kind of importance show more to morality. Her account is Kantian, with an emphasis on practical identity. The responses from Cohen, Nagel, Guess, and Williams fail to damage her project too much, before she provides a thorough and convincing reply in the final section of the book (the benefit of being the author of the book, I suppose). Nagel's objections seem to me the most convincing of the four, but it is worth reading The Sources of Normativity for anyone who wants to decide for themselves. show less