Valuing humanity: Kierkegaardian worries about Korsgaardian transcendental arguments

Abstract

In his recent book on ethics, Alasdair MacIntyre writes as follows:A good life is one in which an agent, although continuing to rank order particular and finite goods, treats none of these goods as necessary for the completion of her or his life, so leaving her or himself open to a final good beyond all such goods, as good desirable beyond all such goods. Defective lives are those in which agents either mistakenly identify some particular finite good that they have achieved or will achieve as their final good or suppose that failure or defeat in achieving such goods is a failure to achieve their final good. 1MacIntyre associates this idea with Aquinas; but it is also an idea that can be strongly associated with Kierkegaard, and his warning that we should not confuse absolute with relative goods or values or ends. Our aim in this paper is to consider whether a confusion of this sort afflicts Christine Korsgaard's well-known transcendental argument for the value of humanity, and thus whether it can be subjected to a specifically Kierkegaardian form of critique.We will begin by outlining Korsgaard's position (in §1), then raising these Kierkegaardian concerns about her transcendental argument (in §2), before presenting a sketch of a different transcendental argument based on the alternative approach offered by Kierkegaard (in §3). Korsgaard's transcendental argumentIn her book The Sources of Normativity, and some associated writings, Korsgaard has offered an influential way of answering 'the normative question' which she takes to be modelled on Kant, 2 and which she sees as involving a transcendental argument. 'The normative question' arises, Korsgaard suggests, when you are 'in the position of an agent on whom morality is making a difficult claim', so that '[y]ou then ask the philosopher: must I really do this? Why 1 Alasdair MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 231 2 How far Korsgaard's argument is genuinely a development of Kant's is of course a debated question in the literature, but one which cannot be considered further here. For some doubts on this score, see Jens Timmermann, 'Value Without Regress: Kant's Formula of Humanity Revisited',