Ep. 370: Christine Korsgaard on the History of Ethics (Part One)
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
Mark Linsenmayer
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 30 June 2025
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On The Sources of Normativity (1996), lectures 1 and 2.
How are facts related to obligations? We don't want to merely explain our moral impulses, but justify them. Korsgaard walks us through the views of Hobbes, Hume, Bernard Williams and others to arrive at her own breed of Kantianism, which we'll lay out in ep. 371.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to The Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. |
| 0:15.7 | Our question for episode 370 is something like, how are factsacts Related to Moral Obligation? |
| 0:22.8 | We read the first two lectures from Christine Korsgaards, |
| 0:26.6 | The Sources of Normativity. |
| 0:28.7 | Lectures delivered in 1992 and published in 1996. |
| 0:32.5 | More information about the text and the podcast, |
| 0:34.4 | please see Partially Examinate Life.com. |
| 0:36.5 | This is Mark Lintonmeyer, both explanatorily and normatively adequate in Madison, Wisconsin. |
| 0:42.2 | This is Seth Paskin, marveling about the striking fact that I actually have values in Austin, Texas. |
| 0:49.8 | This is Wes Alwyn, reflectively endorsing my location, which is Cambridge, Massachusetts. |
| 0:56.1 | This is Dylan Casey nominally normative in Madison, Wisconsin. |
| 1:00.7 | All right. |
| 1:01.0 | We're continuing on our run on contemporary, semi-contemporary moral theory. |
| 1:07.0 | Wes, you had gotten ahead of us, finishing the Philip of Foot and going right on to this. |
| 1:13.1 | And we're going to do two full episodes on this figure that you probably never heard of |
| 1:18.3 | because the one today is all about the history of philosophy, the history of ethics specifically. |
| 1:23.7 | You know, I was thinking we were going to go back to talk about Clark, the guy that Hume is responding to, but she explains Clark well enough. I don't think we have to do Clark now. And there's a number of other things that, you know, interestingly putting Hume and other folks into perspective to eventually get to some sort of Kantianism, which is her view that we can |
| 1:45.1 | talk about next time. Yeah, I had known about Korsgaard for a very long time, because if you've |
| 1:50.3 | ever looked at any Kant secondary literature, Korskard will be referred to as the big Kantian, |
| 1:55.3 | and I had always just had this kind of prejudiced view of her as probably being dry and boring, you know, with Kant come |
| 2:03.5 | certain associations of, with duty. I have no idea what you're talking about. Lacking. She was |
| 2:08.6 | Kantian and Kantian. That was your assumption. Lacking in warmth. But I was surprised to find |
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