Christine Korsgaard on Justifying Moral Justification

Christine Korsgaard has a theory for justifying justification.

It is difficult to justify justification without begging the question.

If you believe that a particular set of rules justifies a set of conclusions, how do you go about justifying the statement that "these rules justify those conclusions"? How do you prove the rules of logic without either using the rules of logic, or using something else which, then, needs its own justification?

When it comes to justifying moral claims, Korsgaard suggests testing whether the method of justification survives the act of revealing what they are. Once we know, "This is what provides the foundation for our moral claims," does the sense that moral claims are justified remain? Or does it (can it) vanish?

If we find upon reflecting on the true moral theory that we still are inclined to endorse the claims that morality makes on us, then morality will be normative. I call this way of establishing normativity the ‘reflective endorsement’ method. (Korsgaard, Christine (1996): The Sources of Normativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

She explains this system in one case by describing an account of morality in which it fails.

Evolutionary theory says that moral claims are justified through a moral sense that we have evolved to have because it promotes the survival of the species.

Now, we take an agent and put him in a situation where she needs to make a moral choice. She can delete an email and nobody will know that it ever existed, or she can turn it over to investigators. She ponders that moral sentiments are sentiments that evolved in order to promote the survival of the species. However, she can go from here to ask, "The fact that people have sentiments that I should turn this over to the investigators that came about through evolution - does that really tell me that I must turn this email over to investigators?"

The agent in this case may share this evolved sentiment - having an aversion to deleting the email and failing to do her duty, but she is still open to taking this as an unfortunate side-effect of evolution, rather than a moral requirement.

At this point, I do not have space to discuss the merits of this test. I hope to do that later.

However, would like to report that desirism seems to pass this test.

Desirism holds that the right act is the act that a person with good desires would perform, and good desires are desires that people generally have many and strong (desire-based) reasons to promote.

The reasons to promote a desire comes from the desires that would be fulfilled by the desire being promoted if it were universally adopted.

For example, people generally have many and strong reasons to promote an aversion to gaining an advantage through deception - by lying and by fraud. The reasons for promoting such an aversion come from the desires that would be fulfilled by a widespread aversion to these types of deception. An act of lying or of fraud is wrong, then, because it is something that a person with such an aversion would not do. It warrants condemnation and, perhaps, punishment because these tools promote the overall aversion to these types of deception.

Now, we apply Korsgaard's test. Would knowing that this is the case undercut the sense that the moral claims are justified?

Knowing these things will not change the fact that people generally have many and strong reasons to promote an aversion to these types of deception. It will not change the fact that they can promote this aversion through the condemnation and punishment of those who engage in these types of acts. It does not change the fact that the person who does such an act has done something that people generally have many and strong reasons to condemn or to punish.

This ties into one of the arguments that I have used (though perhaps not stressed enough) for this whole project.

Let us say that I am entirely wrong in claiming that this is an account of morality. Let us say that I am totally confused about this. perhaps morality essentially involves divine commands or intrinsic values that do not exist.

It would still be the case that people generally have many and strong reasons to promote an aversion to deception, that they can do so by punishing and condemning those who engage in the practice, and that a person who commits such an act is somebody that people generally have reason to condemn or to punish.

In other words, this is still a useful project to develop, even if we do not call it morality.