“Integrity, Luck, and the Unthinkable” - UCLA School of Law

“Integrity, Luck, and the Unthinkable”
David Sussman
Professor of Philosophy, University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign
Legal Theory Workshop
UCLA School of Law
4/12/2012, 5:00p.m.-6:45p.m., Room 1314
http://www.law.ucla.edu/home/index.asp?page=817
Draft, March 23, 2012. For UCLA
Workshop. Please Don’t Cite Or Quote
Without Permission.

[DRAFT—please do not use or cite without permission]
Integrity, Luck, and the Unthinkable
David Sussman
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
dsussman@illinois.edu
But if someone really thinks, in advance, that it is open to question
whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the
innocent should be quite excluded from consideration—I do not want
to argue with him; he shows a corrupt mind.
G.E.M Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy”
In Self-Constitution, Christine Korsgaard advances a version of the Platonic thesis
that the soul of a properly integrated agent bears a strong analogy to a justly ordered
polity. Supposedly, unless the proper relations of authority and deference hold between
the parts of her soul, a person will lack the right kind of unity to be an agent, so that
nothing that goes on in or through her could really count as her acting at all. Korsgaard
argues that absent some kind of quasi-political organization of his psyche, a human being
can be nothing more than a mere “heap” of sub-personal impulses and processes. Such a
heap may shamble around in predictable and explicable ways, but these movements could
not realize or express any intentions, choices, or values, because there would be no way
to give sense to the idea of there being a subject who so intends, chooses, or values.
Korsgaard holds not only that real actions must proceed from such an integrated
agent, but also, somewhat paradoxically, that the basic function of action simply as such

2
is to attain and sustain the unity the agent in the requisite way. Supposedly, any action
that fails to recognize or ratify the right kind of normative relations between the parts of
the soul is defective qua action, regardless of its success in realizing any other values or
objectives. For Korsgaard, we act in the fullest sense (and so are most truly agents) only
when our souls are so constituted that reason is recognized as its most authoritative part.
Only when we act under the guidance of reason do we really act at all; not because we are
nothing more than our reason, but because only insofar as reason structures our various
appetites and emotions does the whole lot add up to something for us to be at all. This
way of understanding the relation of reason to action is supposed to have significant
normative consequences. In particular, Korsgaard thinks that this relation ultimately
grounds a demand that our practical reasons be “public” or “shareable” in a way that
supports not just principles of instrumental and prudential reasoning but also some kind
of robust Kantian universalizability requirement.
Korsgaard does allow there are ways an agent’s soul might be integrated that differ
from the Kantian conception she advances. But she holds that all of these other forms of
agency are inherently defective, such that the agents so constituted turn out to be capable
of action only in a derivative or degenerate sense. Although these people do not merely
respond to impulse, they do not fully act, either. The central problem, as she sees it, is
that all these other souls are only contingently unified; that is, they can maintain their
unity only assuming that certain kinds of problems, challenges, or dilemmas never arise
for them. In contrast, the aristocratic or autonomous soul can recognize itself in any
conceivable situation that he might confront. Supposedly, the identity of this agent, at
least from his point of view, has a special kind of integrity that shields it from luck in a

3
way that makes its actions more truly its own than those of the other, less reflectively
constituted souls.
The constitutional model of the soul has had its detractors. Some, following Hume,
think there really can be no such thing as kind of practical power that is distinct from
passion, or that the talk various parts of the soul “deferring to” or “recognizing the
authority of” other parts can only be a way of describing relations of motivational
dominance in terms of an attractive but misleading metaphor. Nietzsche goes further.
For him, the constitutional model of the soul is not just a confusion that generates
unnecessary philosophical problems. Instead, it we truly embraced this conception we
would ultimately find ourselves unable to sincerely care about anything at all. He writes,
One must indeed grant something even more unpalatable; that, from
the highest biological standpoint, legal conditions can never be other
than exceptional conditions….A legal order thought of as sovereign
and universal, not as a means in the struggle between power
complexes but as a mean of preventing all struggle in general—
perhaps after the communistic cliché of Dühring, that every will must
consider every other will its equal—would be a principle hostile to
life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to
assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to
nothingness.— (Genealogy II, p.76)
In this paper, I develop a version of Nietzsche’s worry; that conceiving of agency along
the lines of a just polity in the Platonic/Kantian fashion may be inimical to the ways that
agents must see themselves if they are to be able to take an active interest in their own
lives. I will focus on Korsgaard’s central claim that only the aristocratic or autonomous
soul has the right kind of unity to act because of the way that this soul alone is
immunized from a certain kind of luck. I argue not only that vulnerability to some kinds

4
of luck are perfectly compatible with being a properly unified agent, but that such
vulnerabilities are necessary for us to possess the kind of integrity needed for us to take
an active reason in our own lives, and so be able to recognize ourselves as agents in the
first place.
1. Korsgaard’s point of departure is the fact that actions are not just events that happen
through people, but what people do for reasons; that is, in a way guided by some sense of
what they are doing and how it makes sense as a response to their situation, as they
conceive of it. This way of making sense of our doings involves implicit reference to an
active power that apprehends the contents of the relevant beliefs and desires, which is
sensitive to the rational relations between them, and which can guide its ensuing activity
in light of an appreciation of those relations. Supposedly, any account of action that did
not make such ineliminable reference to a unified, active agent-cause would not make
sense of action, but merely explain it away (replacing it with an explanation of mere
physical movements and their physical or neurological causes). Our actions “constitute”
us as agents in the sense that it only relative to such a normatively integrated performance
that is intelligible as a first-person point of view that it makes sense to talk about an agent
as distinct from various sub-personal forces and processes, and it is only relative to such
performances that any such agent takes on a determinate character.
For Korsgaard, this means that there can be no such thing as what she calls
“particularistic willing”. A person would will particularistically if she did something for
some reason, but did not take that decision to commit her to anything further; that is, if

5
she did not take her decision to in any way change how she should approach any other
choice at that might come before her. To use Kant’s language, a particularistic willer
would be adopting a maxim of action for just this instance, refusing to recognize its
relevance to any other circumstance. This person would not merely be acting with the
belief that she might or probably will change her mind. Rather, she sees her reason as
disposable, as applying only to her only here and now. Since there is no real
commitment or resolve here, she does not change her mind when the maxim drops out of
her thinking because something else has grabbed her attention. For this response is
perfectly keeping with what she had a mind to do all along.
In Korsgaard’s terminology to will particularistically would be to act on a reason that
is in no way “public” or “shareable”, but one that is wholly “private.” A reason is
“public” or “shareable” to the extent that it makes a claim or demand that can be
addressed from one practical perspective to another, and so has what Stephen Darwall has
called a kind of “second-personal” character. A public reason is the sort of reason that
functions within a context of an essentially joint activity, and so allows particular persons
(or perspectives) a certain standing to direct claims to others, along with special
obligation to attend to claims and responses that might be put to them in turn.
In contrast, a practical reason is private to just the extent that although it leaves agents
able to anticipate and make sense of each other’s behavior, it does not presuppose (or
define) anything like a shared deliberative perspective that they might enter into, or any
second-personal expectations directed to any other points of view. For example, rational
egoism supposes that reasons are private between natural individuals, (although they are

6
public with respect to different times and perspectives within the life of one individual).
Insofar as our reasons are private, we must share our reasons only from a theoretical point
of view: that is, in acting on such a reason I must see the sorts of reasons that make my
actions intelligible as such to be the kind of reason that would make your actions
intelligible as well, absent any interesting qualitative differences between us. Of course,
we may also share our reasons practically insofar as we have interests that happen to
overlap, and such reasons may support extensive systems of cooperation. So, when we
find ourselves in something like a Hobbesian state of nature, or under Hume’s
“circumstances of justice”, we will all turn out to compelling reasons to recognize and
support conventions that, while limiting our individual choices, are ultimately in
everyone’s long-term self-interest.
What distinguishes a private reason from truly public ones is that the sort of co-
deliberation they call for is only contingent. Such reasons call for cooperation and co-
deliberation only under certain kinds of empirical circumstance. Should those
circumstances cease to hold, all bets are off. Put in a different way; within a private
context agents might often deliberate together, but they recognize that relation as
subordinate to a more basic individual perspective from which their commitment to such
deliberation might be called into question, challenged, revised, or abandoned. The
commitment to publicity is essentially qualified by a more basic non-public perspective
that provides the conditions on just how seriously we can take that commitment. Insofar
as agents see their reasons as only private relative to each other, they can only interact
strategically, in the sorts of ways that might be modeled by game theory. In principle, the

7
use of force and fraud are always available even if circumstances always make
cooperation and mutual restraint the wisest course.
It’s important to see that on this view not even the rational egoist takes her reasons to
be absolutely private. Admittedly, she does take her practical reasons to be private with
respect to other people, insofar as she only commitment she takes on in acting on such a
reason is an essentially theoretical one—that of recognizing it must be as intelligible and
rational for other people to act on this sort of reason as it is for her to do so. However,
even rational egoist still takes her reasons to be intra-personally public. Insofar as she
decides to pursue something, and so count it as part of her happiness, she has a normative
expectation that she will be able to recognize and act from that decision at latter times,
when her desires, feelings, or moods may have changed.
This is not to say that the agent is not open to the possibility of changing her mind in
the future. The point is only that by deciding on some end or project, the agent rationally
obligates her later perspectives to either follow through with it or come up with some
reason that justifies abandoning or modifying that objective. From her own perspective,
her earlier choices are not merely significant psychological events in her past; they are
exercises of normative powers that change the way her future choices can be properly
taken up. If the agent saw her future self as retaining the same liberty of choice as her
earlier self, then she might abandon her intention for no reason at all, or “just because she
felt like it”. But then it would seem that the agent never really decided on a course of
action in the first place, that she never succeeded in forming an intention or committing
herself to anything at all.

8
The problem is that in this case, there would really be no difference between
“deciding” in this way, where it remains equally open to abandon a course for any reason
or no reason, and just being directly motivated by some sub-personal desire or impulse.
The experience of such an impulse might make it more likely that we continue to act for
the sake of it in different context, and it might give us reason to expect and hope that we
do so. But if we ended up acting in some other way, this could not count as a kind of
irrationality, weakness of will, or self-betrayal. It would just be a change in the economy
of his motivations. Should we no longer be motivated to pursue some course, there would
be no grounds to say that we still really intended to act that way nevertheless. The
entitlement of some desire to count as our will was purely a consequence of its effective
motivational dominance. If that desire does not actually determine our behavior, it can
no longer be motivationally effective, and so loses whatever claim it had to represent
what we really want, which is now assumed by whatever other desire has actually
managed to move us to action.
Another way of putting the point is to say that we cannot interact in a purely strategic
way with ourselves. If I take my current decisions to be only related to my further ones
causally and epistemically (as making some future performance more likely, and
supplying some evidence for this) then I do not decide at all; I merely experience drives
and impulses and then reflect in a purely theoretical way about them. My situation would
be like the character Kant describes in Groundwork I, whose actions are immediately
determined by instinct, with reason serving only to making sense of their structure and
evaluate them as fortunate or not. For willing to be something other than just motivation
by desire that is theoretically apprehended this way, the act of choice must have

9
normative consequences; it must change something about the space of reasons available
to one’s latter self, independent of whatever causal effects ensure. To be capable of
prudential or even instrumental reasoning, the agent must see some ways of thinking as
addressing normative expectations to other aspects of the self, that incur some special
obligations to respond or reply that otherwise would not have existed.
2. Korsgaard holds that because an agent cannot will in a purely particularistic or private
way, his soul must possess a kind of normative constitution that differentiates different
aspects of it in some way, and assigns these parts some set of rights, duties, and
responsibilities relative to one another. This organization is needed to what counts as an
agent really making up or changing his mind to do something; and what counts as some
sub-personal psychological force becoming motivationally effective independent of any
such commitment or decision.
Following Plato, Korsgaard considers five different practical constitutions, five
different ways that a agent might come to be distinguished from just a complex system of
sub-personal drives coupled with theoretical rational capacity to reflect and assess them.
The first of these is the “aristocratic soul”: the soul that realizes a form of Kantian
autonomy. In this soul, our appetites and inclinations are all taken to be entitled to
propose various objects and courses of actions to the soul as a whole, and the soul bears
the responsibility of attending to them simply as such. However, in this soul the final
decision about what to do lies not with any of these inclinations, but with the judgment of

10
reason, which operates from a standard not to be found in any of inclinations, taken either
singly or together.
For Korsgaard, this ultimate standard is simply that of maintaining the unity of the
agent. The aristocratic soul only recognizes some desire as proving a reason for action
insofar as that reason can be understood as a public one; that is, in something like fair
terms that can be equally recognized by itself at other times, when it has perhaps a very
different array of desires and feelings in play. The picture here is that a person’s will
must be committed to sustaining itself as a kind of general will, that underwrites
something like a kind of intra-psychic contractualism. If we only consider intra-personal
case, such a soul takes the form of the rational egoist; in the inter-personal context, such a
soul is that of the autonomous Kantian agent.
For Korsgaard, only the aristocratic soul fully acts. But there are others constitutions
of agency that allow for partial or defective forms of action as well. Closest to the
aristocratic soul is the timocratic soul, the soul that is governed not be a concern for its
own integrity, but with honor, with being recognized as good, properly governed, etc.
The timocratic soul is not merely concerned with being honored or esteemed reputation,
regardless of whether it really merits such a good reputation. Rather, this soul wants to
be able to take pride in itself, to be celebrated for just what it is, and for what it is to be
justly celebrated. Like the aristocratic soul, the timocratic soul as a kind of concern with
maintaining a kind integrity, and so really maintaining a distinct kind of identity in an
indefinite range of circumstances. However, the timocratic soul sees that kind of
integrity as an essentially public phenomenon; it counts as integrated only insofar as it

11
can impress others as being so, insofar as it presents itself in a way that makes others take
it seriously as something to be admired, loved, or feared.
Further from the ideal is the oligarchic soul. In this soul, some set of passions
become dominant, such that all other interests are taken to be reason-giving only insofar
as they serve these passions or at least do not obstruct or hinder them. Insofar as a kind
of unity is recognized or valued here, it is only valued instrumentally. The coalition of
dominant passions have a common interest in working out a modus vivendi that allows
each to be satisfied without obstructing the others. So long as these passions are of
roughly equal power, they attain something like fair relations amongst themselves (while
the weaker passions must accept whatever terms are dictated to them).
When all the passions are of roughly equal force, the oligarchic soul degenerates into
the purely democratic soul. This soul recognizes each quantum of desire to have an equal
claim to be satisfied, identifying as its choice whatever represents greatest overall
preference satisfaction simply as such, regardless of the content or character of these
desires. Such a soul is not directly determined by the overall economy of its drives, but it
might just as well be, treating facts about motivational force as the ultimate consideration
in deciding what it has truly committed itself to.
The most degenerate soul is the tyrannical soul, which appears as a kind of inversion
of the aristocratic one. The tyrannical soul seems to be what would emerge form an
oligarchic one when one passion comes to such power that it can easily all the others
taken together. As Korsgaard describes it, the tyrannical soul is something like the soul
of the addict or compulsive, or a person in thrall to some erotic obsession. Like the

12
aristocratic soul, this soul as a strong kind of unity, but is a unity sustained only by
overwhelming force. The subordinate parts of the soul do not implicitly recognize or
defer to the dominant one, they do not see themselves in something like a normative
relationship in which they take themselves to be entitled to suggest and object, but must
accept the verdict of their naturally authoritative part. These passions remain discrete
competing points of view within the soul, even if the dominant passion can safely ignore
them.
Korsgaard argues that all the constitutions of the non-aristocratic souls are defective
just because the kind of practical unity they have is objectionably contingent. The point
here is not just that there could come to be circumstances in which any of these agents is
unable to function practically. Even the aristocratic soul may disintegrate under the
assault of pain, fear, injury or disease. Korsgaard’s point, however, is that in such cases
such disintegration is only something happens to the soul, that is, forces and dynamics
that are external to it overwhelm and dismember it. The contingency she is worried about
that that would involve the agent actively dissolving himself, as a proper expression of
his own commitments and point of view. Supposedly, only the aristocratic soul is
immune to using its agency to dissolve its agency in this way.
Consider the timocratic soul. This soul is governed by pride or love of honor,
wanting above all to be recognized as good (where this implies that it must really be
good). But what if this person finds himself in circumstances where the only good acts
will be seen as bad ones, and only bad acts will esteemed or applauded. In this case, the
timocratic soul will be unable to say what it wants; its own commitments will drive it to

13
both embrace and reject the same things. If asked to contemplate such a crisis, this agent
cannot imagine how he might come out the other end; he has no way to project how we
might move through this while still being recognizable as himself.
The oligarchic soul remains unified only so long as the interests of its ruling coalition
of passions do not come into deep conflict. Should this happen, it will not be able to
recognize any determinate way of proceeding, of seeing one way of responding as
expressing its basic commitments while another as being an instance of succumbing to
temptation or some other kind of irrationality or self-betrayal. Like the timocratic soul,
this agent cannot envision how it could continue to be itself in these circumstances, what
would count as still being itself. The democratic soul faces the same predicament when it
finds its desires to be more or less evenly distributed between two or more incompatible
options, or to be shifting to readily to allow for any sustained course of action.
The aristocratic soul does not face these perils, because it is fundamentally
committed, not to any are system of its desires, but to sustaining and reproducing its unity
as an agent, and so maintaining a structure that allows fair consideration of all desires,
regardless of strength, content, or place in the history of the agent. Since this structure
does not depend on any particular desires being present, or having any particular content
or strength, it would seem that it could recognize itself in any future circumstance
regardless changes in the nature and relations of these desires. The aristocratic soul, by
its fundamental commitment to identify itself with a standpoint in abstraction from any of
its substantive incentives, stands above the fray of contingency that can bring the other
souls to tear themselves apart.

14
3. Now, it might seem that these possibilities of self-dissolution should be cause for
alarm only insofar as they are likely to actually arise. But Korsgaard thinks that the mere
possibility that the agent could have to take herself apart, that she could find herself
required to betray herself in some profound way, shows that there was something wrong
with her way of putting herself together from the start:
Plato’s argument sows that this aristocratic constitution is the only one
you can choose….Timocratic, oligarchic, and democratic souls
disintegrate under certain conditions, so deciding to be one would be
like making a conditional commitment to your own unity, to your own
personhood. And that’s not possible. For consider what happens when
the conditions that cause disintegration in these constitutions actually
occur. If you don’t fall apart, have you failed to keep your commitment,
like the conditionally just person who holds out on the rack after all? But
if you do fall apart, who is it that has kept the commitment? If you do
fall apart, there is no person left. You can be a timocratic, oligarchic, or
democratic person, in the same way that you can be a just person who fails
on the rack. But you cannot decide in advance that this is what you will
be. (“Self-Constitution in the Ethics of Plato and Kant, p.120, my
emphasis.)
On certain occasions, the people with the other constitutions fall apart.
For the truly just person, the aristocratic soul, there are no such occasions.
Anything could happen to her, anything at all, and she will still follow her
own principles—and that is because she has universal principles that
can consistently be followed in any kind of case…She is completely
self-possessed; not necessarily happy on the rack, but herself on the rack,
herself even there. (Self-Constitution p.180, my emphasis)
So every rational agent must will in accordance with a universal law,
because it is the task of every rational agent to constitute his agency. And
the law ranges over all rational beings, that is, it commands you to act in a
way that any rational being could act, because you could find yourself in
anybody’s shoes, anybody’s at all, and the law has to be one that
would enable you to maintain your integrity, come what may. (Self-
Constitution, p.214, my emphasis).

15
Korsgaard equates committing oneself to something, in the knowledge that it can be
effectively pursued only given certain conditions, with making a merely conditional
commitment to such pursuit. Supposedly, the timocratic person is committed to being
just that kind of person so long as the reality the appearance of merit do not diverge:
otherwise, he has in effect resolved to abandon that conception of himself, and so to take
himself apart. And Korsgaard thinks that the idea of being committed to abandoning
what makes you capable of acting on commitments makes no sense. Supposedly, it
would logically impossible to actually fulfill such a commitment, because in so doing
there would no longer be an agent to attribute such success to (“if you do fall apart, who
is it that has kept the commitment? If you do fall apart, there is no person left”).
This last step in the argument would seem to prove too much, insofar as a similar
move would show that a person cannot coherently intend to kill himself. After all, if the
intention is successfully executed, there will no longer be an agent to whom it could be
attributed. Similarly, a parliament could not decide to dissolve itself, or a committee to
disband. In general, there seems to be no reason to think that in order for us to be able at
time t, to attribute Φing to X, X must exist at t, the time of attribution. The last act of in a
person’s life can be to end it, when he can see no way to go on. Similarly, the last
expression of a timocratic self-conception can be to dismantle itself, when there seems to
be no way of continuing to live honorably.
What’s more puzzling is Korsgaard’s assumption that, if we adopt a commitment
knowing that it can be pursued only in certain conditions, then we have really only
adopted a conditional commitment; that is, to do pursue something only so long as that

16
condition obtains, and otherwise to abandon it. She gives the example of the person who
claims to be committed to justice, so long as he is not put to the rack (in which case he
will do any unjust thing to be released). Here it seems correct to say that this person does
is not fundamentally committed to justice, but to the avoidance of great suffering, which
sets the boundaries in which subordinate commitments to justice can operate.
However, the timocratic soul does not have to commit himself to actively abandoning
his self-conception should merit and self-esteem diverge. Such an act is neither
necessary nor possible, because in these conditions there just is no determinate fact about
what it would be to remain a timocratic person. The commitment just makes no sense in
that world, nothing counts as remaining yourself, and so nothing that would count as
abandoning that commitment or holding fast to it.
Korsgaard is right that, in such circumstances, it would be wrong to say that external
forces destroyed my agency, as if fear or pain robbed be of the ability to think straight.
But she then makes the mistake of concluding that, because my disintegration is not
effected by outside forces in this way, it must be something I do to myself, as an exercise
of the very powers that I am taking apart. But this would suggest that in such a context,
there would be something that would count as not taking oneself apart, so that one would
persist in some sense if only I did not do so. But the world in which there ceases to be
any honorable way to live is just one in which nothing that counts as me could be found.
My loss of myself is neither clearly something I do nor something that happens to me,
just like being born, or dying. At this level, the distinctions between what I do and what

17
happens to me seems to dissolve, between what is “inside” and “outside” of my agency,
seems to lose their purchase.
To see the point I’m after, consider a variation of a well-known example that Bernard
Williams discusses in “Persons, Character, and Morality.” Williams imagines a man who
faces a situation where he can either save his beloved wife from drowning, or someone
else, but not both. In confronting this situation, this man may recognizes that in such
situations a person is morally at liberty to save his spouse, and so he does. Supposedly,
this man is guilty of thinking “one thought too many” in a way that someone
objectionably alienates him from his “ground projects,” that is the concerns with which
he fundamentally identifies himself, so that he cares about living in the first place.
Williams’ point here is that any conception of the relation of morality to agency that
would demand this further thought, whether self-consciously or only implicitly held, fails
to appreciate the ineluctably personal nature of practical thought. This point is not one
about the content of moral demands; he is not arguing that any a plausible there would
have to allow for something like an “agent-centered” exemption would release agents
from what would otherwise be there obligations when it would demand that they sacrifice
their heart’s desire. William’s point is instead about our relation to morality however its
content turns out to be, so long as morality as such demands that we govern ourselves
from some impartial rational perspective (a point that would also hold for norms of
prudence, as he argues in “Moral Luck”).
For Williams, our ground projects are what sustain our most primitive, pre-rational
interest in life itself, that it, it is only because of them that we take up the standpoint of

18
agency toward the world at all. Even if there are norms of practical reason that are
implicit in agency itself, those norms cannot be addressed to the concerns that bring us to
take up a practical stance toward the world in the first place. Rather, these concerns are
what make it the case that we do not see any need for any such reason or further
justification, the basic of a kind of primitive self-love or care for our lives this is needed
for any questions of justification to become real questions for us in the first place. The
thought seems to be that in order for an agent to recognize whatever impersonal norms of
practical reason or morality that they are, she must take a basic interest in her own life
that is pre-reflective, that neither needs nor admits any justification in impersonal terms.
From the point of view of morality, and of practical reason, it may well be possible that
this man should allow his wife to drown. But this does not mean that this has to be a
possibility for him, something that he is implicitly committing to ruling out before he
dives in after her.
For Williams, this example is supposed to show us something about the limits of the
importance of morality to us, regardless of how its content is specified, but really isn’t
my target. Instead, consider a variation of the case, where the conflict is not between the
demands of morality (however understood) and some ground project, but rather between
two such projects. Here I am envisioning something like having to save either your
spouse or your child, care for your mother or defend France, disobey God or sacrifice
Isaac. I realize that, as in Sophie’s Choice, a person could face circumstances in which
he would have to abandon one of his children to death in order to save the other. Even
so, I can see no way that I could make that choice and still retain my integrity; that is, I

19
can imagine no way of going through such a nightmare and still be able recognize
something as myself at the other end.
The situation here is not like that of just man faced with the threat of torture. That
man knows that it will be very unlikely that he will be able to remain himself under such
an ordeal, but he can see what it would be to remain himself, relative to which his
breaking down could count as a kind of failure or destruction of his own will. In
something like the Sophie’s choice case, I just cannot see what it would mean to succeed
in being myself through such an ordeal, any way of responding that would not be such a
profound betrayal of something I love, and so a basic violation of myself. I cannot
imagine how to relate myself in such a future, or how from such a future I could making
sense of that past that includes me as I now am.
My problem here is not that I believe that I would just be unable to choose, that I
would be paralyzed or driven out of my mind. Real people not very unlike me have
somehow gone through this kinds of dilemmas, and I suppose I might have to do so as
well. All I want to deny is that, in light of this knowledge, I should seriously entertain
this question in advance, and so confront it in general, outside of any real context that
might force it on me. Part of what it is to have a familiar kind of integrity is to consider
some things practically unthinkable; that is, to be unable and unwilling to contemplate
them in the abstract.
The problem here is not just that I can predict that in such a situation my powers of
rational self-control will fail (as I might when thinking about being tortured). Nor is my
problem just that the situation would be so awful that I just cannot bring myself to think

20
about it (as I might be unable to eat a roast rat, say. The sense in which in which I cannot
(will not?) contemplate these possibilities is deeper than that. The problem is that the
choice is practically unthinkable for me not because of the limits of my imagination
fortitude, but because there is no way for me, in any way I recognize myself, to
acknowledge any such choice are really mine. Such a choice represents a necessary
discontinuity in my first-person point of view that is similar to that of Parfit’s
teletransporter case, where I confront the prospect of being split into two distinct but
identical individuals. I could have to choose between the lives of my children, just as I
could face being doubled by the teletransporter. In both cases, I would have to face the
question of just what it is I would become or be replaced by. Looking ahead, though, I
cannot identify either interpretation as the correct one, because I cannot imagine who or
what I could be if I had to make a decision. I would have to become something in that
decision, but no option seems to be one I could recognize as me. This is not to deny that,
should I have to confront this dilemma, I might come to find a way of making sense of
myself retrospectively (just as each person who emerges from the teletransporter might).
My point is only that such an understanding of myself (a justification?) would have to be
essentially retrospective. It is part of who I am now that precludes even taking the
question seriously, even though I know that I might be able to do so after the fact. 1
1 There’s an interesting parallel here to the case of theoretical reasoning. Just as I
recognize that I could confront real dilemmas that I nevertheless cannot imagine
making a decision about, I similarly must acknowledge that that there are possible
states of affairs that I cannot imagine theoretically reasoning my way through. The
prime example here is found in Moore’s paradox. While I know that it could be the
case that I believe p and p is false, there is a way in which that thought is not
available to me to think from (or too), so long as it stays in the first-person present
indicative. But there’s an interesting difference here from the practical case. The

21
What the possibility of such dilemmas shows is that Korsgaard’s criticism of the non-
aristocratic souls rests on a false dichotomy. Korsgaard assumes that if I am not
unconditionally committed to “universal principles that can consistently be followed in
any kind of case” then I have only made a merely conditional commitment. Such a
conditional commitment that would require me to dismantle or abandon myself should
the conditional be fulfilled, and Korsgaard rightly recognizes that no such commitment
could really be foundational; it could not fundamentally define who I am as an agent.
What the Sophie’s Choice example reveals is that although there could be conditions that
would force me to betray myself in a fundamental way (and not just disrupt or
overwhelm the executive powers that my agency depends upon), this possibility does not
show that my commitment to either of my children is conditional in some way, or that I
am in any way disunified (let alone ambivalent or conflicted) because I cannot/will not
contemplate choosing between them earnestly (that is, from an engaged, first-personal
point of view). My love for my children is unconditional in one sense (from my point of
view, it neither depends on or can be defeated by its relation to any other values, ends, or
projects). But that does not mean that this commitment is unconditional in the sense of
giving me a way to go forward as myself in any possible circumstance. As the saying
Moore’s paradox thought is not something I can ever think to be true of me here and
now, but I can certainly contemplate it as something that might, has been, or will be
true of me. I can certainly understand what would follow, for me, of my believing
some p that is false. I can contemplate the possibility, only not the actuality. The
situation is reversed in the practical case. Should that horrible dilemma befall me, I
will, in some way, think my way through it; I will make some terrible decision and
live with whatever that decision makes of me. The choice can be thought through in
the here and now. What is barred to me in the practical case is contemplating this
situation in the subjunctive mood, of making the decision in the abstract, before in has
actually been forced on me. This seems to mark an important logical difference
between theoretical and practical reasoning.

22
goes, in loving others I give hostages to fate, and this would appear to include myself as
well.
The role my love for children plays in unifying my psyche is not of the form of a
resolution to disavow or dismantle myself should I be forced to sacrifice one of them.
Rather, I just can’t see myself through such a choice; I can see no structure within my
soul that could function there, and retain any kind of continuity with what I am now.
What unifies me here is not any sort of formal structure that would be available for other
contents should my psychology shift. Rather, it is a substantive sense of myself that is
prior to any such structures, and so to any thought of decision, commitment, law, or
autonomy, and which forms the horizon against which those notions make sense. Our
embrace of such concerns is neither autonomous nor heteronomous, and their demands
are neither clearly categorical nor hypothetical. These Kantian distinctions lose their
sense at this level, for it is only relative to such grounding concerns that I can identify
myself as an agent at all, and so as a being for whom the question of autonomy, freedom,
or rationality can even arise in the first place.
4. Korsgaard does have a place for the sort of will I have been discussing. According to
her taxonomy, what I have described would be a version of the tyrannical soul. This
soul, diametrically opposed to the aristocratic constitution, is one in which some passion
has grown to such power that it absolutely overmasters all other concerns put together,
and drowning out any proposals they might voice. This is the will of the compulsive or,
as Plato suggests, the person in the grip of some erotic obsession. This obsession does

23
not allow other desires or interests to even be considered with it comes into conflict with
it, the roar of its demands are such that nothing else can be heard, and its power is such
that nothing like a temptation to the contrary can be experienced. Such a will cannot call
its obsession into question, and so cannot take seriously, from a practical point of view
the possibility of ever subordinating it to any other set of concerns. Korsgaard allows
that this will has a unity, but it is not the unity of any kind of rational agency. Rather, the
unity here is just that of a piece of particularistic willing; that is, of immediate causal
determination of by impulse.
However, the will I am envisioning need not only have only one ground concern, nor
must that concern rule out the possibility of seriously attending to other, less foundational
concerns. I would readily abandon my career before I abandon my family (that’s just a
“no-brainer”), but that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t contemplate going to a philosophy
colloquium rather than attend my child’s cello recital, or help her with her homework.
While my concern for my children is categorical in a sense, many of the demands it
addresses to me are merely imperfect duties; things generally to be concerned with and to
attend to, but which need not in every instance take precedence over some admittedly less
important concern. The true tyrannical will is not just the will unified by such a
categorical concern, but one who takes all the reasons that flow from that to be similarly
categorical, so that everything that serves the obsession, no matter how slightly, trumps
all other interests, taken individually or all-together. (Kant describes a kind of moral
tyranny in the case of the person who “strews all his steps with duties”, and so looks on
every action as either obligatory or forbidden.)

24
Insofar as the tyrannical soul can only care deeply about one thing in this way, it does
not consider any kind of dilemma to be unthinkable in advance. Like the aristocratic
will, the tyrannical will is always able to recognize itself in any given situation; at least, it
always has the internal resources for doing so. Neither the aristocrat nor the tyrant are
open to the possibility of any identity-disrupting dilemma, and so both are able and
willing to contemplate any possible dilemma in the abstract. In contrast, the timocratic,
oligarchic, and democratic wills all know that they will fall apart in certain
circumstances; that know that they must come apart under certain conditions. And so, in
a sense, they can contemplate such dilemmas, too, in that they can know, in advance, that
they cannot really face them either, since they will not exist as agents under those
circumstances. They already know who they will be in these circumstances; they will be
nobody at all.
The attitude of the devoted soul I am describing is somewhere between the two.
This soul recognizes that there can be circumstances where it would both be necessary
and impossible for it to cope with and still be itself. Such a dilemma is after all his
dilemma; if it must destroy him as he confronts it, then it would not really be a dilemma
for him at all, but only the occasion of his death (as it is for the oligarchic and democratic
souls). For the choice to be unthinkable, it must still be his to make, not something that
would fall to whatever moral descendant that emerges out of him; this is precisely why its
prospect is a far deeper threat that just that of death. But unlike the aristocratic and
tyrannical souls, the devoted soul will not solve this dilemma in advance; that is, he
refuses to specify, articulate, or structure his concern in a way that would give him a way
of remaining himself, even on the rack, even on Mt. Moriah.

25
5. Toward the end of Self-Constitution, Korsgaard considers whether something like love
or devotion might give us something like a truly private reason (or at least a reason the
privacy of which does not depend on a more basic kind of public justification). Here she
envisions embracing the project of writing a book on Kant that will be required reading.
She acknowledges that there is something private about the reason this project gives her,
in that it is certainly more important that she be the one who writes this book than just
that is book be written by someone (even someone very much like her). However, the
privacy of this reason is dependent upon and subordinate to a more basic kind of
publicity. She argues that the structure of the agent’s attitude is not:
1) I want my book to be required reading (giving me a private reason) and so
2) I shall write a good book (as a means to that end).
Instead, the real structure is supposedly
1) Someone should write a book on Kant good enough to be required reading
(a public reason), and
2) I want to be that someone (the private aspect of the reason). (SC p.210).
Korsgaard’s analysis of love takes the same form:
A
B

26
I think that someone should make my darling happy, and I want very
much to be that someone…if I try to prevent someone else from making
my darling happy or if I suppose that my darling’s happiness has no value
unless it is produced by me, that is no longer an expression of love.
Again, it is a very familiar perversion of it. (SC, p.211).
Again, I think Korsgaard is assuming a false dichotomy here: that I must think either that
my darling’s happiness is a good thing, and that thought forms my basis of making it my
end, or that I first make her happiness my end, and that determines the extent to which I
see it as a good thing. I do not deny that circumstances could occur where I would have
choose between what would make my darling most happy, and my being the one to make
her so. What I deny is that my love must be such I am already implicitly committed to a
general answer to this question, and so how to a way of dealing with any such situation
should it arise. It is part of sincere love that I do not recognize all forms of this question
in advance, and so do not accept either (A) or (B) as something I’m implicitly committed
to. Of course, if I confront this choice, I will have to make such a decision, and so my
love will come to have a more definite structure in this respect. But that will be a change
in myself and my concerns, not something that can be already lying within them even
before the issue has been forced.
Of course, Korsgaard is right that there would be something very perverse about
preferring that your beloved be miserable with you than allowing her to be happy with
someone else, or becoming utterly indifferent to her happiness when it is not something
that you are the one to produce. But it would be equally strange to being ready to let your
beloved go be with another, if you believed that she would end up being somewhat
happier with him than with you. Consider the kinds of issues that arise in custody

27
disputes. I might agree that my children might, if raised by my ex-wife, be somewhat
better off. Nevertheless, I might still refuse to give them up; at least, the question stays
open for me, despite the gain in their expected utility that would follow from my giving
up custody. There the element of “selfishness” here does not seem to be a perversion of
love, but part of its very essence, although it can of course grow to pathological
proportions. My point is not that some version of A is the proper structure of a loving
attitude rather than B. My point is just that while such love commits us to recognizing
certain kinds of both public and private reasons, it need not involve any determinate
ordering between them, and is no way defective or confused, because of this. On the
other hand, if I do commit myself to some overarching way of prioritizing these concerns,
then my love does start to seem in some way inauthentic.
6. The upshot of all this is that a completely public or shareable practical reason is no
more a real possibility than an utterly private one. All practical reasons must be
addressed to some but not others, (although these excluded others may only be “notional”
possibilities). Absolutely universal willing, if that would be willing that follows from
principles that can be projected from any practical position into any other practical
position, makes no more sense than purely particularistic willing, willing that is only
from, and directed to, one practical position. And here is the point behind Nietzsche’s
claim that “legal conditions” are necessarily exceptional. As Nietzsche recognizes, there
are many contexts in which we must address ourselves to other points of view as free and
equal, and so in which the norms of justice quite properly apply. This certainly applies to

28
legal contexts, where the coercive power of the state is brought to be, and so the correct
norms of reasoning here would call for a very high degree of publicity. There may be
other interpersonal relations that resemble such political and legal context, and in those
contexts a similar requirement of publicity may be appropriate.
However, these facts do not show that the relations we have within the “public
sphere” should then be the archetype for all our relations to each other, and to ourselves
over time. Publicity must always be relative to forms of concern that do not address
themselves to every possible coherent point of view, that does not feel it incumbent to
answer every challenge just because it can be coherently voiced. It is not the case that
every degree of privacy in our reasons has to be justified relative to a more basic, public
perspective. Rather, the demands of publicity (of viewing others as equals, of abstracting
away from special attachments and relationships) must also be able to be justified relative
to a more basic private (or at least personal) perspective, a perspective that might be
called one of self-love, although not one of mere self-interest in any ordinary sense. As
in the case of love, neither the public nor the private aspect of our agency has ultimate or
thorough-going priority. At the most basic level, they must hang together as a whole.
Nothing I have argued rules out the possibility that a recognizably Kantian or
contractualist account of morality might be vindicated relative to the sorts of relations
and contexts in which talk moral demands most naturally fits. Kantian morality might
then be an expression of an “idea of public reason” appropriate to these contexts just as a
liberal conception of justice might be appropriate to political contexts. All I am denying
is that for this to be see, this demand for publicity must go “all the way down”; that the

29
moral demand for publicity must be of a piece of a general demand for ever more
publicity that is a feature not just of certain kinds of agency, certain kinds of values and
inter-personal relations, but of any kind of unified agency, simply as such. This demand
betrays a conception of integrity that, in its refusal to expose itself to any kind of luck,
would really inaugurate a kind of tyranny of reason, something like what Nietszche called
the “bad conscience”. As he warned, this approach is inherently nihilisitic. The only
way to be sure of being yourself come what may is by resolving to be nothing at all.