Kantian ethics has struggled terribly with the challenge of incorporating non-human animals as beings to which we can owe obligations. Christine Korsgaard’s Fellow Creatures is a bold, substantial attempt to meet that challenge. In this essay review, I set the scene for the book’s core argument, offer a reconstruction of that argument, and reflect on its strengths and limitations, arguing that it is ultimately unconvincing.

This paper makes a transcendental argument. It assumes the normative validity of the instrumental principle, and then investigates the conditions of its validity. Ultimately, it argues that there are three necessary conditions for its validity. Firstly, agents must be rationally capable of regarding themselves as having a single self that possesses the same reasons, ends, and means. Secondly, agents must be rationally capable of distinguishing themselves from other selves that possess ends. Thirdly, these two conditions must actually obtain, which means (...) that we must have a self that has the same reasons, ends, and means, and that such selves must be distinct from one another. The paper fields two arguments in support of these three conditions and then offers an interpretation of the arguments to show that they vindicate all three conditions. (shrink)

According to Korsgaard’s very influential interpretation, moral normativity follows from a commonly accepted conception of rational agency, namely, the capacity to set ends and pursue them or humanity. The paper argues that humanity is not the source of moral normativity. Taking the exercise of your freedom in pursuit of your ends to be justified commits you to acknowledging the equal claim of others to see themselves as justified in the pursuit of their ends. This entails the equal restriction of the (...) freedom of each to ensure maximal freedom for all. But this is precisely what Kant thinks of as the state of right. In contrast, the paper claims that the second formula of the categorical imperative commands making the humanity of rational beings who are assumed to possess the capacity to act morally or personality, into our end, precisely because they are assumed to possess this distinct rational capacity. (shrink)