THE SOURCES AND STANCES OF MORAL NORMATIVITY

This paper argues against the view that the issue of moral normativity is best accounted by undertaking the first-person deliberative perspective. Section 1 characterizes Korsgaard's self-constitutivist view of moral normativity in contrast to skepticism and contractualism. Section 2 highlights the role of the value of humanity in the self-constitutivist view. Section 3 formulates an issue about the sources of moral obligations to others, which points to a tension within Korsgaard's theory of moral obligation. Sections 4-5 show that the dominance of the first-person deliberative stance in accounting for moral normativity is related to the deployment of the strategy of reflective endorsement, which is not functionally equivalent to the self-constitutivist strategy for vindicating moral authority. Section 6 argues that endorsement understood as an act of imaginative rehearsal fails to carry out the main insights of Kantian constructivism regarding normative discussion and the transformative potentiality of practical reasoning. Section 7, defends the importance of multiple stances to do justice to the complexity of moral normativity.