A Critique of Practical Identity: Korsgaard’s Conditional Motive
Abstract
This paper provides a critical analysis of Christine Korsgaard’s constructivist attempt to ground moral obligation in the reflective structure of “practical identity.” Korsgaard posits that the normative force of moral laws stems from the agent’s internal necessity to maintain a coherent self-conception. The central argument of this paper is that in Korsgaard’s framework, moral motivation devolves into a form of “conditional self-interest,” as the authority of the moral law becomes contingent upon the agent’s psychological desire for self-preservation. This paper examines this structural weakness through the “shmagency” challenge (Enoch) and the case of the “idealized Mafioso” (Cohen), including a reconstruction of Korsgaard’s own responses to these objections, in order to show that her replies do not dissolve the fundamental problem. Crucially, the paper frames this critique not as a failure to satisfy Kantian standards, for Korsgaard consciously departs from Kant, but as an internal failure: her constructivist framework cannot secure the unconditional normative force it sets out to establish, even by its own lights. Furthermore, when compared against rival accounts of normativity, including moral realism and the Fact of Reason, the constructivist grounding proves less adequate. The paper concludes by defending Dieter Schönecker’s intuitionist reading of the “Fact of Reason” (Factum der Vernunft), arguing that moral authority must be recognized as an objective, non-deductive a priori structural necessity rather than a subjective product of reflective endorsement.