The Politics of the Self

Abstract

Abstract This chapter focuses on certain central features of ourselves which play a key role in the constitution of normativity. In particular it focuses on the fact that our desires and concerns are pervasively subject to conflict both interpersonally and intrapersonally and the fact that our desires and concerns relate not just to our present but to our lives over time. Sometimes we choose to act in ways we come to regret, in ways that give purchase in our normative thought to ideas of error, of getting things wrong, or right. We endeavour to avoid error and manage conflict by reflecting and deliberating on our desires and concerns, seeking to arrive at and sustain a coherent understanding of what is most important to us that is stable under reflective scrutiny and can guide us in seeking to live lives we can live with living, that can bear our survey. In doing this we are pursuing coherence, but we cannot and should not follow Kantians who would make of coherence a kind of master value. The concerns that shape our deliberation are not merely formal but substantive and grounded in the contingencies of our normative sensibilities. The chapter concludes with a critical discussion of Christine Korsgaard’s influential Kant-inspired understanding of normativity as grounded in the pursuit of coherence which she takes to be constitutive of agency.