ABSTRACT
Christine Korsgaard’s The Sources of Normativity rejects moral realism and locates the ultimate source of moral normativity in the reflective endorsement of proposed courses of action on the basis of one’s practical identity as a Citizen in the Kingdom of Ends. However, her attempt to identify the source of moral identity is still enclosed within the domain of reflectivity itself, and consequently falls short of Levinas’s ethical summons of the other that lies at the base of reflectivity and theory. This Levinasian pre-reflective encounter with the other and the other’s summons stands as a second “source” (in an analogous sense) of moral normativity, dialectically counterpoised to the reflective sphere, on which Korsgaard places her emphasis and to which Levinas also assigns a significant role, although for Levinas the summons of the other takes precedence over the reflectivity that the other calls into play. Levinas’s account also challenges idealistic tendencies in Korsgaard’s that threaten to absorb the other’s summons within theory, but Levinas does so without reverting to moral realism. Furthermore, the Levinasian perspective would dispute the adequacy of Korsgaard’s depiction of how a social ontology can overcome the individualism to which autonomy-based ethics, such as Korsgaard’s, are prone, as she herself admits. By situating reflective endorsement in relation to the encounter with the other that takes precedence over reflection, Levinas’s view counteracts tendencies in such autonomy-oriented ethics by conceiving reflection as undertaken out of responsibility on behalf of the other, as opposed to growing out of a wariness that the other might dominate oneself or to aspiring to a kind of neutrality that can result in indifference toward the other.
