ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I set out to demonstrate the “reality … of an ethical community consisting of all rational beings” (Science and Metaphysics 7.XX.§144/p. 225), and hence the intrinsic validity of the formal end of morality. I argue that rational egoism, Sellars’s main dialectical opponent, cannot be established just by considering the nature of practical reason. Further, to establish rational egoism on teleological grounds would require proving that an agent’s welfare is the only good (for her). But I will argue that rational agency itself cannot be understood apart from the community. Nor can the agent’s welfare, autonomy, or other essential goods or capabilities—indeed, various essential elements of her identity. Thus, there is no meaningful way to argue that an agent’s well-being matters, but the welfare of the community—which (partially) constitutes her agency, her welfare, and so on—does not matter. Further, and more radically, to be a rational agent in the first place is already to occupy the perspective of the “we,” of the community of rational (and hence, as I will argue, moral) agents.
