The Intersubjective Conditions of Normative Agency

Irene McMullin (University of Essex), Irene McMullin

Abstract: In this paper I consider Levinas’ claim that full-fledged agency requires the recognition of second-person authority. I do so by comparing Levinas and Korsgaard on the kind of critical distance that both posit as a necessary condition for the possibility of norm-responsive agency. Contra Korsgaard, I will argue that distance from one’s incentives can only be critical in the required way insofar as an agent is forced to confront a demand for justification; a demand whose condition of possibility is a perspective outside the confines of the agent’s own projects. As such, Korsgaard’s version of constitutivism – whereby a robust moral normativity is purportedly derived simply from the constitutive norms of agency as such – cannot be the whole story. The question remains, however, whether Levinas can fill the gap.