Order 1287295: Korsgaard, “Morality and the Distinctiveness of Human Action”

ResponsePaperAssignment Korsgaard-MoralityandtheDistinctivenessofHumanAction
 

• Type of paperCritical Thinking
• SubjectPhilosophy
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needs to be proficient in philosophy

Philosophy of the Human Person
Philosophy 1000c

Please write a response paper on any one of the readings assigned for classes between November 13
and December 11. You may choose which one of these readings to write your response paper on, but
your response paper must be submitted by the beginning of the class for which that reading is assigned.

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which that reading is assigned. No late papers will be accepted for any reason. Students who do not
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do not submit any acceptable response papers by December 11 will receive a 0% for this assignment.

Response papers must have the following format:
The response paper is to be divided into four separate sections.
Each section must be a paragraph of 100 words or less.

The four sections are as follows:

(1) State the author’s main thesis in the reading in your own words.
What is the author trying to prove here?

(2) Explain why this thesis might be surprising or controversial.
Why might a reasonable person disagree with the author’s thesis?

(3) Summarize the author’s argument in support of the thesis.
How does the author try to convince reasonable people that they should agree with his thesis?

(4) Evaluate the author’s argument.
Do you believe that this argument can compel reasonable people who disagree with the author’s

thesis to revise their beliefs about this issue? Why or why not?

The purpose of this assignment is for you to analyze the assigned text yourself using your own words.
Accordingly, please do not use any direct quotes or close paraphrases in your response paper.
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If you would like, you may turn in response papers on more than one reading.
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Due Date Reading

T 11/13 Galen Strawson, “The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility”

F 11/16 Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person”

T 11/20 Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” (selections)
Optional Reading: Parens, “The Benefits of ‘Binocularity’”

T 11/27 de Waal, “Morally Evolved” (selections)

F 11/30 Korsgaard, “Morality and the Distinctiveness of Human Action”

T 12/4 Carter, “Do Zygotes Become People?”

F 12/7 Regan, “The Case for Animal Rights”

T 12/11 Tanney, “On the Conceptual, Psychological, and Moral Status of Zombies, Swamp-
Beings, and Other ‘Behaviourally Indistinguishable’ Creatures”

Morality and the Distinctiveness
of Human Action

CHRIS

T

INE M. KORSGAARD

What is different about the way we act that makes us, and

not any other species, moral beings?

—Frans de Waal1

A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past

and future actions or motives, and of approving or

disapproving of them. We have no reason to suppose that

any of the lower animals have this capacity.

—Charles Darwin2

0

wo issues confront us. One concerns the truth or
falsehood of what Frans de Waal calls “Veneer The-
ory.” This is the theory that morality is a thin veneer

1 In Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Ani-
mals Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 111.

2 In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981, pp. 88–89.

T

on an essentially amoral human nature. According to Veneer
Theory, we are ruthlessly self-interested creatures, who con-
form to moral norms only to avoid punishment or disap-
proval, only when others are watching us, or only when our
commitment to these norms is not tested by strong tempta-
tion. The second concerns the question whether morality
has its roots in our evolutionary past, or represents some
sort of radical break with that past. De Waal proposes to ad-
dress these two questions together, by adducing evidence
that our closest relatives in the natural world exhibit tenden-
cies that seem intimately related to morality—sympathy,
empathy, sharing, conflict resolution, and so on. He con-
cludes that the roots of morality can be found in the essen-
tially social nature we share with the other intelligent pri-
mates, and that therefore morality itself is deeply rooted in
our nature.

I begin with the first issue. Veneer Theory is, in my view,
not very tempting. In philosophy, it is most naturally associ-
ated with a certain view of practical rationality and of how
practical rationality is related to morality. According to this
view, what it is rational to do, as well as what we naturally
do, is to maximize the satisfaction of our own personal in-
terests. Morality then enters the scene as a set of rules that
constrain this maximizing activity. These rules may be based
on what promotes the common good, rather than the indi-
vidual’s good. Or they may, as in deontological theories, be
based on other considerations—justice, fairness, rights, or
what have you. In either case, Veneer Theory holds that these
constraints, which oppose our natural and rational tendency
to pursue what is best for ourselves, and which are therefore
unnatural, are all too easily broken through. De Waal seems
to accept the idea that it is rational to pursue your own best
interests, but wants to reject the associated view that moral-

C O M M E N T 99

ity is unnatural, and therefore he tends to favor an emotion-
based or sentimentalist theory of morality.

There are a number of problems with Veneer Theory. In
the first place, despite its popularity in the social sciences,
the credentials of the principle of pursuing your own best
interests as a principle of practical reason have never been
established. To show that this is a principle of practical rea-
son one would have to demonstrate its normative founda-
tion. I can think of only a few philosophers—Joseph Butler,
Henry Sidgwick, Thomas Nagel, and Derek Parfit among
them—who have even attempted anything along these
lines.3 And the idea that what people actually do is pursue
their own best interests is, as Butler pointed out long ago,
rather laughable.4

In the second place, it is not even clear that the idea of
self-interest is a well-formed concept when applied to an an-
imal as richly social as a human being. Unquestionably, we
have some irreducibly private interests—in the satisfaction
of our appetites, in food and a certain kind of sex, say. But
our personal interests are not limited to having things. We

100 C H R I S T I N E M . K O R S G A A R D

3 Butler, in Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel (1726), partly reprinted
in Five Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel and A Dissertation Upon the Nature of
Virtue, edited by Stephen Darwall, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company,
1983; Sidgwick, in The Methods of Ethics (1st ed., 1874, 7th ed., 1907). Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Company, 1981); Nagel, in The Possibility of Altruism (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1970); and Parfit, in Reasons and Persons (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1984). For a discussion of the problems with providing a norma-
tive foundation for this supposed rational principle, see my “The Myth of Egoism”
published by the University of Kansas as the Lindley Lecture for 1999.

4 “Men daily, hourly sacrifice the greatest known interest to fancy, inquisitiveness,
love, or hatred, any vagrant inclination. The thing to be lamented is not that men
have so great a regard to their own good or interest in the present world, for they
have not enough, but that they have so little to the good of others.” Butler, Five Ser-
mons Preached at the Rolls Chapel and A Dissertation Upon the Nature of Virtue, p. 21.

also have interests in doing things and being things. Many of
these interests cannot set us wholly against the interests of
society, simply because they are unintelligible outside of so-
ciety and the cultural traditions that society supports. You
could intelligibly want to be the world’s greatest ballerina,
but you could not intelligibly want to be the world’s only
ballerina, since, at least arguably, if there were only one,
there wouldn’t be any. Even for having things there is a limit
to the coherent pursuit of self-interest. If you had all the
money in the world, you would not be rich. And of course
we also have genuine interests in certain other people, from
whom our own interests cannot be separated. So the idea
that we can clearly identify our own interests as something
set apart from or over against the interests of others is
strained to say the least.

And yet even this is not the deepest thing wrong with Ve-
neer Theory. Morality is not just a set of obstructions to the
pursuit of our interests. Moral standards define ways of re-
lating to people that most of us, most of the time, find natu-
ral and welcome. According to Kant, morality demands that
we treat other people as ends in themselves, never merely as
means to our own ends. Certainly we do not manage to treat
all other people at all times in accordance with this standard.
But the image of someone who never treated anyone else as
an end in himself and never expected to be treated that way
in return is even more unrecognizable than that of someone
who always does so. For what we are then imagining is
someone who always treats everyone else as a tool or an ob-
stacle and always expects to be treated that way in return.
What we are imagining is someone who never spontaneously
and unthinkingly tells the truth in ordinary conversation,
but constantly calculates the effects of what he says to others

C O M M E N T 101

on the promotion of his projects. What we are imagining is
someone who doesn’t resent it (though he dislikes it) when
he himself is lied to, trampled on, and disregarded, because
deep down he thinks that is all that one human being really
has any reason to expect from any other. What we are imag-
ining, then, is a creature who lives in a state of deep internal
solitude, essentially regarding himself as the only person in a
world of potentially useful things—although some of those
things have mental and emotional lives and can talk or fight
back.5 It is absurd to suggest that this is what most human
beings are like, or long to be like, beneath a thin veneer of re-
straint.

But it is also absurd to think that nonhuman animals are
motivated by self-interest. The concept of what is in your
own best interests, if it makes any sense at all, requires a kind
of grip on the future and an ability to calculate that do not
seem available to a nonhuman animal. Just as importantly,
acting for the sake of your best interests requires the capacity
to be motivated by the abstract conception of your overall or
long-term good. The idea of self-interest seems simply out
of place when thinking about nonhuman action. I am not at
all inclined to deny that the other intelligent animals do
things on purpose, but I would expect these purposes to be
local and concrete—to eat something, mate with someone,
avoid punishment, have some fun, stop the fight—but not to
do what is best for themselves on the whole. Nonhuman an-
imals are not self-interested. It seems more likely that they
are, in Harry Frankfurt’s phrase, wanton: they act on the
instinct or desire or emotion that comes uppermost. Learning

102 C H R I S T I N E M . K O R S G A A R D

5 I owe some of these points to Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism, pp. 82
ff. Nagel characterizes the condition as one of “practical solipsism.”

and experience may change the order of their desires so that
different ones come uppermost: the prospect of punishment
may dampen an animal’s ardor to the point where the ani-
mal will refrain from satisfying its appetite, but that is a dif-
ferent matter than calculating what is in your best interests
and being motivated by a conception of your long-term
good. For all of these reasons Veneer Theory seems to me to
be rather silly. I therefore want to set it aside, and talk about
de Waal’s more central and interesting question, the ques-
tion of the roots of morality in our evolved nature, where
they are located and how deep they go.

0

If someone asked me whether I personally believe that
the other animals are more like human beings than most
people suppose, or whether I believe there is some form of
deep discontinuity between humans and the other animals,
I would have to say yes to both alternatives. In thinking
about this issue it is important to remember that human
beings have a vested interest in what de Waal calls “anthro-
podenial.” We eat nonhuman animals, wear them, perform
painful experiments on them, hold them captive for pur-
poses of our own—sometimes in unhealthy conditions—
we make them work, and we kill them at will. Without even
taking up the urgent moral questions to which these prac-
tices give rise, I think it is fair to say that we are more likely
to be comfortable in our treatment of our fellow creatures if
we think that being eaten, worn, experimented on, held
captive, made to work, and killed, cannot mean anything
like the same thing to them that it would to us. And that in
turn seems more likely to the extent they are unlike us in

C O M M E N T 103

their emotional and cognitive lives. Of course the fact that
we have a vested interest in denying the similarities between
ourselves and the other animals does nothing to show that
there are such similarities. But once you correct for that
vested interest there seems little reason to doubt that obser-
vations and experiments of the sort de Waal does and de-
scribes, as well as our own everyday interactions with our
animal companions, show exactly what they seem to show:
that many animals are intelligent, curious, loving, playful,
bossy, belligerent creatures in many ways very much like
ourselves.

But I don’t find a total gradualism very tempting either.
To me human beings seem clearly set apart by our elaborate
cultures, historical memory, languages with enormously
complex grammars and refined expressive power, the prac-
tices of art, literature, science, philosophy, and of course of
telling jokes. I would also add to this list something that
doesn’t often appear on it but should—our startling capac-
ity to make friends across the boundaries between species,
and to induce the other animals who live with us to do so as
well. I am also inclined to agree with Freud and Nietzsche—
whose rather gaudier explanations of the evolution of moral-
ity don’t seem to tempt de Waal very much—that human be-
ings seem psychologically damaged, in ways that suggest
some deep break with nature. An old-fashioned philosophi-
cal project, dating back to Aristotle, attempts to locate the
central difference that accounts for all these other differences
between human beings and the other animals. As a very old-
fashioned philosopher, I am tempted by that project. What
I’d like to do now is talk about one piece of that project that
bears on the question of the extent to which morality repre-
sents a break with our animal past.

104 C H R I S T I N E M . K O R S G A A R D

Moral standards are standards governing the way we act,
and the question of the extent to which animals are moral or
proto-moral beings arises because they unquestionably do
act. De Waal’s conclusions are largely derived from consider-
ing what animals do. In his books, de Waal often canvases
different possible intentional interpretations of animal be-
havior and actions, and describes experiments designed to
find out which is correct. A capuchin rejects a cucumber
when her partner is offered a grape—is she protesting the
unfairness, or is she just holding out for a grape? Do the
chimps share food because they are grateful to those who
have groomed them, or is it just that the grooming has put
them in a relaxed and beneficent mood? Sometimes what
appear to be evolutionary explanations of animal behavior
seem to bleed over into intentional interpretations of their
actions, as when de Waal suggests in Good Natured that
chimpanzees “strive for the kind of community that is in
their own best interest.”6 For reasons I have already men-
tioned, it seems to me difficult to believe a chimpanzee has
anything like this on his mind. But in other places de Waal
carefully separates the question of the extent to which mon-
keys and apes do the things he talks about intentionally or
deliberately from the question of what explains their ten-
dency to do them. De Waal himself chastises veneer theorists
for inferring the selfishness of our intentions from the “self-
ishness” of our genes.

The question of intention is a question about how an
episode in which an animal does something looks from the
acting animal’s own point of view, whether it is plausible to
think that the animal acts with a certain kind of purpose in

C O M M E N T 105

6 Good Natured, p. 205.

mind. I think there is a temptation to think that the question
whether we can see the origins of morality in animal behav-
ior depends on how exactly we interpret their intentions,
whether their intentions are “good” or not. I think that, at
least taken in the most obvious way, this is a mistake. It
seems to make some sense if you hold the kind of sentimen-
talist moral theory favored by Hutcheson and Hume, since
according to these thinkers an action gets its moral character
from the fact that onlookers or spectators would approve or
disapprove of it. At least in the case of what Hume called
“the natural virtues,” these thinkers believed that the agent
who does a morally good thing need not be motivated by ex-
pressly moral considerations. In fact for this reason, some of
the sentimentalists of the eighteenth century and their crit-
ics explicitly discussed the question whether according to
their theories the other animals could be thought of as vir-
tuous. Hutcheson’s immediate predecessor, Shaftesbury, had
asserted that you could not count as virtuous unless you
were capable of moral judgment, and that therefore we
would not call a good horse virtuous.7 But since according
to this sort of theory moral judgment need not play a role in
moral motivation, it is not clear why not. Hutcheson there-
fore boldly asserted that it is not an absurdity to suppose
that “creatures void of reflection” have some “low virtues.”8

Although de Waal praises sentimentalist theories, he denies
that his case rests simply on the existence of animals with

106 C H R I S T I N E M . K O R S G A A R D

7 In An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit (1699). I am quoting from D. D.
Raphael’s British Moralists, vol. I, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991,
pp. 173–174.

8 In An Inquiry Concerning the Original of our Ideas of Virtue or Moral Good
(1726), Moralists, in ibid., vol. I, p. 295. In a later work, Hutcheson argued that it was
confused to think that we can be motivated by moral considerations (Illustrations on

intentions we approve of: “whether animals are nice to each
other is not the issue, nor does it matter much whether their
behavior fits our moral preferences or not. The relevant
question rather is whether they possess capacities for reci-
procity and revenge, for the enforcement of social rules, for
the settlements of disputes, and for sympathy and empathy.”
(p. 16). But he seems to share an assumption with these
early sentimentalists, which is that the morality of an action
is a matter of content of the intention with which it is done.

I think this is wrong, and to explain why, I want to take a
closer look at the concept of acting intentionally or on pur-
pose. This concept, I believe, does not mark off a single phe-
nomenon, but a number of things that can be ranged on a
scale. It is only at a certain point on the scale that the ques-
tion whether actions have a moral character can arise.

At the bottom of the scale, there is the idea of intention-
ally or functionally describable movement. The concept of
intention in this form applies to any object whatever that
has some sort of functional organization, including not only
human beings and animals but also plants and machines.
Within the economy of a functionally organized object, cer-
tain movements can be described as having certain pur-
poses. The heart beats to pump the blood, the alarm rings to
wake you up, your computer warns you against a mis-
spelling, the plant’s leaves reach out towards the sun to col-
lect its rays. There is no implication that the purposes served

C O M M E N T 107

the Moral Sense (1728), ed. Bernard Peach, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1971, pp. 139–140). The primary source for Hume’s view is Book III of Trea-
tise of Human Nature (1739–1740, 2nd edition, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nid-
ditch, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). The primary discussion of the role
of moral motivation in moral thought is Book III, Part II, Section One, pp.
477–484.

by these movements are before the minds of the objects that
move, or even before the minds of someone who created
those objects. Attributing purposes to these movements just
reflects the fact that the object is functionally organized.

In the case of living things, especially animals, including
the so-called “lower” animals, some of these purposive or in-
tentional movements are guided by the animal’s perception.
A fish swims upwards towards a surface disturbance that
may mean an insect; a cockroach runs under cover as you
try to swat him with the newspaper; a spider crawls towards
the moth that is caught in the middle of her web. Here we
begin to be tempted to use the language of action, and it is
clear enough why: when an animal’s movements are guided
by her perceptions, they are under the control of her mind,
and when they are under control of her mind, we are
tempted to say that they are under the animal’s own control.
And this, after all, is what makes the difference between an
action and a mere movement—that an action can be attrib-
uted to the agent, that it is done under the agent’s own con-
trol. At this level, should we say that the animal acts inten-
tionally, or on purpose? It depends how you understand the
question. The animal is directing her movements and her
movement are intentional movements—the movements have
a purpose. In that sense the animal acts with a purpose, but
at this stage there is no need to say that this purpose is some-
how before the animal’s mind. Admittedly, when we try to
look at the situation from the animal’s point of view, when
we ask ourselves what exactly it is that the animal perceives
that determines her movements, it is almost irresistible to
describe it purposively. Why does the spider go towards the
moth caught in her web unless there is some sense in which
the spider sees the moth as food and therefore some sense in

108 C H R I S T I N E M . K O R S G A A R D

which she is trying to get food? But however exactly we un-
derstand the spider’s intention, we need not understand it as
a matter of the spider’s entertaining thoughts about what
she is trying to achieve.

On the other hand, once we are dealing with an intelligent
animal, there is no reason not to suppose that her purpose is
before her mind. Furthermore, I see no reason why we
should not suppose that there is a gradual continuum be-
tween whatever is going on when a spider’s perceptions di-
rect her towards the moth and straightforward cognitive
awareness of something as what you want. And when such
cognitive awareness is in place, presumably the possibility of
learning from experience about how to get what you want
and avoid what you don’t is greatly enhanced. One can al-
ways learn from experience by conditioning, but when you
are aware of your purpose you can also begin to learn from
experience by thinking and remembering.

But even if there is a gradual continuum, it seems right to
say that an animal that can entertain his purposes before his
mind, and perhaps even entertain thoughts about how to
achieve those purposes, is exerting a greater degree of con-
scious control over his own movements than, say, the spider,
and is therefore in a deeper sense an agent. There is now, as
in some of de Waal’s cases, room for disagreement about
what the proper intentional description of an action is, for it
is at this level we become committed to keying the inten-
tional description of the action to what is going on from the
agent’s own point of view. (Freudian slips pose a problem
for the claim I just made, but I want to leave that aside for
now.) This is a difference from the earlier stage: when we do
describe the spider as “trying to get food,” we don’t care
whether that’s what the spider thinks she’s doing. At the level

C O M M E N T 109

of the spider, it is natural for the intentional description of
the movement and the explanation of it to run together in
this way. But once purposes are consciously entertained, the
intentional description of the action must capture some-
thing about the way it seems to the agent. It’s because at this
level we key intentional description to the agent’s perspec-
tive that it makes sense to ask whether the capuchin is
protesting the unfairness or merely angling for the grape. So
all of this represents a deeper way in which an action may be
said to be “intentional.”

But some philosophers do not believe that this is the deep-
est level of intentionality. At the level of intentionality I have
just been describing, the animal is aware of his purposes, and
thinks about how to pursue them. But he does not choose to
pursue those purposes. The animal’s purposes are given to
him by his affective states: his emotions and his instinctual or
learned desires. Even in a case where the animal must choose
between two purposes—say a male wants to mate a female
but a larger male is coming and he wants to avoid a fight—
the choice is made for him by the strength of his affective
states. He has learned to fear the larger male more strongly
than he desires to mate. The end that the animal pursues is
determined for him by his desires and emotions.

Kantians are among the philosophers who believe that a
deeper level of assessment and therefore choice is possible.
Besides asking yourself how to get what you want most, you
can ask yourself whether your wanting this end is a good
reason for taking this particular action. The question is not
merely about whether the act is an effective way to achieve
your end, but whether, even given that it is, your wanting
this end justifies you in taking this action. Kant of course fa-
mously thinks that raising this question about a proposed

110 C H R I S T I N E M . K O R S G A A R D

action takes a particular form: you formulate what he called
a maxim—I will do this act in order to achieve this end—
and you subject that maxim to the categorical imperative
test. You ask whether you can will it as a universal law that
everyone who wishes to achieve this sort of end should do
this sort of act. In effect you are asking whether your maxim
can serve as a rational principle. In some cases, Kant be-
lieved, you find you cannot will your maxim as a universal
law, and then you have to reject the action described by that
maxim as wrong. Even if you do judge the action to be justi-
fied and act, you are acting not merely from your desire but
from your judgment that the action is justified.

Why do I say this represents a deeper level of intentional-
ity? In the first place, an agent who is capable of this form of
assessment is capable of rejecting an action along with its
purpose, not because there is something else she wants (or
fears) even more, but simply because she judges that doing
that sort of act for that purpose is wrong. In a famous pas-
sage in the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argued that we
are capable of setting aside even our most urgent natural
desires—the desire to preserve our own lives and to secure
the welfare of our loved ones—to avoid performing a wrong
action. Kant gives the example of a man who is ordered by
his king, on pain of death for himself and suffering for his
family, to bear false witness against an innocent person the
king wants to get rid of. While no one can say for sure how
he would act in such a situation, Kant argues, each of us
must admit to himself that he is capable of doing the right
thing.9 Now if we are capable of setting aside our purposes

C O M M E N T 111

9 The Critique of Practical Reason (1788), translated by Mary Gregor, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 27.

when we cannot pursue them by any decent means, then
there is also a sense in which when we do decide to pursue a
purpose, we can be seen as having adopted that purpose. Our
purposes may be suggested to us by our desires and emo-
tions, but they are not determined for us by our affective
states, for if we had judged it wrong to pursue them, we
could have laid them aside. Since we choose not only the
means to our ends but also the ends themselves, this is in-
tentionality at a deeper level. For we exert a deeper level of
control over own movements when we choose our ends as
well as the means to them than that exhibited by an animal
that pursues ends that are given to her by her affective states,
even if she pursues them consciously and intelligently. An-
other way to put the point is to say that we do not merely
have intentions, good or bad. We assess and adopt them. We
have the capacity for normative self-government, or, as Kant
called it, “autonomy.” It is at this level that morality emerges.
The morality of your action is not a function of the content
of your intentions. It is a function of the exercise of norma-
tive self-government.10

I propose this as an answer to a question de Waal raises in
Good Natured: “What is different about the way we act that
makes us, and not any other species, moral beings?” But al-
though I believe the capacity for autonomy is characteristic
of human beings and probably unique to human beings, the
question how far in the animal kingdom that capacity extends

112 C H R I S T I N E M . K O R S G A A R D

10 Although it may not seem at all obvious, the argument I have just given is a
version of the argument that leads Kant, in the first section of the Groundwork of
the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), to the conclusion that “an action from duty has its
moral worth not in the purpose to be attained by it but in the maxim in accordance
with which it is decided upon.” I am quoting from the translation by Mary Gregor
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 13.

is certainly an empirical one. There is nothing unnatural,
nonnatural, or mystical about the capacity for normative
self-government. What it requires is a certain form of self-
consciousness: namely, consciousness of the grounds on
which you propose to act as grounds. What I mean is this: a
nonhuman agent may be conscious of the object of his fear
or desire, and conscious of it as fearful or desirable, and so as
something to be avoided or to be sought. That is the ground
of his action. But a rational animal is, in addition, conscious
that she fears or desires the object, and that she is inclined to
act in a certain way as a result.11 That’s what I mean by being
conscious of the ground as a ground. She does not just think
about the object that she fears or even about its fearfulness
but about her fears and desires themselves. Once you are
aware that you are being moved in a certain way, you have a
certain reflective distance from the motive, and you are in a
position to ask yourself “but should I be moved in that way?
Wanting that end inclines me to do that act, but does it really
give me a reason to do that act?” You are now in a position to
raise a normative question about what you ought to do.

I believe that, in general, this form of self-consciousness—
consciousness of the grounds of our beliefs and actions—is
the source of reason, a capacity that is distinct from intelli-
gence. Intelligence is the ability to learn about the world, to
learn from experience, to make new connections of cause
and effect, and put that knowledge to work in pursuing your
ends. Reason by contrast looks inward, and focuses on the
connections between mental states and activities: whether

C O M M E N T 113

11Being conscious of the ground of your beliefs and actions as grounds is a form
of self-consciousness because it involves identifying yourself as the subject of certain
of your own mental representations.

our actions are justified by our motives or our inferences are
justified by our beliefs. I think we could say things about the
beliefs of intelligent nonhuman animals that parallel what I
am now saying about their actions. Nonhuman animals may
have beliefs and may arrive at those beliefs under the influ-
ence of evidence, but it is a further step to be the sort of ani-
mal that can ask oneself whether the evidence really justifies
the belief, and can adjust one’s conclusions accordingly.12

Both Adam Smith and, following him, Charles Darwin
believed that giving an account of the capacity for normative
self-government is essential to explaining the development
of morality, because it is essential to explaining what Darwin
describes as “that short but imperious word ought, so full of
high significance.”13 And interestingly, both of them ex-
plained it by appeal to our social nature.14 In Smith’s ac-
count, it is sympathy with the responses of others to ourselves
that first turns our attention inward, creating a conscious-
ness of our own motives and characters as objects to be
judged. Sympathy, for Smith, is a tendency to put ourselves
in the shoes of others and think about the way we would re-
act if we were in their circumstances. We judge another’s

114 C H R I S T I N E M . K O R S G A A R D

12 I pursue this argument in The Sources of Normativity, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996.

13 The Descent of Man, p. 70.
14 Freud and Nietzsche also appeal to our social nature to explain the origin of

morality. They think that our ability to command ourselves is the result of our in-
ternalizing our dominance instincts and turning them against ourselves. Psycho-
logically, the phenomenon of dominance seems to me a promising place to look for
the evolutionary origin of the ability to be motivated by an ought, as I proposed in
The Sources of Normativity, pp. 157–160. For Freud’s account, see Civilization and
Its Discontents (trans. James Strachey, New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), especially
chapter VII. For Nietzsche’s, see The Genealogy of Morals (trans. Walter Kaufman
and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Random House, 1967), especially essay II.

feelings and the resulting actions to be proper if they are
what we suppose we would feel in his place. If human beings
were solitary, Smith argues, our attention would be focused
outward: a human afraid of a lion would think about the
lion, not about his own fear. Because we are social animals,
sympathy leads us to consider how we ourselves appear from
the point of view of others, and to enter into their feelings
about us. Through the eyes of others we become the specta-
tors of our own conduct, dividing internally, as Smith de-
scribed it, into an actor and a spectator, and forming judg-
ments about the propriety of our own feelings and motives.
The internal spectator transforms our natural desire to be
thought well of and praised into something deeper, a desire
to be worthy of praise. For to judge that we are worthy of
praise is to judge that it would be proper for others to praise
us, and the internal spectator, who knows our inner motives,
is in a position to make a judgment about that. In this way
we develop the capacity to be motivated by thoughts about
what we ought to do and what we ought to be like.15

Darwin speculates that the capacity for normative self-
government arose from a difference in the way we are affected
by our social instincts and our appetites. The effect of the so-
cial instincts on the mind is constant and calm, while that of
the appetites is episodic and sharp. Social animals will there-
fore be under frequent temptations to violate their social in-
stincts for the sake of their appetites, as say when an animal
neglects her offspring while mating. But it is a familiar experi-
ence that satisfying an appetite seems more important when
you are actually in its grip than after you have satisfied it. So

C O M M E N T 115

15 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Indianapolis: Liberty
Classics, 1982.

once a social animal’s mental faculties develop to the point
where she can remember giving way to such temptations,
they will seem to her not to have been worth it, and she will
eventually learn to control such impulses. Our capacity to be
motivated by the imperious word “ought,” Darwin suggests,
has its origins in this kind of experience.16

0

In an essay called “Conjectures on the Beginnings of Hu-
man History,” Kant speculated that the form of self-
consciousness that underlies our autonomy may also play a
role in the explanation of some of the other distinctively hu-
man attributes—including culture, romantic love, and the
capacity to act from self-interest. Other philosophers have
noticed the connection of self-consciousness of this sort
with the capacity for language. I can’t go into those argu-
ments here, but if they are correct they would provide evi-
dence that only human beings have this form of self-
consciousness.17

If that is right, then the capacity for normative self-
government and the deeper level of intentional control that
goes with it is probably unique to human beings. And it is
in the proper use of this capacity—the ability to form and
act on judgments of what we ought to do—that the essence
of morality lies, not in altruism or the pursuit of the greater
good. So I do not agree with de Waal when he says, “Instead
of merely ameliorating relations around us, as apes do, we

116 C H R I S T I N E M . K O R S G A A R D

16 The Descent of Man, pp. 87–93.
17 “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History” (1786) can be found in

Kant: Political Writings, 2nd ed., ed. Hans Reiss and trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991.

have explicit teachings about the value of the community
and the precedence it takes, or ought to take, over individ-
ual interests. Humans go much further in all of this than
the apes, which is why we have moral systems and apes do
not” (p. 54). The difference here is not a mere matter of
degree.

And it isn’t a small difference, that ability to be motivated
by an ought. It does represent what de Waal calls a saltatory
change. A form of life governed by principles and values is a
very different thing from a form of life governed by instinct,
desire, and emotion—even a very intelligent and sociable
form of life governed by instinct, desire, and emotion. Kant’s
story about the man deciding to face death rather than bear
false witness is the stuff of high moral drama, but it has its
constant analog in our everyday lives. We have ideas about
what we ought to do and to be like and we are constantly
trying to live up to them. Apes do not live in that way. We
struggle to be honest and courteous and responsible and
brave in circumstances where it is difficult. Even if apes are
sometimes courteous, responsible, and brave, it is not be-
cause they think they should be. Even as primitive a phe-
nomenon as a teenager’s efforts to be “cool” is a manifesta-
tion of the human tendency to live a life guided by ideals
rather than merely driven by impulses and desires. We also
suffer deeply from our self-evaluations and act in sick and
evil ways as a result. This is part of what I had in mind ear-
lier when I said that human beings seem psychologically
damaged in a way that suggests a break with nature. But
none of this is a way of saying that morality is a thin veneer
on our animal nature. It’s the exact contrary: the distinctive
character of human action gives us a whole different way of
being in the world.

C O M M E N T 117

My point is not that human beings live lives of principle
and value and so are very noble, while the other animals
don’t and so are ignoble. The distinctiveness of human action
is as much a source of our capacity for evil as of our capacity
for good. An animal cannot be judged or held responsible for
following its strongest impulse. Animals are not ignoble; they
are beyond moral judgment. I agree with de Waal that saying
that a person who acts badly acts “like an animal” (“man is
wolf to man”) can be very misleading in one way. But in an-
other way it is no more an insult to nonhuman animals than
saying of a brain-damaged person that he has become a veg-
etable is an insult to plants. Just as the second remark means
that the person has fallen away from his animate nature, the
first means that he has fallen away from his human nature. In
following his strongest impulse without question or reflec-
tion he has failed to exercise his capacity for the kind of in-
tentional control over his movements that makes us human.
That is not the only form of wrongdoing, but it is one.

Earlier I said that we are likely to feel more comfortable
about the various ways in which we use the other animals if
we think they are very different from ourselves. So it is im-
portant for me to say that I do not think the difference that I
have been describing should provide that comfort. Exactly
the opposite is true. In Good Natured, de Waal tells a story
about an angry capuchin hurling objects at a human ob-
server. When he ran out of other things to throw, the ca-
puchin picked up a squirrel monkey and threw her at the
human. De Waal remarks, “Animals often seem to regard
those who belong to another kind as merely ambulant ob-
jects.”18 But no species is more guilty of treating those who

118 C H R I S T I N E M . K O R S G A A R D

18 Good Natured, p. 84.

belong to other kinds as ambulant objects than we are, and
we are the only species that knows it is wrong. As beings who
are capable of doing what we ought and holding ourselves
responsible for what we do, and as beings who are capable of
caring about what we are and not just about what we can get
for ourselves, we are under a strong obligation to treat the
other animals decently, even at cost to ourselves.

C O M M E N T 119

Copyright © 2006 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton,
New Jersey 08540

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All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Waal, F. B. M. de (Frans B. M.), 1948–
Primates and philosophers : how morality evolved / Frans de Waal ; edited and

introduced by Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober ; Christine M. Korsgaard . . . [et al.].
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12447-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-691-12447-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Ethics, Evolutionary. 2. Primates—Behavior. 3. Altruistic behavior in

animals. I. Macedo, Stephen, 1957– II. Ober, Josiah. III. Korsgaard,
Christine M. (Christine Marion) IV. Title.

BJ1311.W14 2006
171′.7—dc22
2006013905

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Minion Family & Minion Condensed

Printed on acid-free paper.∞

pup.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

PRIMATES
AND

PHILOSOPHERS
How Moral i ty Evolved

0

Frans de Waal

Robert Wright
Christine M. Korsgaard

Philip Kitcher
Peter Singer

EDITED AND INTRODUCED BY

Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober

p r i n c e t o n u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s

p r i n c e t o n a n d o x f o r d