I’ve just read The Sources of Normativity, the 1992 Tanner Lectures of Christine M. Korsgaard. The book was recommended to me by my colleague Tim Meijers after I came into his office bothering him about duties. Not his duties, but the nature of duties. See, I don’t really get duties; or rather, what I don’t get is how I could fall under morality merely by being a human being or a rational being. There are two quite distinct aspects to my perplexity:

• Why would we conceptualise normativity in terms of duties?
• Why would we think that normativity, however conceptualised, has a claim on human (or rational) beings as such?

My colleague Johan de Jong told me — and my reproduction here might not be entirely accurate — that Derrida says that friendship is a duty to help the friend regardless of duty. That makes sense. When the friend calls for help, I must help — but of course I help not because I must help, not because it is a duty, for then it would not be true friendship that is on display here. I’m tempted to think that this even extends to professional duties. If a doctor saves a patient because she has taken the Hippocratic Oath, then there is something deficient about her as a doctor. Talking in terms of duties seems to be a way to theorise about what is more fundamental, namely about being a friend and being a doctor. It is being those things that ensures that we fall under a certain normativity. But not in the sense that (P1) I am your friend, (P2) friends ought to help each other, and therefore (C) I ought to help you. Me being your friend and me being ready to help you, as friends do!, are simply the same thing. The thought of the ‘ought’ does not arise when friendship is functioning, but only when it is not. Normative concepts can be used to think through the nature of friendship and the struggles of being a real friend. We use it when there are conflicting demands, or when we are disappointed in ourselves or in someone else.

Those are some preliminary reflections on why I think it’s dubious to think of duties as a fundamental category of the ethical. Surely friendship is more fundamental than any duties that might come with it. But the second perplexity is the deeper one. It is relatively easy to see why I should help my friend. It is less easy to see why all humans should help each other. If the ‘ought’ in the first claim is a term we use to think through the nature of friendship, then what can the ‘ought’ in the second claim be? A term we use to think through the nature of humanity, or rationality, or something like that?

It is helpful to approach this through an example Tim gave me. Suppose that, as we are sitting in his office, Tim suddenly starts choking on a piece of apple. Then I ought to jump up and help him. But if that’s really a duty that I have towards him, and not just some inclination, then perhaps it is a duty I have towards everyone; and a duty that everyone has towards everyone.

I think this reasoning is deeply wrong, but there are a lot of truths in and nearby it. So, first of all, I completely agree that I ought to help Tim when he chokes. I also agree that this is a bona fide moral truth; I don’t see any reason to adopt an ‘error theory’ and claim that this is not a truth or not a moral truth. Surely it’s true that I ought to help Tim, and if that’s not what is meant by a moral truth, then I have no idea what is. This is all the more the case because that I ought to help Tim is not merely some conditional obligation: it’s not the case that I want to help Tim and therefore I ought to do it; it’s not the case that people will blame me if I don’t help Tim and therefore I ought to do it; it’s not the case that I will hate myself if I don’t help Tim and therefore I ought to do it. I just, you know, ought to do it.

But even that description of the situation is, so to speak, too indirect. When Tim chokes, the question of whether or not I ought to help him doesn’t really come up. That will only come up if I somehow, inexplicably, don’t help him. When Tim chokes, I jump up and help him. That’s it. That’s the entire story. And I think it is extremely important that that is the entire story.

Let’s bring in Korsgaard. She tells us (p. 79) that the reflective mind, the mind that is aware of itself as a self, “cannot settle for perception and desire, not just as such. It needs a reason. Otherwise, at least as long as it reflects, it cannot commit itself or go forward.” This is an essential first step in her argument for a quasi-Kantian theory of normativity. But it is also extremely curious. Here are two things I’m willing to accept:

1. Human beings engage in actions, and actions are different from mere movements in that they cannot be fully understood by being placed in a space of causes, but must be placed in a space of reasons.
2. As long as you are reflecting on a certain course of action, you have not committed yourself and are not going forward.

But this does not commit me to everything that Korsgaard says or implies. Most crucially, Korsgaard seems to present a quasi-causal model of action where the reflective mind needs a reason to act, in the same way that a ball needs to be hit by something in order to start moving. Well, not in quite the same way: the mind is supposed to be self-moving. But the reflective mind must settle on a reason before it can ‘commit itself’ and ‘go forward’.

This can’t be true. When Tim chokes, my mind is not looking for a reason to help him. I just help him. And my mind could not be looking for a reason, because:

• Suppose that I am wondering whether I should save Tim. I cannot wonder about that; ‘saving Tim’ is already normatively binding on me. There’s no such thing for me as wondering whether I should save Tim. The moment I conceptualise what is going on as ‘saving Tim’, I’ve already committed to this action.
• Suppose that I am wondering whether I should stretch my legs, move my body in a Timwards direction, and repeatedly apply pressure on his back with my hand. That’s something I can contemplate without already being committed to it. But why would I contemplate this? It makes no sense — well, unless I want to save Tim and wonder whether this is the right way to help someone who chokes, but then it’s no longer a normative question.

So don’t I have a reason to save Tim? I’d prefer to say that saving Tim is the reason. If someone comes into the room and asks me why I’m hitting my friend on the back, then I’ll have this reason ready: “To save him! He’s chocking!” (And then hopefully this other person knows how to do the Heimlich maneuver.) If that person were then to look at me quizzically and ask: “Yes, okay, but why do you save him rather than letting him die?”… well, what am I to say? None of the possible answers seem any good, except perhaps the exasperated cry “Because I’m not a total asshole!”

So what I’m saying is that of course we act under reasons, but not in the sense that we first think of reasons and then act. Of course this sometimes happens, but only in cases where we are unsure what to do. Should I try to save Tim myself, even though I don’t remember the Heimlich, or should I run into the corridor and shout for help? If that’s my dilemma, then I need a reason to get moving. But this is not a normative question. This is merely practical, with the normativity — I should save Tim — already settled, and not through reasons.

Of course someone could ask you for reasons in normative cases. “You claim that we should not eat animals. Why not?” Ethical reflection is possible. It’s even likely that we can only be truly said to be normative creatures if we are capable of ethical reflection. What I resist, however, is the idea that ethical reflection should take place at the moment of action; or, more generally, that it should somehow precede action; or, and this is I think the picture that Kant and Korsgaard are pushing, that the results of ethical reflection are somehow already there in the ethical action, that a full description of that action includes the kinds of entity that we get into view in ethical reflection. In particular, for both of them, a full description of an action seems to include a specification of the law under which it was done. (I’ll get to this in a second.) But reasons don’t work like that. They are not active in the action; they come up when we try to explain our actions, to ourselves and to others; and this is why reasons are not transparent to the subject. I can be acting for reasons I know nothing about.

Law. Here is Korsgaard on the next page, channeling Kant: “If the bidding from outside is desire, then [Kant’s] point is that the reflective mind must endorse the desire before it can act on it — it must say to itself that the desire is a reason. We must as he puts it, make it our maxim to act on the desire.” But a reason is a particular entity, in the sense that it is a reason for this particular person to do this particular action in these particular circumstances. How do we get from that to a maxim, which is inherently general?

The free will must be entirely self-determining. Yet, because the will is a causality, it must act according to some law or other. Kant says, “Since the concept of causality entails that of laws… it follows that freedom is by no means lawless…” Alternatively, we may say that since the will is practical reason, it cannot be conceived as acting and choosing for no reason. Since reasons are derived from principles, the free will must have a principle.

I find this utterly unconvincing. To think of the will as a causality is already suspect; but to think of causality as falling under a law is one of the central mistakes Kant makes in the Critique of Pure Reason. (You can check out my article on causal singularism.) Korsgaard’s alternative argument seems to rest on simply stating, without argument, that reasons are derived from principles.

Tim is choking, and I help him. What is the law that determines my action? Which principles or maxim am I following? I was not aware of following any. Asked for my reason to jump up and hit him on the back, I give the reason “He was chocking.” What is the law? “If somebody is choking, you have to hit them on the back?” That could be interpreted as some not too accurate medical advice, but let’s say it’s supposed to be a moral maxim: if someone is choking, then you ought to, you are morally obligated to, hit them on the back. But is that true? Surely not if there is somebody in the same room who is trained to perform the Heimlich. Then you should make room for them and do nothing. Or what if the person who is chocking is an evil terrorist who is holding you hostage? Or… Here a certain type or moral philosopher will rub their hands and start working on finding the formulation with the exactly right extension across all possible cases. They’ll probably fail. But even if they succeed, after much hard work, to formulate a version of the maxim to which even after reflection no counterexample comes to mind… who cares? For it is clear, first of all, that I was not acting under that moral maxim when I was helping Tim, since I did not even know that such a moral maxim existed; and, second, even in future cases I will not be acting under that moral maxim, and that for two reasons: (a) in typical, unproblematic cases my action will not involve moral reflection at all; and (b) maxim-using moral judgement clearly does not and cannot consist in the application or pre-given maxims, but must always consist in judgement as to whether the maxim also applies in this case, which means that an application of a maxim is at the same time a giving content to that maxim. And this process of giving content cannot ever stop. Morality never becomes the mechanical application of a law, whether self-given or not. (And this is why Korsgaard is also wrong in saying that voluntarism is, in the end, correct. We are not lawgivers unto ourselves, because the law is never given.)

I don’t mean to say that there is no metaphysical story to be told about the grounds of morality. But the story of laws, with its promise of universality (because the laws come from reason alone and so by their very form must be such that they are binding on all rational creatures as such) is not the story we can tell. For me, the road to explore is that of love, about which I will now make a few extremely sketchy remarks that must be taken as doing no more than indicate a direction.

Why did I help Tim? Well, only a total asshole, that is, somebody who does not have love, wouldn’t help him. I don’t mean that love is a sentiment or feeling, or something I desire. It is much more fundamental than that. Love is a striving towards unity, and in an act of love, that unity is achieved. In an act of love, one is still oneself, but one is oneself as part of the greater unity. It is not that one desires to be part of the greater unity, and therefore does the action, in order to achieve the unity; no, in the loving act, love is both cause and act and effect. One could not perform the loving act if one were not already love; in performing it one is love; and having performed it, one has affirmed oneself as love. Love is an ontological category, and the source of all normativity, including epistemic normativity. To trust the senses, to strive for coherence, to seek to conform one’s beliefs to reality, to talk to people and try to come to agreement — those are all acts of love.

And, crucially, none of this is in any sense normatively binding on somebody who does not have love. Of course we can argue — and I agree with the argument — that there is a sense in which rationality implies that one has love. Haven’t I myself just said that striving for epistemic coherence is an act of love? That’s true; and so a rational devil is still not entirely a devil. But so what? How is it to be shown that love cannot be rejected, even if this rejection implies the rejection of rationality itself? Let us grant that both love and rationality imply understanding oneself as falling under the normative. So anyone who understands anything at all understands themselves as falling under the normative. But why can understanding not be given up? For it is clear, it is the most obvious (although most unintelligible) thing of all, that we are not just love and rationality. If we were, there would be no need for ethics. There are failures of love and failures of rationality; there is, if one wants to use any of these words, evil, or emptiness, or non-being, or lovelessness. And love and rationality have no purchase on those things. The loveless does not fall under the demands of love.

One cannot rationally wish to be loveless. But one can be loveless. Perhaps one cannot be loveless, not entirely, since pure lovelessness implies the dissolution of the subject. (Although, in a different way, so does pure love.) Yet there can be lovelessness. And in lovelessness, the calls of love do not even fall on deaf ears; there are no ears for them to fall onto.

All of us have love, and all of us are streaked through with lovelessness. Insofar as we have love, we are on our way to more love. Insofar as we are lovelessness, we are on our way to more lovelessness. To claim that there is an authority that speaks to us entire, is to claim, falsely, that we are purely love; it is to claim that we are already complete and have no further need to act; it is to collapse the finite into infinity.