Christine M. Korsgaard

Christine M. Korsgaard (born April 9, 1952) is an American moral philosopher and the Arthur Kingsley Porter Research Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, where she has taught since 1991. She is among the most influential Kantian ethicists working today.

Career

Korsgaard earned her PhD at Harvard under John Rawls in 1981 and taught at Yale, Chicago, and the University of California before returning to Harvard. Her 1996 John Locke Lectures, published as The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge University Press, 1996), argued that moral obligation arises from the reflective structure of practical reason itself — a reconstruction of Kant that has become a central reference point in contemporary meta-ethics.

Animal ethics

For decades Korsgaard hinted that her Kantian framework had radical implications for non-human animals; in Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals (Oxford University Press, 2018) she made the argument explicit. Against Kant’s own view that animals are mere means, Korsgaard contends that Kant’s deeper commitments — that the good is always good for some creature, and that rational beings must legislate for all whose good is at stake — require treating sentient animals as ends in themselves. We cannot, she argues, coherently value our own animal nature while denying moral standing to the animal nature of others.

Influence

Fellow Creatures has become a touchstone for philosophers seeking a deontological alternative to utilitarian animal-liberation arguments, reshaping debates in ethics and animal-rights theory and drawing a generation of Kantians into the question of what humans owe the other animals.