Christine Korsgaard b. 1952

Christine Korsgaard is an American philosopher long associated with Harvard University and one of the most important contemporary interpreters of Kantian ethics. The Sources of Normativity argued that the authority of moral obligations is rooted in the reflective structure of human agency itself: rational beings must endorse the principles by which they act. Self-Constitution developed this constitutivist program into a full ethical theory, while Fellow Creatures applied her Kantian framework to defend the moral standing of non-human animals as ends in themselves.

Christine Marion Korsgaard was born in April 1952. She took her bachelor's at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1974 and her doctorate at Harvard in 1981 under John Rawls, with a dissertation on Kant's ethics. She taught at Yale, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Chicago, before joining Harvard in 1991, where she has been Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy since 1995.

Her books are the Tanner Lectures published as The Sources of Normativity (1996), the collected essays Creating the Kingdom of Ends (1996), the John Locke Lectures published as Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity (2009), The Constitution of Agency: Essays on Practical Reason and Moral Psychology (2008), and Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals (2018).

Korsgaard developed a Kantian constructivism on which moral obligation is grounded in the necessary conditions of agency: a rational being unifies itself into a single agent only by giving itself principles, and the demand to give oneself a universalisable principle is the heart of morality. Her late Fellow Creatures extended the framework to argue that human beings owe the other animals direct moral consideration, since they too have a good of their own that we share with them as fellow creatures.