In her book, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals, Professor Christine M. Korsgaard develops a Kantian account of why human beings have obligations to other animals and what some of those obligations are. She argues that there are two senses in which you can be, in Kant’s language, an “end-in-itself”: you can be a participant in making the laws of the moral community, and you can be a creature for whom things can be good or bad. Human beings are committed to regarding ourselves as ends-in-ourselves in both senses, and that commits us to regarding animals as ends-in-themselves in the second sense. In this talk she sketches the main arguments and practical conclusions of the book.
Christine M. Korsgaard is Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard. She got her BA at the University of Illinois at Urbana and her PhD at Harvard, where she studied with John Rawls. After teaching at Yale, Santa Barbara, and Chicago, she returned to Harvard in 1991. She is the author of The Sources of Normativity (1996), Creating the Kingdom of Ends (1996), The Constitution of Agency (2008), Self-Constitution (2009), and Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals (2018).