Is Practical Identity Second-Personal?
In The Sources of Normativity, Korsgaard (whose class I may take this fall!) argues that our ability to act for reasons necessarily derives from our having a practical identity–a sense of who we are that forms the basis of our reasoning about what to do. Some of the most obvious elements of our practical identity are entirely contingent, Korsgaard notes. Our religion, nationality, profession, and family ties can be crucial elements of our practical identity, and all of them can be assumed, discarded, or exchanged. We become parents, we lose our jobs, we convert.
But, Korsgaard says, having some practical identity is not a contingent matter, because “unless you are committed to come comception of your practical identity, you will lose your grip on having any reason to do one thing rather than another–and with it, your grip on yourself as having any reason to live and act at all” (120). The need to have some practical identity is itself a necessary, constant element of our practical identity–this need is, according Korsgaard, a significant part of what makes us human.
So we and our obligations are not simply buffeted about by the vagarities of our ever-shifting identities–a student one day, an alumnus the next. The most basic level of practical identity–humanness–is constant and necessary, and it gives rise to the reasons that we call morality. It is also the sine qua non of our contingent practical identities, and so the reasons given by those identities can’t (coherently) conflict with the reasons that derive from our being human. “What makes morality special,” Korsgaard says, “is that it springs from a form of identity which cannot be rejected unless we are prepared to reject…the existence of practical reasons…altogether” (125).
(Side note: success! We’ve got an answer to one of the questions I asked in my last post. We’ll see if it survives the trip through the thresher that these ideas are about to get.)
These philosophical moves are part of a larger argument that normativity (and thus morality) ultimately derives from reflective endorsement of impulses and desires. This position is explicitly and resolutely first-personal. (Though Korsgaard also argues that reasons are inherently shareable, and she makes an observation about second-personal address that will probably be the linchpin of my thesis. This confuses me. More later.) Korsgaard writes, “The answer [to her central question--"what are the sources of normativity?"] we need is really the first-person answer, the one that satisfies us when we ourselves ask the normative question” (17).
I disagree, and here’s why. Korsgaard doesn’t spend much time writing about how we derive our practical identities, what sustains them, and what it takes to discard them. In her account, they seem to just pop up through either circumstantial facts (I assume the practical identity of a father, say, when I have a child) and more or less random acts of will. Kukla and Lance give a much more detailed–and to me, much more satisfactory–account of practical identity. Their model doesn’t undercut the idea that morality is the product of the most basic, most widely shared element of our practical identities–in fact, it dovetails nicely with Korsgaard’s argument. But it reveals as a mistake the idea that because morality is at root about our own conception of who we are, it is therefore not deeply second-personal.
Kukla and Lance’s argument is this: every utterance is directed at someone. And thus every utterance includes an implicit vocative–what they call a “hail”. Hails have a dual pragmatic structure: they both announce the recognition of their intended object, and demand (“call for”) an acknowledgment of that announcement. If I see you walking through Harvard Yard and call out “Yo!”, I am expressing my acknowledgment of you as someone who can be addressed second-personally, and demanding that my hail be acknowledged in turn.
What does this have to do with practical identity? I’ll let them speak for themselves:
We can argue that it is by responding to interpellative hails that recognize us in terms of our gender, our class, etc., as well as our more particularized positions such as Sarah’s friend, Amy’s spouse, etc., that we have these identities at all. In acknowledging herself as the little girl identified as likely to prefer pink, the girl practically[*] takes up a gender identity. In turning around when your child calls “Daddy!” you practically take up your place as her father. When I recognize you as a student, or as a man, or as a friend, my recognition takes you as already having these identities. But at the same time, I call forth an appropriate response from you that contributes to this identity.” (183)
(Apologies for the long block quote. But they write really well.)
The idea, then, is that the very elements of practical identity that Korsgaard is talking about–familial, national, religious, and even something like gender–are fundamentally second-personal. They are constituted by others’ overt recognition of us as having that identity, and in our acknowledgment that their recognition is appropriate.
This model has a story about how we come to have the practical identities that we do practically built in. We “induct” infants into practical identities by hailing them, even though we know that they can’t yet enter into a relationship of mutual recognition. Kukla and Lance cite examples of ultrasound technicians “hailing” a fetus even in utero.
And while one might take the position that while our contingent, local practical identies are second-personally constituted, but that our basic identity as humans is not, Kukla and Lance go farther. I’ve written a little about this before, so I’ll just summarize: what makes you a person is not, on Kukla and Lance’s account, that you have some quality or characteristic that qualifies you for personhood. It’s that others see you as a being that they can address second-personally, and your acknowledgment of their hails with vocatives of your own.
The parallels with Korsgaard’s argument are striking. In each case, you’ve got a fundamental identity that is necessary for personhood (as a being that must take on practical identities, and as a being that is hailable, respectively), and this necessary element of your identity underwrites the rest of it (you can’t figure out which hails are directed at you if you aren’t hailable to begin with). And most importantly, for my purposes, this most basic element of practical identity is, on both accounts, the stuff of morality.
It’s hard not to think that at root, Korsgaard and Kukla and Lance aren’t all trying to describe the same thing, just with different conceptual toolkits.
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* “Practically” in the sense of “not theoretically,” not “almost”
Yo (and yes, I say that advisedly), L-Mo,
I’ve been reading here and there in the Armchair, never quite giving it enough time to feel ready to comment–but this morning, as I sit at Speeder and Earl’s trying out wireless for the very first time (and feeling ever so cool) it seems like the time. Given my very limited experience with your materials (I confess that I haven’t yet read all the other entries, much less the useful links), I’m with you in favoring Kukla and Lance’s position–the idea (as I understand it) that one has an identity only in terms of relationship with others. I’ve just read Toni Morrison’s latest novel, “A Mercy,” and then reread “Beloved.” As you may know, they’re both largely about what it means to be American, and African-American, and female, and, most specifically, what it means to be a mother. Ultimately, it seems almost too obvious that one is a mother (or father, or child) only in relationship, only through the second person who hails you through that relationship. I wonder if there even IS such a thing as “fundamental identity” that’s separable from such hailing. Morrison is smart enough to keep it from seeming as simple as the terms in which I’ve just put it: especially in the torn, vexed history of African-Americans, often wrenched away from their parents, the relationships of hailer and hailee (so to speak) are often incommensurable. There are four brief chapters fairly late in “Beloved” that could make a wonderful study, in which each of the three main characters (mother, daughter, and ghost of another daughter) address each other (and perhaps themselves as well–it’s nicely complicated) in the second person, apparently trying to sort out their identities through that vocative.
Ooh, that’s interesting–does hailing oneself in the second person (Marquess, you numbskull!) count?
OK, I really should read more of the Armchair before I spritz further. But I wanted to be in touch. Rock on. Try to be more comprehensible than Ashbery.
Will
Yo yourself, Will,
I think that’s exactly right. I glossed over it this time around because I went into a little more depth on the topic earlier (there’s a link in the original post), but yes: Kukla and Lance want to say that your fundamental identity as a person is just that you are hailed, and hail in return. If you demand that kind of acknowledgement, and receive it from others, then you’re in the club.
The question of whether or not you can hail yourself is a big one. (Sometimes it’s formulated, using more philosopher-speak, this way: can one person occupy both poles of a second-personal relation?) Neo-Kantians like Christine Korsgaard say yes, and in fact the pseudo-second-personal interaction between the “thinking self” and the “acting self” is the foundation of her philosophy of normativity. What’s unclear, at least to me, is which kind of relation she takes to be prior. Are we able to hail ourselves only because we know what it is to hail others? Or is it the other way around?
Hail, Mr. Holland–
Where I come from, of course, that salutation could be taken as an imprecation, as in “what the hail?” But let’s call it a hail. Thanks for pinging me, or binging me, or whatever such an e-mail gets called. As I’ve been trying to read some critical theory lately (and I do emphasize “trying”), I find your efforts to work out the double bind of no-moral-facts-and-yet-still-moral-wrongs especially resonant. “No moral facts” seems (to me, at least) similar to the idea that there is no “transcendental signifier”; language is always slippery, referring to other language, in a web that can never be reduced to some original essence. And yet one imagines that if they were having lunch together, Derrida could probably ask Barthes to pass the ketchup without falling all over himself in questions about transcendence. Of course, ketchup on pommes frites is a moral wrong.
On the question of what deserves priority in hailing yourself (thinking self or acting self), jeez, it sounds like a chicken-and-egg affair. Have they solved that one yet?
“On Our Own Authority” seems like an excellent title–especially if it suggests your ultimate position. I haven’t read enough yet to know. I’ll get back to that.
Just saw this. It is gratifying to see someone appreciating the stuff. Nothing to disagree with in the interpretation. If you are interested, we have a recent paper – not published yet – that deals with some of the same points you are thinking about in the realm of practical rationality. There is a long discussion with people like McDowell, Davidson, and Haugeland, about how receptivity can constrain us normatively. Haugeland takes up at some points more or less what you are calling the Korsgaard position: that it does this because we assume as part of our practical identity that objects have a certain significance. We argue that this is really not the way to go and that we hold each other to norms in the epistemic case as much as the moral. We hold each other to a regime in which objects have a non-optional normative significance for what it is appropriate to believe and do.
Sorry to go on about that, but since you are just developing the project, I want to caution you not to think too narrowly about morality. these issues are much more abstract, about normativity in general, and the specific differences between the practical and the theoretical are much less significant than some take them to be. (I have in mind especially Darwall here who thinks the second person stuff is specifically to do with morality, but many others go wrong on this, I think, because they fail to take a broader view. I think that has been one of the big advantages Rebecca and I have had in thinking about this.)
Anyway, mostly wanted to say thanks for the thoughtful plug. Glad to know others are thinking about this stuff.
Welcome, Professor Lance, and thank you so much for taking the time to respond!
In case it’s not obvious, “Yo!” and “Lo!” has been very helpful with several of the questions I’m grappling with in my thesis, and it has inspired me to come down on your side of the debates you mention.
In particular, I agree with you about the lack of a hard line between matters theoretical and matters practical. I was surprised to see Darwall arguing against Moran’s account of testimony–I think he’s way off base there, and in fact one of the things I think I’m going to try to do is to use Moran’s view of testimony (on which utterances give rise to reasons for belief) as a framework for an analogous account of the way that utterances give rise to reasons for action.
Given that, I see how my single-minded focus on morality might seem misguided. Part of it is that it seems like a more manageable, thesis-sized, chunk of philosophy to work with. But it’s also that I think that stepping back, and looking at language and illocution in a broader context, the way that you have, has some consequences for the project of the moral expressivists, who I think are on to something really important but who don’t quite know what to do with it.
In any case, I’m glad to hear that I’m not horribly butchering your work, and I would love to see the paper you referred to, if you’re willing. And thanks again–I will be treading extra carefully now that I know you might actually be reading this.