Christine Korsgaard

It doesn't have to be justified.

Some people get a little crazy and say, well, where does it end? Are we supposed to stop all the wild animal predators from eating other animals too? In Christine Korsgaard's book, Fellow Creatures Are Obligations to the Other Animals, in a section called Creation Ethics, she discusses whether humans have a duty to intervene in wild animal predation.

She's not arguing in favor of doing this.

She is just sort of covering this ground at the end of her book.

So for instance, if I have reason to believe the special theory of relativity because of all the research that I've done, and maybe even invent the special theory of relativity, do I think of all those insights that I've ha- have, I've had and all those things I've learned that led me to develop the theory caused the, the theory? It's a really weird way to put it from the first-person point of view because I think in th- this in terms of being receptive to something in the world, being receptive to what's true about things, and to say that I'm caused makes it seem kind of like it's something blind, right? So if I'm doing arithmetic and I say five plus five equals 10, and someone asks me how I reached that conclusion, if I said, "Well, you know, this one brain state followed another brain state, and then that came out with that correlated to 10," that would be an odd thing to say because, you know, I know that five plus five equals 10 because I can see that five plus five equals 10.

So this gives you some of the flavor of the difference between the world of reasons from the first-person point of view, this is something we got into a little bit in our Korsgaard episode, right, and the third-person point of view from which it becomes causal.

And often, these two realms would just be strictly separated, right? So if I'm going to the fridge to get something to eat and someone asks me why, I say I'm hungry.

That's within the realm of reasons.