Abstract

In this article, I ask whether Korsgaard’s ethics can be reconciled with a hermeneutic understanding of the human subject. Hermeneutics, inspired by Nietzsche, has traditionally been skeptical about the notion that moral principles have authority over us. But Korsgaard’s account of normativity as grounded in self-consciousness and its reflective distance from beliefs and desires is strikingly similar to Gadamer’s description of human beings as distant and ‘free’ from their environment. The question hermeneutics poses to deontology is how a finite subject can be bound unconditionally by principles, when our understanding of them is always historically mediated and partial. I argue that Gadamer’s notion of the subject matter of understanding (the Sache) allows us to see that we understand our principles as interpretations of fully determined principles. What binds us is the principle that we are always revising our way toward, but whose content we never completely determine