In response to Stephan Darwall’s The Second-Person Standpoint, Christine Korsgaard agrees that the autonomy of others must be presupposed in order to hold them accountable to our second-personal demands, but unlike Darwall, she finds that we discover our autonomy prior to second-personal engagements. Korsgaard maintains that one knows that one is autonomous by obligating oneself through a “second voice within.”* Hence, she concludes that we do not have to engage with others second-personally in order to know that we are autonomous and can obligate ourselves. In this thesis, I introduce Tyler Burge’s Reason and the First Person to show that knowing that others are capable of holding themselves accountable to our second-personal demands is not dependent on first knowing that we can hold ourselves accountable—we can have knowledge of both concurrently. I conclude with the stronger claim that given the unnecessary epistemic priority of self-obligation, coupled with her own theory of rational agency, Korsgaard must accept that we cannot know that we have obligations to ourselves without engaging second-personally with others.
*Christine M. Korsgaard, “Autonomy and the Second Person Within: A Commentary on Stephan Darwall’s The Second-Person Standpoint,” Ethics 118 (2007).