Abstract

My claim in this essay is that Kierkegaard’s concept of “the single individual” is a precursor of “the normative question” in Christine Korsgaard’s The Sources of Normativity. The normative question refers to what one asks oneself when considering whether one is obligated by a particular moral claim, and it essentially serves to illustrate the necessity of justifying these claims from a first-person perspective. The single individual is a concept Kierkegaard employs throughout his works to emphasize the first-person perspective that an individual must bring to bear on issues of existential significance. I analyze the correlations between Kierkegaard’s notion of the single individual and Korsgaard’s notion of normativity, and suggest what these correlations more broadly indicate about moral theory.