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Shortly before turning to Wittgenstein for help in establishing the essentially public nature of reasons, and so, she supposes, undercutting the egoist challenge to morality, Korsgaard links the sort of necessary publicity or 'shareability" of reasons she has in mind with the fact that "our social nature is deep" (1996, p. 166) No doubt there are ways of reading that claim such that even the most selfish amoralist could happily agree with it; and as we have just seen, Korsgaard does nothing in the end to spell it out in a form that should occasion any threat to the rational T-Egoist. There is a suggestion, however, that by the "depth" of our 'social nature" Korsgaard does in fact mean something that, if it could be sustained, would undermine TE as a source of moral scepticism. For at one point, in the course of what is in effect a discussion of how to achieve a rapprochement between the liberal and the communitarian, she seizes upon the possibility that the former might emphasize the universality of the very importance to us of particular communal ties and traditions that the latter places such weight upon.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230356955_10

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