- Lived:
- Born 1952 · Chicago suburbs, Illinois · teaches and writes at Harvard; now research professor emerita
- Tradition:
- Contemporary analytic ethics; Kantian constructivism
- The Big Idea:
- Moral obligation doesn't come from heaven, nature, or society — it comes from the structure of your own self-conscious mind, which cannot act at all without valuing the humanity in you and, by extension, in everyone (and the animal in every sentient creature).
- In their words:
- A practical identity, she writes, is "a description under which you value yourself."
- If you remember one thing:
- You are not born a self; you make one, choice by choice — and the rules of that self-making turn out to be the moral law.