Abstract

This chapter suggests that what is special about being human—that is, about being a self in the sense of a possessor of a first-person deliberative standpoint—is that you have a self-consciously creative role in the production of your life and an unavoidably creative role in the production of your self. The sense in which you create your life is that your life is partly made up of your choices. And the sense in which you create your self is that you are the author of your choices. This vindicates the perfectly familiar and perfectly mundane fact that by making choices, you partly make your life what it is. The discussion draws on Koorsgaard’s work on self-constitution, work in moral psychology on human autonomy, and the large body of literature on the construction of a first-person narrative.