Korsgaard received a B.A from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D from Harvard. She has taught at the University of Chicago, University of California, Santa Barbara, and Yale. She joined Harvard in 1991. She has also served as a visiting lecturer at U.C. Berkeley and UCLA.
Korsgaard teaches moral philosophy and the history of philosophy.
In 1996, Korsgaard published a book entitled The Sources of Normativity (ISBN 052155960X), which was a collection of her past papers that discusses moral obligations.