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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2010
1 For example, in some writing on feminist ethics, virtue ethics, and the ethics of care.
2 See Ehman, Robert, “Personal Love and Individual Value,” Journal of Value Inquiry, 10 (Summer 1976): 91–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 It may be argued that persons have value as individuals because our form of life assigns value to persons as individuals, and not because of any prior feature that justifies such valuing. The final justification for claiming that persons have value as individuals would, thus, be that, in our way of life, people believe that persons have value, as such, even if we do not always or even usually act in ways that acknowledge that value. However, this “constructivist” account of individual value is a sceptical solution to the problem of finding a feature of persons that justifies valuing them as individuals, and we should embrace it only after we have examined other possible solutions and found them wanting. As this article will make clear, I am not convinced that the search for a nonsceptical solution will prove fruitless.
4 Derek Parfit, as is well known, proposes a reductionist view of persons, according to which there is nothing more to persons than various interrelated physical and mental events; see Reasons and Persons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), especially pp. 209–17Google Scholar. It would take me too far afield to explore the implications of the reductionist view for the task I have set myself in this article, namely, to provide an account of the value of individual persons. Perhaps the belief that persons have value as individuals presumes a nonreductionist view of the person, and, once we are convinced of reductionism with respect to persons, my original question will seem misguided. I do not, in fact, believe that we will or ought to stop wondering about this if reductionism is accepted as the truth about persons, but I cannot argue for this here. In what follows, I simply assume that the question is to be taken seriously.
5 Blustein, Jeffrey, Care and Commitment: Taking the Personal Point of View (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), chap. 17.Google Scholar
6 Ibid., p. 199.
7 See, for example, Brinthaupt, Thomas and Lipka, Richard, eds., The Self: Definitional and Methodological Issues (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Gergen, Kenneth, The Concept of Self (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971)Google Scholar; Hattie, John, Self-Concept (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1992)Google Scholar; Osborne, Randall, Self: An Eclectic Approach (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1996)Google Scholar; Suls, Jerry and Greenwald, Anthony, eds., Psychological Perspectives on the Self, vol. 2 (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1983)Google Scholar; Yardley, Krysia and Honess, Terry, eds., Self and Identity: Psychosocial Perspectives (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1987).Google Scholar
8 Osborne, Self: An Eclectic Approach, p. 18.
9 Gergen, The Concept of Self, p. 19.
10 Hattie, Self-Concept, pp. 38–40.
11 Erikson, Erik, Identity: Youth and Crisis (New York: Norton, 1968).Google Scholar
12 Osborne, Self: An Eclectic Approach, p. 18, and Markus, H. and Wurf, E., “The Dynamic Self-Concept: A Social Psychological Perspective,” Annual Review of Psychology, 38 (1987): 299–337.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13 Hattie, Self-Concept, p. 98.
14 For a discussion of the effects of social context on the rigidity of moral requirements and prohibitions, see Deigh, John, “Morality and Personal Relations,” in Person to Person, edited by Graham, G. and LaFollette, H. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), pp. 106–23Google Scholar. Deigh characterizes friendship and family relations as “social contexts of less than maximum rigidity” (p. 119).
15 This discussion owes much to Elizabeth Spelman's excellent article, “On Treating Persons as Persons,” Ethics, 88 (1978): 150–61. Spelman develops and defends an account of treating someone as a person in terms of recognizing and responding to his or her self-conception. There is, however, she argues, no general obligation to treat someone as a person in this sense. It is only in special kinds of relationships that we are obliged to do this, and she concludes by suggesting that friendship may be such a relationship.
16 Although much of what Kant says about promoting the happiness of others (i.e., their morally permissible ends) is similar to what I say here, one reason I want to distance myself from Kant is that there is nothing exactly corresponding to my notion of self-conceptions in his moral philosophy.
17 One could argue, as an anonymous referee for this journal has pointed out, that one's self-conception is of value to oneself, and that, therefore, proper moral regard for the individual will, in certain contexts, demand recognition of his or her particularities. That is, an obligation to respond to another's self-conception may be explained in terms of the fact that that person attaches values to his or her particular self-conception. But while having a self-conception may be a valuable characteristic of the person, the very self-conception one has may not be, as I go on to explain. If it is suggested that what grounds the obligation is the person's valuing of his or her self-conception, or having a valued self-conception, this raises a question that parallels the one I ask in the text: is it the particularity of the valuing that matters, or the fact that the particular valuing is an instance of valuing of one's self-conception?
18 According to Robert Nozick, “the characteristic in virtue of which ethical behaviour is owed,” what he calls “the moral basis,” must meet the condition “that the person who is valued (or behaved to in a certain way) in virtue of possessing that characteristic is valued for being himself.” He goes on to ask, “when the basic moral characteristic is being a unique and individual self, are you not then valued for being yourself, for being your unique and individual self?” His reason for answering no parallels my remarks here. See Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 452–57.Google Scholar
19 Korsgaard, Christine, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), section 3.4.7, p. 120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
20 Ibid., p. 121.
21 Hattie, Self-Concept, p. 99.
22 Korsgaard, Sources, p. 121.
23 Korsgaard, Christine, “Personal Identity and the Unity of Agency: A Kantian Response to Parfit,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 18, 2 (Spring 1989): 101–32, at 121.Google Scholar
24 For Korsgaard, we can no more escape viewing ourselves as agents than as objects of theoretical study. The former stance is naturally inevitable for humans, and, while the objective stance is available, to some extent, to all of us, it is not a real possibility for us to adopt it all the time. Moreover, the inevitability of the practical standpoint makes it hard to sustain the claim that we understand ourselves better when we can give a scientific explanation of what we do. What we should say instead, Korsgaard suggests, is that this is just one sort of understanding of ourselves, distinct from, but no more legitimate than, the understanding of the experience of agency (see Sources, p. 96). But if we do regard each standpoint as in some way valid, and if they can conflict, then Korsgaard's answer to the question, “But is this real freedom?” may dispose of the problem too quickly.
25 In Care and Commitment, p. 212, I said, “Human beings [according to Kant] have an intrinsic value beyond all price and are irreplaceably valuable. But this irreplaceability is a feature of persons simpliciter, not of one person as distinct from others.” Christopher Gowans has helped me to see that there are more resources in Kant than I recognized then for constructing an account of the individual value of persons. See his “Intimacy, Freedom, and Unique Value: A ‘Kantian’ Account of the Irreplaceable and Incomparable Value of Persons,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 33, 1 (January 1996): 75–89.Google Scholar
26 Kant, Immanuel, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Akademie edition, translated by Beck, L. W. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), p. 434.Google Scholar
27 Kant, Immanuel, The Metaphysics of Morals, Akademie edition, translated by Gregor, Mary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 392.Google Scholar
28 Johnson, Edward, “Ignoring Persons,” in Respect for Persons: Tulane Studies in Philosophy, edited by Green, O. H., Vol. 31 (New Orleans: Tulane University Press, 1982), pp. 91–105, at p. 93.Google Scholar
29 Scheler, Max, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, translated by Frings, M. and Funk, R. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 371–72.Google Scholar
30 O'Neill, Onora, “Justice, Gender, and International Boundaries,” in The Quality of Life, edited by Nussbaum, M. and Sen, A. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 303–23, at p. 309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
31 In the First and Second Critiques, Kant employs the concept of the noumenal positively to designate objects which belong to an “intelligible world” in contrast to those which belong to “the world of sense.” This metaphysical view is notoriously problematic in Kant, but the important point for our present purposes is what it says about the possibility of constructing a Kantian defence of the value of individuals. While Kant certainly did not intend for there to be no basis for noumenal individuation of persons, how this individuation is to be accomplished must remain as obscure as the noumenon itself, and it seems that our way to explaining how individual persons have value, as such, is blocked. See Henley, Kenneth, “The Value of Individuals,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 37 (1976–77): 345–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Henley interprets the noumenal/phenomenological distinction as an ontological one, and therefore believes there is no basis in Kant for the notion that persons have value as individuals. Again, however, as noted in the text, I do not claim that the account I offer can be squared with everything Kant says, but only that there are statements in Kant that can be developed along these lines.
32 See Korsgaard, Christine, “Creating the Kingdom of Ends: Reciprocity and Responsibility in Personal Relations,” in Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 6: Ethics, edited by Tomberlin, James (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1992), pp. 305–32.Google Scholar
33 Kant, Foundations, p. 458.
34 Ibid., p. 457.
35 I agree with one of the referees that agency is always exercised in the context of a particular life, and that valuing agency in the abstract will involve valuing it in particular agents—for example, respecting and supporting specific concrete ways in which it is exercised by them. The point I am making here, though compatible with this observation, is different, since it places special emphasis on the unique authorial relation each of us has to his or her own choices and actions.