Two worries about respect for persons

Ethics

Volumn 120, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 212-231

  Green, Leslie ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 77952532058     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/651425     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (32)

1. Stephen L. Darwall, "Two Kinds of Respect," Ethics 88 (1977): 39.
2. Acts 10:34. A "respecter of persons" is prosopoleptes, an "accepter of appearances" who bases judgments on superficial features.
3. Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed., reissued (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), bk. 3, chap. 5, 267.
4. W. G. Maclagan denies the equivalence of impartiality and respect on the grounds, inter alia, that one who respected nobody would be impartial among all, whereas respect requires some kind of positive regard for persons as such (W. G. Maclagan, "Respect for Persons as Moral Principle-I," Philosophy 35 [1960]: 196-98).
5. In suggesting that respect is one of the impartial moral principles, I am not asserting that is reducible to impartiality. With respect to its invariability, we may want to think of personhood as a kind of "range property" Jeremy Waldron's discussion in God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations of John Locke's Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 76-81.
6. Immanuel Kant, The Moral Law: Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), sec. 492n.
7. Maclagan, "Respect for Persons," 199. Raz makes similar observations (Value, Respect, and Attachment [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 134-35). All citations to this work appear in parentheses within the text.
8. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pt. 1, chap. 13, 88.
9. There are, however, limits to what might reasonably be so taken. See Sec. VI, below.
10. In Austin, Texas, I regularly used to walk past monuments to the Confederate war dead, Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. I did so with deep sadness, realizing that to remove, or to retain, these fossils of an ugly regime would be taken as signs of disrespect.
11. Published in revised form as Value, Respect, and Attachment.
12. See Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 321-366
13. Value Respect and Attachment
14. The phrase figures in one of the U.S. Supreme Court's tests for a fundamental liberty: Moore v. East Cleveland, 431 U.S. 494, 503 (1977) (per Powell, J.).
15. This is not a thesis about the supervenience of the evaluative on the nonevaluative: the grounds may themselves be evaluative. See Joseph Raz, Engaging Reason: On the Theory of Value and Action (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 22-28.
16. The last clause is crucial. The instrumental value of an effective means is contingent on the value of its ends. Something that is an effective means to a worthless end does not have instrumental value, though we can talk about it as if it had such value, on the fiction or assumption that the pertinent end does have value.
17. This feature of being nonfreestanding, of being of "valuable for," often gets misrepresented as a kind of instrumental value. That abuses the idea of an instrument. The sunset is not a means or device for bringing about anything, but its (noninstrumental) value does depend on beings who can respond to it, for example, aesthetically.
18. There are difficulties in interpreting this idea that I cannot pursue here. (There were mountains before there were people, so on one reading it is false that mountains are there to be climbed.)
19. Raz comments, "it is far from clear in what way a person can be an end, either in itself or any other way. I can make it my end to get people jobs, or to see to it that they come to no harm, or to ensure them a comfortable income, or to keep them from temptation, and so on. But can they themselves, rather than securing them something, be my ends?" (Value, Respect, and Attachment, 144). For other attempts to make sense of the idea that persons can be ends in themselves, see Bruce Aune, Kant's Theory of Morals (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 70-103
20. David J. Velleman, "Love as a Moral Emotion," Ethics 109 (1999): 355-362
21. But note that there is nothing linguistically odd in speaking of respect as a feeling or attitude: the Shorter OED, 6th ed., gives this definition of "respect" (5): "Deferential esteem felt or shown towards a person thing or quality; a feeling of deferential esteem" (2:2549).
22. See Leslie Green, "On Being Tolerated," in The Legacy of H. L. A. Hart, ed. M. Kramer et al. (Oxford: Clarendon, 2008), 277-297
23. It is unclear how fine-grained such a disposition would be: a disposition to recognize value, or aesthetic values, or art, or statuary?
24. I am not here intimating that only the living merit respect.
25. For one attempt to connect respect and equality, see Bernard Williams, "The Idea of Equality," in Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 230-249
26. Could the hard edge of disrespect therefore lie in the neighborhood of an objectification of persons? See Martha Nussbaum, "Objectification," Philosophy and Public Affairs 24 (1995): 249-291 If so, that implicates only a subset of false beliefs about value, for not all false thoughts about persons' value plausibly fall under that heading.
27. See, e.g., H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law, ed. P. A. Bulloch and Joseph Raz, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 82-91.
28. Joseph Raz, Practical Reason and Norms (1975; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), esp. 39-84.
29. 63 U.S. 537 (1896).
30. "Heart and Soul-Sex and the Islamic World," presented by Shazia Khan, produced by Katy Hickman, BBC World Service, February 24, 2008.
31. I thank Kate Greasely for helpful discussion of these points.
32. Hobbes, Leviathan, 88.