Buss Respect for Persons 1999

7/22/2019 Buss Respect for Persons 1999

1/36

This article was downloaded by: [University of California, Los Angeles(UCLA)]On: 17 February 2014, At: 04:57Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

Canadian Journal of PhilosophyPublication details, including instructions for

authors and subscription information:

http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcjp20

Respect for PersonsSARAH BUSS aaUniversity of Iowa , 269 English Philosophy Bldg,

Iowa City , IA , 52242-1408 , USA

Published online: 01 Jul 2013.

To cite this article:SARAH BUSS (1999) Respect for Persons, Canadian Journal ofPhilosophy, 29:4, 517-550

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00455091.1999.10715990

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the

information (the Content) contained in the publications on our platform.However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness,or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and viewsexpressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, andare not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of theContent should not be relied upon and should be independently verified withprimary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for anylosses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages,

and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly orindirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of theContent.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan,sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcjp20http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00455091.1999.10715990http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcjp20


2/36

expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Downloadedby[Un

iversityofCalifornia,

Los

Angeles(UCLA)]at04:57

17February2014
http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions


3/36

CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHYVolume 29, Number 4, December 1999, pp. 517-550 517

Respect for Persons

I

SARAH BUSS69 English Philosophy BldgUniversity of IowaIowa City, lA 52242-1408

USA

We believe we owe one another respect. We believe we ought to paywhat we owe by treating one another with respect. f we could understand these beliefs we would be well on the way to understandingmorality itself. f we could justify these beliefs we could vindicate acentral part of our moral experience.Respect comes in many varieties.1 We respect some people for theirupright character, others for their exceptional achievements. There arepeople we respect as forces of nature: we go to great lengths to accommodate their moods, wiles, and demands. Finally, most of us seem torespect people simply because they are people. his is the sort of respectof special interest to moral theory.

n order to be worthy of this last sort of respect, it is not only sufficientbut necessary that one be a person. We can, of course, take a similarattitude toward nonpersons. Think of the respect some of us have fornature, or for great art / But even someone who earns our contempt

1 For helpful discussions of the different types of respect, see Stephen Darwall, TwoKinds of Respects, thics 88 (1977) 36-49; and Stephen Hudson, The Nature ofRespect, Social Theory and Practice 6,1 (1980) 69-90.

2 As I note later, even if we learn about our obligations to persons by learning aboutour obligations to other human beings even if a human being is a paradigm caseof a person- it is an open question who qualifies as a person. In particular, nothingI say in this paper rules out the possibility that certain nonhuman animals have thesame moral claim on us as other members of our own species.

Downloadedby[Un


Los


17February2014


4/36

518 Sarah Buss

deserves a special recognition we are not prepared to give to the birds,the beasts, our own beloved pets. Indeed, it is precisely because nonpersons are not proper objects of respect that they are incapable of behavingcontemptibly. To regard a person as beneath contempt is to cease toregard her as a person.My aim in this paper is to try to make sense of the rather mysteriousphenomenon of respect for persons as persons. I want to tell a story aboutwhy it is so natural for us to assume that we have special categoricalobligations to other persons. This is a story about reasons for action aswell as a story about persons, and their relation to one another. t aimsto explain our belief that what we have reason to do is not simply afunction of the attitudes and beliefs that constitute our own point of viewt ha t our own point of view is not the only one that is relevant to thechoice worthiness, or value, of our own ends.In telling this story, I will not say anything about what, in particular,

we have reason to do; I will not discuss how much weight we shouldattribute to the ends of others when we are trying to decide how to act.3I will focus, instead, on our conviction that other persons can be a sourceof ends for us By exploring the phenomenology of this conviction, I willtry to explain what grounds it. I will then consider whether we arejustified in attributing this significance to other persons. I will rathertentatively suggest that we have good reason to take our experience ofrespect for persons at face value in the sense that we have no betterreason not to do so.

In the philosophical literature on political and moral obligation it is acommonplace that people have a right to be treated with respect, even,it is said, with equal respect.4 But discussions of this important subject do

3 I will have occasion to stress this point again later. As Joseph Raz has noted, theduty to give 'due weight' to the interests of others corresponds to a very abstractright, from which 'nothing very concrete about how people should be treatedfollows without additional premisses. This explains,' Raz continues, 'why [theright] is invoked not as a claim for any specific benefit, but as an assertion of status.To say I have a right to have my interest taken into account is like saying I tooam a person ' (Joseph Raz, The Morality ofFreedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1986],190).

4 According to John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, for example, 'Justice as fairness restson the assumption of a natural right of men and women to equality of concern andrespect, a right they possesses not by virtue of birth or characteristics or merit orexcellence, but simply as human beings' (Ronald Dworkin, Taking ights Seriously[Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1971], 182). Some philosophers have criticized the assumpt ion that ll persons are of equal worth as persons. Their criticismsoften address particular egalitarian claims. But they sometimes defend quite sweep-

Downloadedby[Un


Los


17February2014


5/36

Respect for Persons 519

not generally distinguish the attitude of respect from the belief that persons deserve to be treated with respect, nor even from the required modeof treatment itself.5 Even when the attitude of respect is itself the primarysubject matter, too little attention is spent on the relationship that obtainsbetween respecting people and apprehending them in a special way.6The general assumption seems to be that experiencing people as respect-worthy has no distinct, substantive role to play in an account of morallife.I believe that this is a serious mistake. As long as moral theoryoverlooks the phenomenology of respect, it will lack the resourcesnecessary to make sense of the belief that people deserve to be treatedwith respect simply because they are people. And it will fail to do justice

ing anti-egalitarian conclusions, as, for example, when Louis P. Pojman concludes:it is hard to believe that humans are equal in any way at all (Louis P. Pojman, OnEqual Human Worth: A Critique of Contemporary Egalitarianism, in Equality:Selected Readings Louis P. Pojman and Robert Westmoreland, eds. [New York:Oxford University Press 1997], 294). I think such strong antiegalitarianism missesthe mark. As I will show, we can make sense of the moral equality of persons withoutrelying on the dogma of a religious tradition ( On Equal Human Worth, 296), andwithout implying that a person has moral values merely as the logical subject ofwhich qualities can be predicated (John Kekes, Facing Evil [Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press 1990], 112).Perhaps one of the reasons why critics tend to overlook the moral significanceof the subject as evaluator is that they are insufficiently sensitive to the distinctionbetween the metaethical claim that each person is a source of (apparent, nonrelative)values, and so an end-in-herself, and the normative claim that each person s endsare of equal importance. Though the former claim is, I believe, relevant to how weought to treat one another, it does no t imply that everyone ought to be treatedequally, nor even that the interests of each make an equally strong claim on us. Itdoes not ground a set of thick natural rights 290), nor even equal prima facierights to freedom and well-being 290). (For a third critique of moral egalitarianism,see Thomas Hurka, Peifectionism [New York: Oxford University Press 1993], 161-3;see also n.3.)

5 S.I. Berm, for example, explicitly endorses the view that there is nothing more torespecting a person than attributing certain rights to im and refraining fromviolating these rights: Accepting im as respect-worthy means that one attributesto im certain rights of a very general nature; actually respecting im as a personmeans attributing such rights to im and acting in accordance with them S.I. Berm,Privacy and Respect for Persons: A Reply, ustralasian Journal of Philosophy 58[1980], 55).

6 See Robin Dillon, Respect and Care: Toward Moral Integration, Canadian JournalofPhilosaphy 22 1992) 105-31. See also other works on respect cited in these notes.In a recent paper Dillon focuses attention on the sense in which self-respect is amatter of how one experiences oneself. (See Dillon, Self-Respect: Moral, Emotional,Political, Ethics 107 [1997]226-49.)

Downloadedby[Un


Los


17February2014


6/36

520 Sarah Buss

to the experience of those who hold this belief. These are, I realize, ratherserious charges. The account that follows is offered in their defense.On this account, it comes naturally to us to regard other persons asends in themselves because it comes naturally to us to experience theirevaluative points of view as directly relevant to what really matters. Toexperience people in this way is to take a certain attitude toward them.I will explain why it is fitting to characterize this attitude as the attitudeof respect. In so doing, I will try to show that our moral commitment totreating one another with respect makes sense only once we understand

our natural disposition to see one another as respect-worthy.

II The Experience of Respect for Persons as PersonsThere is one towering figure in the history of moral philosophy whoappreciated that an account of respect for persons must be, in part, anaccount of a very special way of perceiving persons- what I am looselycalling a very special attitude. I refer, of course, to Kant. t seems to methat the essential elements of his description of what it is like to experience respect cannot be improved upon.

According to Kant, respect for persons is a distinct feeling that couldequally well be characterized as reverence. More carefully, it is anacknowledgment of the fact that other people have unconditionalauthority over us, where this acknowledgment takes the form of a specialway of experiencing them? We have this experience in the presence ofsomething absolutely great, something that transcends the limits of ourown imagination, and so compels us to recognize that our own personalperspective is a limited perspective from which to gain knowledge ofreality. Anything that affects us in this way is sublime. 8 So, i f we respectpersons, this is, necessarily, because persons are something sublime.9

7 Kant, Groundwork o the Metaphysic o Morals trans. H.J. Paton (New York: HarperRow 1964), 68-9 78-9 128; and Critique o Practical Reason trans. Lewis White Beck(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill1956), ch. 3 ( The Incentives of Pure Practical Reason ),74-92. Note that the word typically translated as respect is Achtung.

8 Kant, Critique o Judgment trans. J.H. Bernard (New York: Macmillan 1951), Book 2( Analytic of the Sublime ), 82-106. For an explicit reference to the link between theaesthetic and the moral, see 104-6. For another such link n the Groundwork see 89-91.

9 Kant identifies the sublimity of persons with the dignity of persons. But AurelKolnai seems right when he writes: What is dignified is not necessarily sublime,and Dignity is not just a lesser degree of sublimity. Our response to the sublime hassomething awe-struck about it, as if the presence of the sublime edified us but at the

Downloadedby[Un


LosAngeles(UCLA)]at04:57

17February2014


7/36


Persons are sublime, Kant tells us, because persons have the power toreason. ur reason gives us the sublime capacity to transcend thelimitations of sense experience. Because we are sensuous beings, we arenaturally limited; but because we are rational beings, we can appreciatethis fact. This is why encounters with something sublime are a cause ofboth pain and pleasure. We feel pain insofar as we are reminded of ourlimitations; but we also feel pleasure insofar as we are reminded of oursublime capacity to transcend these limitations.10Insofar as respect for persons is a partly painful, partly pleasurableappreciation of their sublime nature, there is nothing essentially moralabout it. This is just what we need if unlike Kant, we are to appeal torespect to explain our belief that persons are a source of categoricalreasons for action: i f respect for persons were primarily a moral attitude,then it would not be an essential element in any diagnosis of suchattitudes.11 This having been said, there is, nonetheless, a feature ofKant's account that does not seem to hold out much hope for myexplanatory project. n particular: how could reverence for reason possibly be the basis of a moral attitude? The answer, I believe, is that it couldnot, and that, accordingly, Kant has misidentified the ultimate object ofour morally relevant respect for persons. I will work up to my own viewsabout this object by very briefly indicating my rather familiar groundsfor rejecting Kant's.

same time shocked or crushed us. Whereas, when faced with the quality of Dignityas such we certainly also feel edified but not so much crushed, overwhelmed oreven deeply excited as, rather, tranquilized ..' (Aurel Kolnai, 'Dignity,' Royal Insti-tut ofPhilosophy 5 [1976], 55).10 Kant, Critique ofJudgment, 'The feeling of the sublime is ... a feeling of pain arisingfrom the want of accordance between the aesthetical estimation of magnitudeformed by the imagination and the estimation of the same formed by reason. Thereis at the same time a pleasure thus excited, arising from the correspondence withrational ideas of this very judgment of the inadequacy of our greatest faculty ofsense, in so far as it is a law for us to strive after these ideas' 96). Again: 'That themind be attuned to feel the sublime postulates a susceptibility of the mind for ideas.For in the very inadequacy of nature to these latter, and thus only by presupposingthem and by straining the imagination to use nature as a schema for them, is to befound that which is terrible to sensibility and yet is attractive' 104-5).11 n 'The Ethics of Respect for Persons' William Frankena claims that 'Respect forpersons in its ethical or moral sense does not involve having awe of persons orregarding them as sacred or holy (William K. Frankena, 'The Ethics of Respect forPersons,' Philosophical Topics 14,2 [1986], 154). The burden of this paper is to arguethat we can better understand respect for persons in its ethical or moral sense oncewe see it as the consequence of a natural, nonmoral, awe-filled encounter with

persons.

Downloadedby[Un


Los


17February2014


8/36

5 Sarah Buss

Reason, Kant famously insists, is the source of categorical imperatives 12 f reason is on the side of some contemplated action, then everyrational agent can endorse this action; and if every rational agent canendorse an action, then the action s acceptability does not depend on theidiosyncratic desires, feelings, inclinations of any particular agent. Insofar as we are rational beings, we know this. Yet insofar as we are notperfectly rational beings - insofar as we have inclinations and feelingsw e are tempted to forget or ignore it. We are tempted to do whateversatisfies our strongest inclinations. Worse still, we are tempted to thinkthat such a policy is sanctioned by reason, that it is a policy which everyrational agent could endorse. When we discover our mistake, we feel

pain: it is painful to have one s desires frustrated; and it is painful to haveone s delusions of grandeur exposed and struck down.,t3 At the sametime that we are thus frustrated and humiliated, however, we are set freeand ennobled. Impediments to rational action are removed, and by apower that is our own. No sensuous being can experience such thingswithout pleasure. 4According to Kant, once we see that moral imperatives are the categorical imperatives of reason, we see that to acknowledge moral obligations is to regard rational agency as a limiting condition on permissibleaction, an end-in-itself. f we respect rational agency as an end-in-itself,then we respect rational agents as ends-in-themselves, i.e., unconditionalends. And if rational agents are ends-in-themselves, then their relevanceto our choices does not depend on any other ends we may have; i.e., theyare a source of ends for us.The story is an inspiring one. Unfortunately, I am with those whocannot persuade themselves to believe it. In particular, it seems to methat Kant fails to offer a compelling reason for preferring his conceptionof practical rationality (according to which there are reasons for actionwhich are universally valid in the strong sense that they are reasons foreverybody no matter what his her personal interests or desires may be)over an alternative conception (according to which there are no suchreasons, but all reasons for action are universally valid in only the weaksense that they are reasons for anybody with the same interests and desires .Nothing about the commitment to acting for reasons implies that we

12 Kant, Groundwork, chs. 2 and 3, 74-131; and Critique o Practical Reason, trans. ewisWhite Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1956), Part I, Book I, Chapter 1, section 1,17-19

13 Kant, Critique o Practical Reason, 7614 Ibid., 75-8, 80-2

Downloadedby[Un


Los


17February2014


9/36

Respect for Persons 5 3

have reason to treat other rational agents as ends-in-themselves. Nor isthis implied by the fact that, like us, these agents have the capacity toappreciate the world in a w y that exceeds the bounds of sense. Politicalnd moral philosophers frequently suggest that persons impose categorical limits on permissible action simply because they are rational. ButI m with the amoralist in failing to see the point. I m willing to concedethat the capacity to reason h s a sublimity not shared by the capacity tofly, to sing, to devour large mammals in one gulp. But to be sublime isone thing; to impose obligations is another. Even i f all values depend onreason, it hardly follows that the values of other rational agents arenoninstrumentally relevant to wh t I myself have reason to do.

Such thoughts have led m ny philosophers to give up the attempt tomake sense of morality as a system of categorical imperatives. Some goso far as to side with the amoralist. Others suggest that whatever obligations we have to one another are based on nothing more binding th nour own natural sentiments, or dispositions. Kant himself thought thecategorical status of moral requirements must be abandoned i f it couldnot be shown that categorical imperatives can be derived from reasonalone.I believe, however, that it is possible to give n account of our beliefthat we are subject to objective, categorical reasons for action which isnaturalistic without implying that there really are no such reasons. Withconsiderable help from Sartre, I w nt to offer such n account myself. Iw nt to describe a special attitude tow rd persons - a special w y ofregarding t h m th t can make sense of our belief that other personsimpose direct, categorical limits on wh t we have reason to do. I hope toshow that this natural attitude can pl y the relevant explanatory rolewithout discrediting the belief it explains. I will strengthen my case bynoting the role the attitude seems to pl y in ordinary moral development. I will then consider wh t relation the atti tude bears to the attitudeof respect.1

n eing and Nothingness Sartre offers a novel response to the solipsise5I do not t ink his argument works. t does, however, contain a veryimportant insight which I wish to exploit for my own purposes. Theargument begins with the observation that we all do, in fact, have a verystrong conviction that there are other subjects - other minds like our

15 Jean-Paul Sartre, eing and Nothingness trans. Hazel E Barnes (New York: PocketBooks 1956), p rt 3, chapter 1 ( Being-for-others ), 301-400

Downloadedby[Un


Los


17February2014


10/36

5 4 Sarah Buss

own, with the capacity to apply norms, to evaluate things and events, toset ends. What, Sartre asks, could possibly provide the grounds for sucha conviction? Nothing, he answers, short of a mode of being consciousof them which is as incompatible with doubting their existence as thecogito is incompatible with doubting one's own existence. Just as ourcertainty of our own existence as thinkers depends on the fact that wecan be aware of ourselves as something distinct from the objects of ourthought, so too, Sartre argues, our awareness of others must be based onour awareness of something distinct from any possible object of thought.But this means that we must be capable of encountering other subjectsas subjects Unless we have had such encounters, the existence of othersubjects would simply be a matter of conjecture. t would be a merehypothesis, the truth of which could never be established with certainty.There is only one way to encounter other subjects as such: we mustexperience ourselves as objects for them What sort of experience couldthis possibly be? Characterized negatively, it is not the experience onehas of 'putting oneself in another's shoes'; it is not the experience ofimagininghow things must seem from his perspective, given his desires,hopes, dreams, etc., and of thereby appreciating that he attributes to onea particular significance- e.g., that he regards one as lazy, sexy, useful,etc. This is not how one subject experiences another as a subject for thesimple reason that in this experience, the other subject ('the Other')figures as a special sort ofo ject a subject object whose characteristicfeature is its capacity to interpret the world and set its own ends. This isSartre's point when he writes, 'The Other-as-Object has a subjectivityas this hollow box has an inside. '16 As long as the Other's subjectivityis simply a feature we attribute to him-as-object, it too is an object for us;and as long as it is an object, it escapes us.17

Characterized positively, the experience of being an object for a subjectis the experience of really being as one is seen In other words, it is theexperience of having the particular significance the Other attributes tous, of having a value that depends on our relation to his projects and hispossibilities. The point is not that we know what he thinks of us. Rather,we know that, whatever he thinks, his point of view matters. t makes adifference to who we are and what we have done. t makes a difference,even if it is not, as Sartre thinks, proof against solipsism even if there

6 Ibid., 3847 Ibid., 341-4. For a similar point in the recent 'analytic' literature, see Thomas Nagel,'Subjective and Objective,' chapter 14 in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press 1979), 196-213.

Downloadedby[Un


Los


17February2014


11/36


really are no other subjects in the world. Just as one s own point of viewas a thinking thing cannot necessarilybe identifiedwith one s empiricalself, so too, the point of view of the Other cannot necessarily be identified with any particular object of experience. Nonetheless, in experiencing oneself as seen from this point of view, one cannot possibly doubt itsrelevance to the value of one s own choices and deeds. The experiencejust is the direct, prereflective experience of the relevance of an externalpoint of view, where to say that i t is relevant simply means that i f theassessments from this point of view can be dismissed, this is not merelybecause they are grounded in a point of view other than one s own.Putting the positive together with the negative, we get the followingpicture. To experience another person as a subject is, necessarily, not toexperiencehim as an object of one s own experience. t is not to experiencehim as something one contemplates, makes something of, evaluates inthe onlywaypossible, viz., in terms of one s own evaluative perspective.The only way to experience another subject as a subject is to experienceoneself as an object that he contemplates, makes something of, evaluatesfrom his perspective. But to experience oneself as such an object isincompatible with regarding the Other s appraisals as just so manycharacteristics of an object in one s own world. t is, necessarily, theexperience of these appraisals as playing a role in determining one splace in the world, and so, as conditioning who one is.Since this experience is necessarily the experience of living in a worldof values that are neither relative to one sown point of view nor dismissible as irrelevant from one s own point of view, it is the experience ofliving in a world of values that are not reducible to the values things havefor some individual nd since no other experience of other people involves the acknowledgment of such objective values, this experienceeffects a dramatic shift in one s conception of oneself and one s possibilities. n becoming conscious of oneself as an object in the world, oneexperiences the abrupt demotion of one s self from its exalted positionas the point of view from which everything in theworld derives its value.n other words, one experiences what Kant calls the striking down ofone s self-conceit. 8 Since the Other forces one to recognize one s limitations by transcending these limitations, one s experience of being anobject for the Other is the experience of being in the presence of something truly sublime.

But have we ever been conscious of one another in this way? I t inkthat we have. n particular, I thinkSartre is right to identify this mode of

18 Kant, Critique ofPractical Reason 76

Downloadedby[Un


Los


17February2014


12/36

526 Sarah Buss

consciousness with shame. There may well be aspects of shame consciousness that Sartre's account overlooks; 9 and (more importantly)there may be ways of experiencing subjects as such without experiencingshame (though I suspect that such modes of consciousness could onlyoccur in someone who is also capable of shame; this is, for example,Sartre' s view about pride.20) t seems to me, however, that being ashamedof oneself is a paradigm case of being conscious of oneself as an objectof appraisal for another subject. To experience shame is to experienceoneself as for another; it is to 'confess'2 that there is more to the significance of one's activities than their significance relative to one s ownpersonal perspective.

According to Bernard Williams, the root of shame lies in exposure, ina loss of power. '22 Sartre reminds us that what is exposed in shame is,most fundamentally, one's lack of self-sufficiencf3 - and that the lossof power is not simply the loss ofpower over one's situation, but the lossof power over the significance of one's situation. To be overcome byshame is to discover that one's actions have a meaning which one mustaffirm even though it is not conditional upon one's own point of view,and that, accordingly, one's own personal resources cannot determineall of one's reasons for action. 'Shame is the feeling of an original fall, notbecause of the fact that I may have committed this or that particular faultbut simply that I have fallen into the world in the midst of things andthat I need the mediation of the Other in order to be what I am. 24

f we focus on shame consciousness as the paradigm case of theexperience of another person as a potential source of ends, then my

9 For a careful analysis of shame, see Gabriele Taylor, Pride, Shame, and Guilt: EmotionsofSelf-assessment (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1985). See also Bernard Williams, Shameand Necessity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1993), chapter 4, 75-102.

20 Sartre, Being and Nothingness 386-72 Ibid., 35022 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 220.23 n making this claim (and developing it in the pages that follow), I am in disagree

ment with Arnold Isenberg, according to whom modesty and humility are basedon the recognition of inherent and inevitable limitations, whils t shame is an experience of weakness and inferiority' (Arnold Isenberg, Natural Pride and NaturalShame,' in Explaining Emotions, Amelie Rorty, ed. [Berkeley, CA: UCLA Press 1980],362). n rejecting Isenberg's contrast, I do not wish to reject his point about modestyand humility. To the contrary, the force of my argument is that reflection on thelesson of shame can prompt modesty and humility about one s limitations.

24 Sartre, Being and Nothingness 384

Downloadedby[Un


Los


17February2014


13/36


rather abstract claims that this experience contains an implicit acknowledgment of objective reasons may be easier to understand and moredifficult to reject. Thus, consider a case in which 1) you believe thatsomeone has a certain negative opinion of you; e.g., she thinks that youhave a terrible sense of humor, an obnoxious laugh, affected mannerisms, etc.; and 2) you simply regard these appraisals as facts about theperson who is their subject. In such a case, the thought of what you arefor this person could not occasion the least shame. You might, of course,feel disappointed, or frustrated, or angry that you inspire such distastein someone you had hoped to please. But this would just be a specialinstance of being disappointed or frustrated or angry that the things inyour world are not exactly (or even approximately) as you would likethem to be. Such emotions are clearly distinct from the emotion of shame.This little thought experiment shows, I believe, that there is more toshame-consciousness-more to the content of shame experience- thanthe recognition that there is a point of view from which one is just aparticular sort of object. And it also calls attention to the missing ingredient: shame is an acknowledgement that one is indeed, this very objectt ha t one is as seen where this involves not simply acknowledging thatone does, indeed, have a bad sense of humor, but that this is a weakness

or fault. A slave might acknowledge that her master thinks of her as anobject, without granting any authority to the master s point of view. Andshe need not recognize his authority even if she values his opinions, hispower, or anything else about him. In forming these judgments abouthim, she relies on her own point of view; her assessments are groundedin her own attitudes and beliefs. If however, the master succeeds inmaking his slave feel shame, then this is because, no matter how thoroughly she may despise all that he stands for, he makes her experienceherself as an object for him; he makes her experience him as a potentialsource of (nonstrategic) reasons for her. The experience of shame isincompatiblewith the experience of indifference toward all perspectivesdistinct from one s own; one cannot in good faith experience shamewhile taking a so what attitude toward all values that are not conditional upon one s own attitudes and beliefs; to be ashamed is to beincapable of truly believing that the only things of value for oneself arethings whose value is grounded in one s own motivational set. 25Many readers, I know, will take issuewith this last claim. Surely, theywill protest, a person can experience shame without acknowledging the

25 The expression is from Bernard Williams, Internal and External Reasons, nMoraluck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981), 101-13.

Downloadedby[Un



17February2014


14/36

528 Sarah Buss

authority of perspectives other than her own. For surely, she can feelashamed about failing to live up to her own personal ideals. Could therebe a more obvious counter-example to the claim that shame is a confession that one s own personal resources cannot determine all of one sreasons for action ? Indeed, why should we t ink that our capacity to feelashamed of ourselves is the capacity to recognize that our own point ofview is not the only point of view that is relevant to what is valuable andimportant for us?In response to this challenge, I want to make two points. First, I wantto make an empirical claim about the origins of our personal ideals: as amatter of fact, most of us develop our ideals in response to the proddingof our elders; shame at falling short of someone else s ideals plays animportant role in this moral instruction; and without such moral instruction, most of us would grow up morally stunted - though we mighthave the moral responses that depend on other aspects of our psychee.g., sympathy. Second, I want to argue that anyone who is capable offeeling ashamed about her failure to live up to her own ideals has themore general capacity to feel ashamed about her failure to live up to theideals of someone else.The first point calls attention to shame s important role in enabling aperson to bootstrap herself from premoral to moral consciousness:though shame often presupposes moral commitments - though thelook to which one feels exposed in shame is often the gaze of the moraljudge- the most primitive form of shame is a pre-moral emotion. Shamedoes not presuppose any moral consciousness whatsoever. Rather, itmakes such consciousness possible by making it possible to regard theevaluations of others as directly relevant to the value of one s ownpursuits?6The moral development of most children is strong evidence that forthe vast majority of human beings, shame is a precondition of full moralconsciousness. 27 As Myles Bumyeat notes in discussing Aristotle, shame

26 With this claim, I am taking issue with those who, like John Kekes, believe that inorder to feel shame, it is essential that we ourselves should accept the standard [wefall short of], otherwise we would not feel badly about falling short of it. That is, Iam challenging the assumption that we must accept the standard before we feelashamed of failing to live up to it (John Kekes, Shame and Moral Progress, MidwestStudies in Philosophy 13 [1988], 283 . n so doing, I am making a point that AnthonyO Hear has raised against Rawls s account of shame, viz., one can be shamed intoaccepting new [standards] (Anthony O Hear, Guiltand Shame as Moral Concepts,Proceedings of the ristotelian Society 77 [1976-77], 79 .

27 As Agnes Heller puts it in he Power ofShame, shame has played an enormous part

Downloadedby[Un



17February2014


15/36


is the semivirtue of the leamer. 28 Most children are capable of feelingshame before they are capable of feeling guilt. And most parents rely onthe pre-moral emotion in order to engender the moral one. Shame onyou, we say to the little human being who has just pulled the eat s tail.With such verbal censure, and the far more powerful arsenal of disapproving looks and tones, we prod this moral ignoramus into confessingthat she has overlooked certain considerations relevant to the significance of her own actions. We make her painfully aware of a transcending view that confers upon [her] acts the character of a given on whicha judgment can be brought to bear 29

t is a remarkable fact about human beings that we are so ready toconfess the limitations of our own personal perspectives. Shame comesvery naturally to us, no matter how single-mindedly we may be devotedto the pursuit of our own interests.30 This is why children are so vulnerable to the disapproval of their parents, even when they have no fear thatthey will be punished for provoking this disapproval. t is also whyyoung teenagers (and many others not so young) find it so difficult todismiss the verdicts of their peers. Since it is important that people becapable of shrugging off, and even standing up to, the disapproval ofothers, it is important that their natural disposition to make a confessionof inadequacy is not developed into a hypersensitivity. On the otherhand, if someone lacked the disposition altogether, experience suggeststhat she would be a moral monster, i.e., a moral cripple. In order to escapethis fate, she would, it seems, have to be very unlike other human beingsin other respects as well.31

in the process of socialization (Agnes Heller, The Power of Shame: A RationalPerspective [London: Routledge Kegan Paul 1985], 6). She also notes that onlydomestic animals who have been confronted with the norms of human culture arecapable of feeling shame (5).

28 Myles Burnyeat, Aristotle on Learning to be Good, in Essays on Aristotle s EthicsAmelie Oksenberg Rorty, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press 1980), 7829 Sartre, Being and Nothingness 34830 As John Rawls notes in A Theory of Justice Unless we feel that our endeavors arehonored by [other people], it is difficult i f not impossible for us to maintain theconviction that our ends are worth advancing (John Rawls, A Theory of Justice[Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press 1971], 178).31 Thus, she might resemble God: her personal desires might playno role in determining which considerations she takes most seriously in deciding what to do. Alternatively, like some beasts, she might be too stupid to act for reasons. n note 35, Isuggest a third sort of abnormality that could enable a moral agent to be shameless.

Downloadedby[Un



17February2014


16/36

53 Sarah Buss

I am not claiming that the capacity to experience shame is a definingfeature of humanity. My point is, rather, that if children who wereotherwise normal human beings did not understand the significance ofshame on you, they would be incapable of developing an adequatemoral sensibility. For if they were incapable of shame- if they were, aswe say, shameless - they would be incapable of recognizing that theirown point of view is not the only one that is relevant to their choices.They would never discover that the ends of others are of more thanstrategic value for them. Little amoralists, they would blink with unmoved perplexity at the solemn faces of those who urgently repeat,again and again, that their behavior simply cannot be justified.

Of course, such children might conform their behavior to the moralcode of their parents. But if they did so, this would not be because theyrecognized the uthority of their parents evaluative perspective, butbecause they feared the consequences of disobeying, or because therewere things they very much wanted (including love and approval)which could not be had without obeying- or at least appearing to obey- or because their feelings of fear, love, resentment, and sympathyeventually were such as to give them a moral point of view just like thatof their parents.32

This claim is, of course, an empirical one; and we cannot possiblyconduct the experiments that would be necessary to verify it. I hope fewreaders will find it contentious. Even so, it is a claim about normalhuman beings. I do not want to insist that there could be no exceptionst h a t for all human beings (no matter how different from the rest ofus) experiencing shame in relation to others is a necessary condition for

32 Rawls notes that if a child does love and trust his parents, then, once he has givenin to temptation, he is disposed to share their attitude toward is misdemeanorsA Theory ofJustice, 465). I do not mean to suggest that love and trust are irrelevantto moral development. As Rawls himself notes, many kinds of learning rangingfrom reinforcement and classical conditioning to highly abstract reasoning and therefined perception of exemplars enter into [the] development [of a moral view] ATheory of Justice, 454). I am simply interested in identifying one factor of centralimportance to this development. n particular, I am suggesting that the dispositionto which Rawls refers depends on the child s capacity to experience himself as an

object of appraisal, whose actions may really be wrong, even though they do notseem wrong from his own point of view. Lacking this capacity, a child might wantto avoid displeasing his parents, and, as Rawls says, he might even desire to becomethe sort of person that they are 465). But it would probably not occur to him that,regardless of what he desires - and regardless of what sort of person he becomesh i s parents may well be right.

Downloadedby[Un


Los


17February2014


17/36


the possibility of full moral consciousness.33 For the purposes of theexplanatory story I am trying to tell here, it is enough that this experience is sufficient to reveal extra-personal values, and that it typicallyplays an essential role in moral development. I am willing to concede,for the sake of argument, that someone could use some other method todiscover the nonstrategic relevance of other points of view.Let us assume, then, that someone has formed her values entirely onher own, and in particular, without the help of shame. For her, shame ismerely a response to the relationship between what she is and does, onthe one hand, and what, prior to the shame experience, she believed sheought to be and do, on the other. Her experiences of shame make noindependent contribution to her values; they make no independentcontribution to her beliefs about what she has reason to do. Rather, theysimply alert her to the fact that she has failed to live up to her own ideals.Of this person we can ask: might she not lack the capacity to experienceshame at failing to live up to the ideals of others?

t seems to me that this could only seem possible i fone overlooked thefact that to experience shame is to experience oneself as an object ofappraisal. For i f one takes this fact seriously, then one sees that to beashamed at failing to live up to one s own ideals is to have a dividedconsciousness: insofar as one is the source of one s ideals, one is criticalof one s behavior; and insofar as one is the object evaluated in light ofthese ideals, one is ashamed of this behavior. 4 n this respect, shame

33 n other words, with Kekes, I reject the view that thosewho are incapable of [shame]cannot be seriously committed to any standard, so they are apt to lack moralrestraint (Kekes, Shame and Moral Progress, 282). That is, though I believe thatan incapacity for shame will almost always prevent someone from committingherself to a moral standard, I do not see why we should assume that this associationreflects a necessary connection. One person who seems to make this assumption isVirgil Aldrich. n An Ethics of Shame he writes: you can get a thief to agree thatstealing is improvident, dangerous, etc., but unless that makes him feel some degreeof deterrent shame, it will not forhim be morally wrong (Virgil Aldrich, An Ethicsof Shame, Ethics 50,1 [1939], 60). So, too, according to Rawls, being moved by endsand ideals of excellence implies a liability to humiliation and shame, and an absenceof a liability to humiliation and shame implies a lack of such ends and ideals ATheory o Justice 489).

34 Many people have noted that even though shame does not seem to require anotherperson, it does seem to require another point of view. Thus, Susan Miller notes thatthe particular type of misery-about-the-self that gives shame its distinctive feel doesseem to depend on some sense, however vague, of the self standing before anotheror potentially visible another (Susan Miller, he Shame Experience [1985], 32). Andaccording to Taylor, the metaphors of an audience and being seen reflect thestructural features of the agent s becoming aware of the discrepancy between her

Downloadedby[Un


Los


17February2014


18/36

532 Sarah Buss

differs from self-directed anger or regret: when I m angry t myself forwh t I have done, or when I regret having done it, I do not occupy twodifferent perspectives t once, but identify exclusivelywith the perspective of the critic.35

f no one can experience shame without acknowledging the relevanceof a perspective distinct from some aspect of herself with which sheidentifies in her shame, then no one who experiences shame can sincerely, nd without self-deception, dismiss as irrelevant all evaluativeperspectives that are distinct from the one she occupies t ny given time.In other words, anyone who is capable of feeling ashamed t her failureto live up to her own ideals is necessarily capable of experiencing herselfas n object of appraisal, nd so is capable of experiencing the nonstrategic relevance of a point of view that is distinct from the one sheoccupies in her shame. There is no shame in self-criticism unless oneoccupies the point of view of the self who is criticized; nd if one canoccupy a point of view from which one experiences oneself as criticized,then one is vulnerable to the appraisals m de from other points of view.There is nothing one can do to render oneself invulnerable, short ofrendering oneself utterly shameless.

his having been said, it is important to stress that certain conditionsm y need to obtain if we are ever to exercise the capacity for experjencingourselves as the objects of others appraisal. Thus, for example, we mightnever feel shame if other people did not present obstacles to our doingwhatever we wanted; our discovery that our parents can compel us toaccommodate ourselves to their ends might be essential to our discoverythat their ends are of more th n strategic relevance to us. This possibilitycan be put in terms of Williams observation that shame is rooted in theloss of power: for all I have said, the perception that others have power

assumptions about her state or action and a possible detached observer-descriptionof this state or action, nd of her further being aware that she ought not to be in aposition where she could be seen Pride, Shame, and Guilt 66 . O Hear suggests thatthis experience only makes sense i f there is a sense in which the individualconcerned is playing two roles, judger and judged ( Guilt nd Shame as MoralConcepts, 77). t seems to me, however, that this divided consciousness is a uniquefeature of the one-person case. n the two-person cases (and in the cases wheresomeone simply believes or imagines that she is observed by another), the personwho feels shame must transcend her own perspective in order to appreciate itsinadequacy; but for this, she need not actually occupy n additional perspective;she need merely experience herself as n object from this perspective.

35 1his suggests another way in which a moral agent might be sufficiently unlike therest of us to be free of shame: she might be incapable of identifying herself with thevery point of view whose inadequacy she acknowledges.

Downloadedby[Un



17February2014


19/36


over the significance of one s actions may depend on the perception thatthey have power over the actions themselves. n other words, recognizing the uthority of another point ofview may depend on recognizing thepower of the person whose point of view it is.Even if this were the case, however, it would not affect the content ofshame consciousness. No matter what its preconditions may be, shameis, intrinsically and essentially, the experience of an external authority-the experience of the authority of an external point of view. This is whyshame can and does play such an important role in the development ofmoral consciousness.

n sum, though we can, indeed, be ashamed of failing to live up to ourown ideals, most of us have not acquired our ideals without the help ofshame at failing to live up to the ideals of others, and, in any case, toexperience shame in relation to one s own ideals is to experience anexternal point of view as a source of values for us. What we know aboutthe relationship between shame and morality thus supports my accountof the content of shame consciousness. And this account, in tum allowsus to tell a compelling story about the relationship between shame andmorality. According to this story, the capacity to see others as having avalue that is not reducible to their relation to our own ends t h ecapacity to see others as ends in themselves - is, at least in normalhuman beings, the capacity to experience shame. This does not in itselfentail that we must experience shame in order to see others as ends inthemselves. Rather, it suggests that the experience of shame can bootstrap us into moral consciousness, and that few of us can be shamelesswithout being morally handicapped.36By appealing to shame to account for one of our most basic moralbeliefs, I side with those who reject the Kantian project of derivingmorality from reason alone. There is, however, a very significant difference between the role shame plays in my account and the role played inother naturalistic accounts by the sentiments of self-love or sympathy.According to these other accounts, some aspect of human nature is asufficient condition for the possibility of moral consciousness because it

36 n reaching this conclusion, I am, again, in opposition to Isenberg, who, with Kekes,thinks that it would be a good thing if we did not experience shame in response toour recognition that we have failed to live up to some standard (Kekes Shame andMoral Progress, 282-95). n defending his assertion that every shame, howevercircumscribed, must go ( Natural Pride and Natural Shame, 369), Isenberg focuseson cases in which someone is ashamed of a trait she cannot get rid of (e.g., a physicaldeformity, or stupidity), rather than on cases in which someone is ashamed ofsomething she has done. I refer to is discussion of these latter cases in note 46.

Downloadedby[Un


Los


17February2014


20/36

5 4 Sarah uss

is a sufficient condition for the possibility of moral reasons for action. nother words, the sentiments evoked in these accounts explain our beliefthat we have certain moral obligations because, and only because, theyjusti y this belief: we believe we have certain obligations, so the storygoes, because we really do have these obligations; but we really do havethese obligations insofar and only insofar as we have certain naturalinclinations or sentiments mos t famously, the sentiments of self-loveand sympathy, which incline us to be sociable, and more particularly, tovalue actions which are useful and agreeable to ourselves and others.37n contrast, our capacity for shame explains our belief that we have moralobligations without justifying this belief. n this respect, it resembles the

sentiments that figure in the naturalistic accounts of Nietzsche andFreud. Yet it differs from these sentiments, too; for we can acknowledgeits role in our moral life without concluding that we are the victims ofillusion and self-delusion. Shame s role in our moral development isperfectly compatible with the fact that there really are categorical reasonsfor action.38Most ofus take this fact for granted when we are not doing philosophy.We believe that the values and goals of other people are relevant to ourown reasons for action, no matter what our personal inclinations maybe. Kant is right to insist that this belief is incompatible with the manynaturalistic accounts of morality according to which an agent s reasonsfor action are conditional upon her natural dispositions. f a child sreason to conform her behavior to the expectations of her parents depended on the fact that she fears them, or wants to please them, orsympathizes with them, then there would be no principled distinctionbetween her moral behavior and the behavior aimed at satisfying herpersonal desires. But if a child s natural tendency to conform to herparent s expectations is motivated by her (shameful) awareness that sheis not the sole source of her own reasons for action, then this awarenessis not itself her reason for conforming, and so there is, in principle, noobstacle to regarding her naturally motivated efforts at conformity asefforts to do what she really does have reason to do. Our natural

37 There are many theories of this sort. Those that appeal to sympathy have their rootsinHume Those that appeal to self-love have their roots in Hobbes.

8 Note that, strictly speaking, Nietzsche and Freud s accounts are also compatiblewith this possibility. Yet each philosopher suggests that once ourerrors are exposed,we can see that there is no independent reason to t ink that there really are moralfacts of any kind. They offer their error theories as critiques of the possibility ofgenuine categorical imperatives no t just as critiques of our reasons for believingthat there are such imperatives.

Downloadedby[Un



17February2014


21/36

Respect for ersons 535

dispositions can be essential to our moral motivations without being thebasis of moral reasons; for their motivating role can be a function of therole they play in enabling us to perceive moral reasons. Shame is motivating in just this way. Moreover, unlike other natural dispositions (e.g.,sympathy), it exerts its influence, not simply by making us sensitive toparticular reasons for action we would otherwise overlook, but bymaking us (painfully) aware of the more general fact that our ownnatural dispositions are not the < >nly source of our reasons for action.

2.I hope it is clear that this story about shame-consciousness is also a storyabout respect for persons. I would like now to make this connectionexplicit. Having done so, I will briefly consider whether we have anyreason to trust our experience of others as worthy of respect- whether,that is, we have any reason to believe that the attitude of respect reallyreveals something to us about other persons and their relation to ourreasons for action.Respect, remember, is a complex attitude whose object is somethingsublime. We deem something respect-worthy only insofar as it makes usfeel the limitations of our own finitude and thereby strikes down ourself-conceit. According to Kant, our moral attitude toward persons isgrounded in our respect for their sublime capacity to reason. If I am right,however, Kant has things backwards. The moral significance we attribute to the rational capacity of persons is grounded in our experience ofthem as sublime.The reason why we believe we ought to accommodate our ends to theends of others - to treat other persons with respect - is because wehave had encounters with other persons which are encounters withsomething that transcends our interpretive powers and thereby forcesus to acknowledge the limitations of these powers.39 This experience is

39 When she introduces her own defense of objective, shared reasons, ChristineKorsgaard writes, If you are going to obligate me I must be conscious of you. Youmust be able to intrude on my reflections-you must be able to get under my skin(Korsgaard, Sources of ormativity [New York: Penguin Books1997], 136 . To explainhow this is possible, and to justify the moral status I grant you when you get undermy skin, Korsgaard appeals, not to Sartre and shame, but to Wittgenstein and theargument against a private language. I do not think her strategy works, and onereason why it cannot work is precisely because it lacks the resources to explain howyour evaluations can get under my skin in a way that does not depend on my ownpersonal evaluations, and the point of view they constitute. This problem is connected, I think, to Korsgaard s exclusive focus on the practical reasoner as autono-

Downloadedby[Un



17February2014


22/36

536 Sarah Buss

not in itself sufficient to ground the belief that we ought to treat allpersons with respect. (For one thing, we may have trouble seeing thatthe power which some people have to determine what really matters is apower they have in common with all other people. For another, torecognize that other perspectives are relevant is not necessarily to recognize what they imply about how we should act.) Nonetheless, our actualencounters with other persons make it impossible for us to believe thatour own concerns and interests are the only possible source of reasonsfor us. Having experienced other persons as such, we confidently believethat they are ends-in-themselves.To say that someone is an end-in-herself is, among other things, tosay that we must take her ends into account in setting and pursuing ourown. Because other people have special access to evaluative features ofour actions, we have good reason to consult them in determining whatwe have reason to do. But this means that we have good reason to regardtheir ends as making demands on us. A person s ends reflect her viewsabout what is worth pursuing; and her views about what is worthpursuing reflect her ends.40To acknowledge the nonstrategic relevance of another person s evaluative judgments is thus to acknowledge the nonstrategic relevance of theends which at once reflect and determine these judgments. t is toacknowledge that her ends are directly relevant to our ow that theseends may make a difference to which ends we ought to pursue ourselves.We can believe this without believing that the ends of others do in factmake a difference to which ends we ought to pursue. The point, rather,is that to discover what we have sufficient reason to do, we cannot simplyconsult our own point of view; in deciding what to do, we must treatothers as a potential source of ends.41 As Thomas Hill puts it, we must

mous agent: i f I am right, then we cannot recognize categorical reasons for actionunless we can experience ourselves as the passive) objects of someone else s valueconferring activity.40 As Mackie famously notes, a person s ends are, for him, to-be-pursued (J.L.Mackie, Ethics: nventing Right and Wrong [Harmondsworth: Penguin 1977], 40).Similarly, Heidegger notes that, according to Nietzsche, to esteem something, tohold it worthwhile, also means to be directed toward it. Such direction toward has

already assumed an aim. Thus the essence of value has an inner relation to theessence of aim (Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Nihilism [San Francisco, Harper Row1982], 15-16).41 The imperatives to which shame calls our attention are thus of two sorts: 1) therequirement that we take others points of view seriously and 2) the requirementsthat follow from taking their points of view seriously. The former requirement is

Downloadedby[Un


Los


17February2014


23/36


treat them as [sharing] the authority to determine how things ought tobe. 42f persons as independent subjects (not persons as rational agents) arethemselves the primary target of our respect for persons, then our belief

that we owe one another respect must ultimately be based on our actualrelations with one another. Here is where shame enters the story. Shameis one of the ways we directly apprehend one another. Though it is anattitude we take toward ourselves it is, at the same time, an attitudetoward another person - a perception of this other as something thattranscends the limits of our own personal perspectives, something beyond [our] world, 4 something that makes us feel smal1,44 somethingsublime. Shame is respect in its primitive, prereflective mode. t is notthe painful side-effect of having our inclinations checked and ourself-conceit struck down. Rather, it is our most basic way of experiencing our inclinations as checked, our self-conceit as put down. t is ourmost basic way of acknowledging a subjectivity other than our own.45Experience prompts reflection. nd the experience of shame promptsreflection on what produced this experience. By reflecting on the significance of a given transcendent judgment, we easily discover the significance of the point of view with which it is associated. nd by reflectingon the fact that this point of view is significant, we discover that whatmakes it significant is something it has in common with all other evalu-

categorical in the strong sense that it does not depend on what desires, etc. anyonehappens to have. The latter is categorical in the weaker sense that it does notdepend on the desires, etc. of the person to whom it applies. I am grateful to aquestion from Gideon Yaffee which forced me to clarify this point. (Again, requirement [1], not requirement [2] is the focus of this paper. See note 3.)

42 Thomas Hill, Respect for Humanity , Tanner Lectures on Human Values Grethe B.Peterson, ed. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press 1997), 443 Sartre, Being and Nothingness 347-54

As Susan Miller puts it, shame consists of an experiencing of the self as diminished( The Shame Experience, 32). People who have been asked to draw a cartoondepicting someone who becomes ashamed draw someone becoming smaller insize (34).45 n a thoughtful discussion of shame, John Deigh reminds us of times when thingswere going well and we were somewhat inflated by the good opinion we had ofourselves, when suddenly, quite unexpectedly, we did something that gave the lieto our favorable self-assessment, and we were shocked to see ourselves in a far lessflattering light ( Shame and Self-Esteem; Ethics 93 [1983], 226). Our self-conceit canalso be struck down, however, in cases involving evaluations that are not self-directed, but which merely presuppose the adequacy of our own point of view.

Downloadedby[Un



17February2014


24/36

538 Sarah Buss

ative points of view: it is a distinct evaluative point of view.46 A personcan, of course, fail to engage in the necessary reflection; she can fail, aswe say, to put two and two together. Most of us, however, are capableof seeing what follows from our experience of shame; and most of usexercise this capacity from time to time, even though it can be painful todo so. The result is that, even when we are not filled with awe at thesublimity of our fellow human beings, we can appreciate that their pointof view is relevant to whether our behavior is justified.To be sure, this appreciation is vulnerable to the false conviction thatcertain people (or certain types of people) do not have their ownevaluative points of view/7 or that their evaluative judgments are soflawed that there is nothing sublime about their having a point of view.My account offers no guarantee that such impediments to respect willalways be overcome. But human history provides ample evidence thatsuch guarantees would not be credible.48The reflection that takes us from one to all also takes us from others toourselves. Since other persons are sublime because each has his own pointof view, I, too, mustbe sublime; since their sublimity makes them worthyof respect, so too, must I be worthy of respect. Of course, just as one canrespect some others without respecting them all, so one can respect someothers without respecting oneself; the mere fact that one sees otherpersons as respect-worthy does not guarantee that one sees oneself thesame way. Someone who lacks self-respect may have failed to put twoand two together. Alternatively (as Robin Dillon suggests49 , she may

46 Isenberg concedes that when we feel ashamed of something, we often go on ... toweigh and measure, chart and explore ( Natural Pride and Natural Shame, 375 .t s not clear to me whether he credits shame with prompting this reflection. Insofar

as it has this effect, it does serve [a] useful purpose, despite Isenberg s suggestionsto the contrary ( Natural Pride and Natural Shame, 374).47 For most of us, human beings are unique in their capacity to apply norrns. This is,I believe, what makes it so difficult for so many of us to regard the interests ofnon-human animals as making claims on us as strong and compelling as theinterests of other members of our own species. For all I have said, however, thoseof us who are incapable of being shamed by the gaze of certain nonhuman animalshave the same sort of handicap as the shameless sociopath.48 Indeed, as Martha Nussbaum has reminded me, until recently, respect for persons

as such was a pretty rare phenomenon.49 Dillon, Self-Respect: Moral, Emotional, and Political. Dillon suggests that a self-relation she calls basal self-respect is the basis ofour sense of our own intrinsic worth.

t seems to me that the ultimate ground of our sense that we are intrinsically valuableis the self love that every healthy human being shares with every other healthyanimal, i.e., the primitive assumption that one is worth caring for, and so, that one s

Downloadedby[Un


Los


17February2014


25/36


believe that she is worthy of respect but be incapable of seeing herself asrespect worthy. Or she may have lost the capacity to 'think for herself';and so, she may have lost any sense of having her own point of view.Again, I think it is one of the strengths of my account that it stressesthe contingency - indeed, the fragility - of seeing persons, oneselfincluded, as respect worthy. If however, a person does not face, or if sheovercomes, the various impediments to extending her respect, her experience of shame will be supplemented with a more pleasurable aweexperience. As Kant himself notes, we are filled with admiration andwonder when we contemplate something that is capable of evaluatingand imposing order on the world of our experience. And it is especiallypleasurable to recognize this power in onesel.5 Deep pleasure alsocomes from recognizing that one's connection with others does notmerely exist in one's sympathetic imagination, but that there truly is acommunity of ends.Here, then, in brief, is my story about our belief that we owe oneanother respect. Kant's insistence to the contrary notwithstanding, respect for persons is not based on the recognition that reason has thepower to generate its own ends; it is simply our natural way of recognizing another person as a subject. To feel respect for a person, one neednot first accept any particular premises; and in particular, one need notbelieve that one has reason to restrain the pursuit of one's own self-interest.51 Rather, the belief that the existence of other persons constitutesa reason to restrain the pursuit of one's own self-interest only makessense if one already regards other persons with respect. If someone isblind to the sublimity of other persons, then she will be deaf to appealslike: What if everybody did? How would you like it if?'According to my story about respect, if other persons constitute limitson what it is reasonable for us to do, then this is because their point of

basic desires to eat, groom, find shelter, etc. are worth making an effort to satisfy. Ifthis is a different relation than Dillon has in mind, then it is an even more basic one.50 There seems to be another sort of pleasure associated with the recognition of one's

own limitations - a pleasure Aldrich associates with shame: 'To be genuinelyashamed is already to be penitent and with no grudge against having been foundout, despite all appearances and hurtful practical consequences. Indeed, it is oftenaccompanied by a sense of deeper insight and, therefore, gratitude. Thus only is oneconverted. None of these considerations hold for mere embarrassment or annoyance' ( An Ethics of Shame,' 60 .

51 In other words, I reject Carl Cranor's claim that 'one cannot respect another for noreason at all' ('Toward a Theory of Respect for Persons,' American Philosophicaluarterly 12,4 [1975], 311).

Downloadedby[Un



17February2014


26/36

54 Sarah Buss

view confers on our own lives a significance that exceeds the bounds ofan exclusively personal scheme of interpretation. Respect s simply theattitude that persons inspire in us insofar as they have this power. Itstarget is other persons as such and the reason why persons are a worthytarget is because they are ends in themselves.

III The Justification of Respect for PersonsBut why should we think that another person s evaluations are reallynonstrategically relevant to the value of our own acts? This question takesus from the phenomenology of respect for persons to the validation of thisphenomenology. In particular, it calls attention to the big justificatory taskthat mustbe tackled i we are to establish that the conviction intrinsic andessential to our experience of other persons as persons s a justified conviction. Do we really have good reason to trust our experience? Or is it justthatwe are psychologically unable to escape it? Again, Sartre describes forus a way of being conscious of another person as the sort of being that iscapable of inspiringour respect. But even i he is rightthatthereisno otherway to be conscious of persons as the subjects they essentially are, do wehave any reason to assume that this mode of consciousness yields genuineknowledge about our relations to other persons? In particular, whyshould we assume that other persons really are a potential source ofreasons for us? After all, we can think of countless instances in whichpeople feel ashamed for no good reason. Isn t it possible that shame isalways unjustified? that it is a distorted and distorting way of perceivingthe relationship between our evaluations and the evaluations of others?Why should we think that someonewho cannot experience the sublimityof other persons is blind ? Why not assume that such a person is, in fact,more clear-sighted than the rest of us?Unfortunately, I am quite unsure about how best to respond to thesepressing questions. nd even i I had more confidence, I could notpossibly do them justice here. According to the view I have presented inthis paper, the belief that we owe one another respect is not ultimatelygrounded in our reflection on the nonmoral properties of persons. Norcan it be justified by appealing to such properties, be they the capacityto reason, the capacity to suffer, or any other capacity. As far as I can tell,we can acknowledge these capacities without being rationally compelled to adopt any moral attitude whatsoever.These reservations notwithstanding, I do think it is possible to defendthe lesson of shame. Indeed, one of the advantages of my account ofrespect for persons is precisely that it lightens the justificatoryburden ofthose who confront the skeptic about categorical imperatives: to defendthe belief that persons have categorical obligations to one another, we

Downloadedby[Un


Los


17February2014


27/36

Respect for ersons 54

need not provide an argument with uncontroversial premisses (aboutrationality or human nature) that rationally compel this conclusion. Weneed merely point out to the skeptic that he, too, has had an experiencewhose content is incompatible with his skepticism. Unless he is a veryexceptional human being, he, too, has had moments in which he asconfessed the nonstrategic value of other people and their points ofview. t is thus up to him to show that the reasons for thinking that suchexperiences always distort the truth are more compelling than the reasonsfor thinking that they sometimes reveal the truth. And, of course, he mustshow this without presupposing that an agent s only reasons for action arethose that are conditional upon her subjective motivational set.

Not only can we indirectly defend shame by challenging the skepticto reconcile his experience with his skepticism, but we can also directlydefend the anti-skeptical position by showinghow reasonable it is for usto accept it, even though nothing rationally compels us to do so. That is,in addition to shifting the burden of proof to the skeptic, we can offer areason for thinking the burden cannot be met. This is what I want to tryto do in the remaining pages. I want to argue that as practical reasonerswe are committed to a possibility which implies that we haveno groundsfor rejecting the lessons of shame.

Before I begin, two words of warning are in order. First, in arguingthat shame can reveal something to us about the value of our acts, andabout the nonstrategic relevance of the evaluations of others, I will notbe addressing the difficult metaphysical issue of whether values are insome sense subjective or response dependent. f values are responsedependent, then facts about what is valuable are facts about which thingsevoke which evaluative responses in ideal judges under ideal conditions.So if values are response-dependent, then to discover that the evaluations of others are nonstrategically relevant to the value of our actionsis to discover that the ideal judge under the ideal conditions would bedisposed to evaluate our actions from this point of view among others- that what makes him an ideal judge, or what makes his conditionsideal, is, in part, that he forms his judgments from a point of view distinctfrom our own. Whatever the details, an account of this sort enables us todistinguish between true evaluative beliefs and false ones, and so it iscompatible with my assumption that there are facts about values.Second, some readers might suspect that evolutionary accounts ofshame have already given us sufficient reason to reject the lessons ofshame. As far as I can tell, however, this suspicion is ungrounded.Everything I have said about shame is perfectly compatible, for example,with Allan Gibbard s suggestion that shame evolved as a way of registering threats to one s candidacy for inclusion in cooperative schemes,and that the capacity for shame is a capacity for detecting a lack of theabilities, powers, or resources one needs if one is to be valued for one s

Downloadedby[Un



17February2014


28/36

54 Sarah Buss

cooperation and reciprocity.'52 For all Gibbard (or anyone else) tells us,the capacity to recognize defects in one's abilities to cooperate andreciprocate depends on, and is an important manifestation of, the capacity to recognize the relevance of other people's evaluations of one'sabilities. More importantly, though Gibbard's story and my own areboth about shame, there is an important sense in which their subjectmatter is quite different. t is one thing to give the developmental historyof shame experience - to identify the various selective pressures thatmight have generated the capacity for shame. t is another thing altogether to examine the content of this experience and to consider whetherwhat one experiences in shame might really be as it is experienced.Regardless of the evolutionary origins of our shame experiences, regardless of what purposes may have been served by our evolving a capacityfor shame, it may be that these experiences really do reveal something,i.e., that the capacity for shame is a capacity for discovering somethingthat would otherwise be hidden from us - or at least much moredifficult to discern and accept. To show that a capacity has evolved forreasons that are independent of the use to which we put it does not showthat this capacity misleads us.5With these warnings out of the way, let us focus our attention, again,on the development of moral consciousness. This surely requires thedevelopment of many different dispositions, such as the disposition tosympathizewith others, and even to appreciate the pleasures of community. But it also requires the disposition to regard other people as sourcesof reasons just because they are sources of revaluative judgments, capable of setting their own ends. Rare is the child who lacks this disposition.

52 Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, pt Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress 1990), 13853 The extent to which human capacities can function in ways that are independent oftheir evolutionary origins is, I think, nicely illustrated by the human capacity to hear(and appreciate) melodies and harmonies. Whatever evolutionary pressures pro

duced this marvelous capacity, they surely were notpressures to appreciate musicalcompositions that were written long since the capacity developed Yet t is does notrule out the possibility that some musical compositions really do have the complexstructure we hear them as having - nor that we are deluded in thinking that weare able to detect musical beauty. The point is a familiar one: in seeking the naturalbasis of our ability to 'appreciate music - or our 'sense of humor - or any other'recognitional capacity - we are not thereby seeking an account of why these arenot genuine abilities, after all. As Bernard Williams notes in a recent review ofThomas Nagel's The Last Word, What we want is naturalism without reductionism.We want not to deny the capacities we undoubtedly have, but to explain them ..New York Review ofBooks 19 Nov., 1998), 143).

Downloadedby[Un



17February2014


29/36


Even very young children, for example, assume that they have reason toconsider whether the fact that it would be lots of fun to draw on the wallsoutweighs the fact that Mommy and Daddy believe there are goodreasons not to draw on the walls; and insofar as they assume this, theyassume that they have good reason to consider what Mommy's andDaddy s good reasons might be, and to weigh these against the fact thatit would still be lots of fun. I have nothing interesting or helpful to sayabout how this 'weighing' does or should proceed. Indeed, it is not myaim in this paper to defend any particular normative principles.54 Whatmatters for the purpose of the present discussion is simply that otherpeople's reasons do frequently figure in one's own reasoning withoutany special significance being assigned to the fact that they are someoneelse s. Mommy's and Daddy s reasons are thrown in with the otherswhen one is trying to decide what to do; and though the fact that theyare Mommy's and Daddy s explains why they are among the things oneconsiders, this fact itself need o t and often does o t figure amongthe considerations. One considers the fact that the drawings cannot beerased, the fact that to return the walls to their original state wouldrequire lots of work, the fact that there are other surfaces to draw onwhich do not have these drawbacks, and - of course - one considersthe fact that the walls belong to Mommy and Daddy, and so are withinthe domain of things over which they have special responsibility andcontrol. One considers all of this, and more, simply because one cannotsincerely deny that it mi ht be relevant to what one has reason to do.I have argued that children cannot sincerely deny this because theyhave had the experience of being ashamed of themselves. I want now toargue that we have no good reason to doubt that this natural experienceof the nonstrategic relevance of another point of view reflects a genuineinsight into the relation between our own evaluations and the evaluations of others. My aim will be to show that the practice of taking otherpeople's reasons seriously is no less justifiable than any other mode ofreappraising one's evaluations. I f I can defend this intuition, then I will,in effect, have defended the claim that our natural capacity for shame isa natural capacity to detect reasons for action that might otherwise eludeus. Let me stress, again, that even if as I believe, shame is a source ofgenuine insight, this is compatible with its power to reinforce false beliefsabout what reasons there are. Even i f shameless people are ignorant ofan important fact about their relation to others, nothing follows from thisregarding what we have reason to be ashamed of

54 See note 3

Downloadedby[Un



17February2014


30/36

5 Sarah Buss

I begin with an observation I hope will be uncontroversial: no evalu-ation is, in principle, immune to reappraisal. This is not simply becauseit is always possible that new information may come to light, butbecausewe may come to see the old information differently. n deciding what todo, we are well aware of this permanent possibility of reappraisal. Werecognize that our conclusions regarding what we have reason to do arefallible, and that, in particular, concluding that it would be good to do Xdoes not make it so. n short, we recognize that our present perspectiveis not the only perspective relevant to the significance of our decisions;we may later conclude that we did not really understand what we wereup to in committing ourselves as we did.

Our perspective when we thus reevaluate our past action is external tothe perspective we had at the earlier time. n this respect, it resemblesthe perspective of other persons. Of course, unlike the perspective ofothers, this later perspective is still our own But it would be a mistake toconclude from this that its relevance to the value of our earlier deedsimplies nothing whatsoever about the relevance to our deeds of theperspectives of others. Again, our belief that our own later perspectivemay be relevant seems to depend on nothing but our belief in thepermanent possibility of seeing our behavior in a way that forces us toreject our prior assessment as mistaken. The whole point is that there are,in principle, no restrictions on which points of view might playa decisiverole in our reappraisal of our actions; and so there can be no theoreticalrestrictions on which points of view we would be right to acknowledgeas relevant to the value of these actions.

Our implicit awareness of this fact is evident when we engage inreasoning precisely in order to determine whether we should alter ourpoint of view. We ask ourselves whether there mightbe more to someoneelse s point of view than we are able to see from our own; and in orderto answer this question we try to take this person s reasons seriously, i.e.,to treat them as reasons for us 55 If upon reflection, we do come to see oursituation differently, this might simply be because we have reached adifferent conclusion about what our priorities have been all along, orabout what these priorities really imply about our reasons for action. Buthaving admitted the relevance of considerations which, as far as weknow, have no weight from our own point of view, we cannot rule ut thepossibility that we have reasons for action that are not conditional upon

55 t is very difficult to say anything very precise about what this amounts to. Clearly,taking someone else s reasons seriously requires an exercise of imagination that isat least temporarily transformative, while nonetheless preserving the distinctionbetween one s own point of view and that of the other.

Downloadedby[Un


Los


17February2014


31/36

Respect for Persons 5 5

our own subjective motivational set. Even if, from our present point ofview, it seems to us that our reasons are conditional upon our subjectivemotivational s e t even if we believe that all imperatives are hypothetic l it could be that when we take up an alternative point of view wewill see things very differently. t could be that we will discover reasonsthat do not depend on the motives we already had before. For all weknow, there may be such reasons.

Of course, unless one s point of view is self-defeating, it cannot itselfprovide one with reasons for taking up a different point of view instead.But this does not mean that one cannot reasonably believe that such achange would be reasonable. We are all familiar with the fact that wecan come to see things differently after undergoing a significant changeof mood. The beliefs and desires we acquire in this way are not the resultof a rational process; they are not intelligible in terms of the beliefs anddesires we had at an earlier time. But there may be reasons to acquirethem nonetheless. Even if the beliefs and desires of a seriously depressedperson give her no reason to take Prozac, she may be quite justified intaking the drug; for taking it may enable her to appreciate the significance of considerations her mood had obscured from her sight. n a casesuch as this, greater insight might not be possible without the drug. Butit is a marvelous thing about human beings that we often do not needchemical help in order to discover reasons which our past point of viewhad made inaccessible to us.

n short, the mere fact that we happen to occupy a particular point ofview is not itself a reason for preserving whichever point of view wehappen to have at a time, and so we have no reason to t ink that thereasons accessible from this point of view are the only ones that could atthis time possibly be reasons for us From th

Documents

Buss Respect for Persons 1999