Valuing Persons as Persons: Between Respect and Love
When
Title: Valuing Persons as Persons: Between Respect and Love
Abstract: Others’ valuing us as a person and displaying that valuing attitude in how they treat us is, arguably, the basic form of goodwill we care most about. Recognition and affirmation of our value as persons is central to a minimally decent society, to our intimate relationships, and to a social life in which we are not severed from the society of others--we are not, for example, alienated, lonely, abandoned, rendered invisible. Rather than taking “valuing persons as persons” to be an exclusively moral notion, I suggest that to value persons as persons is to value them under three distinct descriptors: as bearers of moral personhood, as nonfungible individuals who are the particular persons they are, and as individuals with whom we are in society. The first two notions are familiar from the literature on recognition-respect and on personal love. I introduce the last to illuminate the way everyday, mundane social encounters between strangers and acquaintances communicate a distinctive form of recognizing our value as persons; I suggest that the companion valuing attitude is friendly non-indifference.
The colloquium will be in the Maloney Seminar Room, Social Sciences 224, 3-5p. For those unable to attend in person, the talk will be viewable on this Zoom link.