Buss Respect For Persons 1999

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Respect for Persons
SARAH BUSS
a
a
University 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 of
Philosophy, 29:4, 517-550
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00455091.1999.10715990
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CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
Volume 29, Number 4, December 1999, pp. 517-550
517
Respect for Persons
I
SARAH BUSS
269 English Philosophy Bldg
University of Iowa
Iowa City, lA 52242-1408
USA
We believe we owe one another respect. We believe we ought to pay
what we owe by treating one another 'with respect.' If we could under-
stand these beliefs we would be well on the way to understanding
morality itself. If we could justify these beliefs we could vindicate a
central part of our moral experience.
Respect comes in many varieties.
1
We respect some people for their
upright character, others for their exceptional achievements. There are
people we respect as forces of nature: we go to great lengths to accom-
modate their moods, wiles, and demands. Finally, most of us seem to
respect people simply because they are people. This is the sort of respect
of special interest to moral theory.
In order to be worthy of this last sort of respect, it is not only sufficient
but necessary that one be a person. We can, of course, take a similar
attitude toward nonpersons. (Think of the respect some of us have for
nature, or for great art/ But even someone who earns our contempt
1 For helpful discussions of the different types of respect, see Stephen Darwall, 'Two
Kinds of Respects,' Ethics 88 (1977) 36-49; and Stephen Hudson, 'The Nature of
Respect,' 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 about
our obligations to other human beings -even if a human being is a paradigm case
of a person- it is an open question who qualifies as a person. In particular, nothing
I say in this paper rules out the possibility that certain nonhuman animals have the
same moral claim on us as other members of our own species.
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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 nonper-
sons are not proper objects of respect that they are incapable of behaving
contemptibly. To regard a person as beneath contempt is to cease to
regard her as a person.
My aim in this paper is to try to make sense of the rather mysterious
phenomenon of respect for persons as persons. I want to tell a story about
why it is so natural for us to assume that we have special categorical
obligations to other persons. This is a story about reasons for action as
well as a story about persons, and their relation to one another. It aims
to explain our belief that what we have reason to do is not simply a
function of the attitudes and beliefs that constitute our own point of view
-that our own point of view is not the only one that is relevant to the
choice 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 should
attribute to the ends of others when we are trying to decide how to act.
3
I will focus, instead, on our conviction that other persons can be a source
of ends for us. By exploring the phenomenology of this conviction, I will
try to explain what grounds it. I will then consider whether we are
justified in attributing this significance to other persons. I will rather
tentatively suggest that we have good reason to take our experience of
respect for persons at face value in the sense that we have no better
reason not to do so.
In the philosophical literature on political and moral obligation it is a
commonplace 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, the
duty to give 'due weight' to the interests of others corresponds to a very abstract
right, from which 'nothing very concrete about how people should be treated
follows ... without additional premisses. This explains,' Raz continues, 'why [the
right] 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 too
am a person"' (Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1986],
190).
4 According to John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, for example, 'Justice as fairness rests
on the assumption of a natural right of men and women to equality of concern and
respect, a right they possesses not by virtue of birth or characteristics or merit or
excellence, but simply as human beings' (Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously
[Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1971], 182). Some philosophers have criti-
cized the assumption that all persons are of equal worth as persons. Their criticisms
often address particular egalitarian claims. But they sometimes defend quite sweep-
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Respect for Persons 519
not generally distinguish the attitude of respect from the belief that per-
sons deserve to be treated with respect, nor even from the required mode
of treatment itself.
5
Even when the attitude of respect is itself the primary
subject matter, too little attention is spent on the relationship that obtains
between respecting people and apprehending them in a special way.
6
The general assumption seems to be that experiencing people as respect-
worthy has no distinct, substantive role to play in an account of moral
life.
I believe that this is a serious mistake. As long as moral theory
overlooks the phenomenology of respect, it will lack the resources
necessary to make sense of the belief that people deserve to be treated
with 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, 'On
Equal 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 misses
the mark. As I will show, we can make sense of the moral equality of persons without
relying on the dogma of 'a religious tradition' ('On Equal Human Worth,' 296), and
without implying that a person has moral values 'merely as the logical subject of
which qualities can be predicated' (John Kekes, Facing Evil [Princeton: Princeton
University Press 1990], 112).
Perhaps one of the reasons why critics tend to overlook the moral significance
of the subject as evaluator is that they are insufficiently sensitive to the distinction
between 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 ends
are of equal importance. Though the former claim is, I believe, relevant to how we
ought to treat one another, it does not imply that everyone ought to be treated
equally, nor even that the interests of each make an equally strong claim on us. It
does not ground 'a set of thick natural rights' (290), nor even 'equal prima facie
rights 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 to
respecting a person than attributing certain rights to him and refraining from
violating these rights: 'Accepting him as respect-worthy means that one attributes
to him certain rights of a very general nature; actually respecting him as a person
means attributing such rights to him and acting in accordance with them' (S.I. Berm,
'Privacy and Respect for Persons: A Reply,' Australasian Journal of Philosophy 58
[1980], 55).
6 See Robin Dillon, 'Respect and Care: Toward Moral Integration,' Canadian Journal
of Philosaphy 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 a
matter of how one experiences oneself. (See Dillon, 'Self-Respect: Moral, Emotional,
Political,' Ethics 107 [1997]226-49.)
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520 Sarah Buss
to the experience of those who hold this belief. These are, I realize, rather
serious charges. The account that follows is offered in their defense.
On this account, it comes naturally to us to regard other persons as
ends in themselves because it comes naturally to us to experience their
evaluative points of view as directly relevant to what really matters. To
experience 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 attitude
of respect. In so doing, I will try to show that our moral commitment to
treating 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 Persons
There is one towering figure in the history of moral philosophy who
appreciated that an account of respect for persons must be, in part, an
account of a very special way of perceiving persons- what I am loosely
calling a very special'attitude.' I refer, of course, to Kant. It seems to me
that the essential elements of his description of what it is like to experi-
ence respect cannot be improved upon.
According to Kant, respect for persons is a distinct 'feeling' that could
equally well be characterized as 'reverence.' More carefully, it is an
acknowledgment of the fact that other people have unconditional
authority over us, where this acknowledgment takes the form of a special
way of experiencing them? We have this experience in the presence of
something 'absolutely great,' something that transcends the limits of our
own imagination, and so compels us to recognize that our own personal
perspective is a limited perspective from which to gain knowledge of
reality. Anything that affects us in this way is 'sublime.'
8
So, if we respect
persons, this is, necessarily, because persons are something sublime.
9
7 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H.J. Paton (New York: Harper
& Row 1964), 68-9, 78-9, 128; and Critique of 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 of 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 the
aesthetic and the moral, see 104-6. For another such link in the Groundwork, see 89-91.
9 Kant identifies the sublimity of persons with the dignity of persons. But Aurel
Kolnai 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 has
something awe-struck about it, as if the presence of the sublime edified us but at the
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Persons are sublime, Kant tells us, because persons have the power to
reason. Our reason gives us the sublime capacity to transcend the
limitations of sense experience. Because we are sensuous beings, we are
naturally limited; but because we are rational beings, we can appreciate
this fact. This is why encounters with something sublime are a cause of
both pain and pleasure. We feel pain insofar as we are reminded of our
limitations; but we also feel pleasure insofar as we are reminded of our
sublime capacity to transcend these limitations.
10
Insofar as respect for persons is a partly painful, partly pleasurable
appreciation of their sublime nature, there is nothing essentially moral
about it. This is just what we need if, unlike Kant, we are to appeal to
respect to explain our belief that persons are a source of categorical
reasons for action: if respect for persons were primarily a moral attitude,
then it would not be an essential element in any diagnosis of such
attitudes.
11
This having been said, there is, nonetheless, a feature of
Kant's account that does not seem to hold out much hope for my
explanatory project. In particular: how could reverence for reason possi-
bly be the basis of a moral attitude? The answer, I believe, is that it could
not, and that, accordingly, Kant has misidentified the ultimate object of
our morally relevant respect for persons. I will work up to my own views
about this object by very briefly indicating my rather familiar grounds
for rejecting Kant's.
same time shocked or crushed us. Whereas, when faced with the quality of Dignity
as such we certainly also feel edified but not so much "crushed," overwhelmed or
even deeply excited as, rather, tranquilized .. .' (Aurel Kolnai, 'Dignity,' Royal Insti-
tute of Philosophy 5 [1976], 55).
10 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 'The feeling of the sublime is ... a feeling of pain arising
from the want of accordance between the aesthetical estimation of magnitude
formed by the imagination and the estimation of the same formed by reason. There
is at the same time a pleasure thus excited, arising from the correspondence with
rational ideas of this very judgment of the inadequacy of our greatest faculty of
sense, in so far as it is a law for us to strive after these ideas' (96). Again: 'That the
mind 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 presupposing
them and by straining the imagination to use nature as a schema for them, is to be
found that which is terrible to sensibility and yet is attractive' (104-5).
11 In 'The Ethics of Respect for Persons' William Frankena claims that 'Respect for
persons in its ethical or moral sense does not involve having awe of persons or
regarding them as sacred or holy' (William K. Frankena, 'The Ethics of Respect for
Persons,' Philosophical Topics 14,2 [1986], 154). The burden of this paper is to argue
that we can better understand respect for persons in its ethical or moral sense once
we see it as the consequence of a natural, nonmoral, awe-filled encounter with
persons.
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522 Sarah Buss
Reason, Kant famously insists, is the source of categorical impera-
tives.12 If reason is on the side of some contemplated action, then every
rational agent can endorse this action; and if every rational agent can
endorse an action, then the action's acceptability does not depend on the
idiosyncratic desires, feelings, inclinations of any particular agent. Inso-
far as we are rational beings, we know this. Yet insofar as we are not
perfectly rational beings - insofar as we have inclinations and feelings
-we are tempted to forget or ignore it. We are tempted to do whatever
satisfies our strongest inclinations. Worse still, we are tempted to think
that such a policy is sanctioned by reason, that it is a policy which every
rational 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 have
one's delusions of grandeur exposed and 'struck down.,t
3
At the same
time that we are thus frustrated and humiliated, however, we are set free
and ennobled. Impediments to rational action are removed, and by a
power that is our own. No sensuous being can experience such things
without pleasure.
14
According to Kant, once we see that moral imperatives are the cate-
gorical imperatives of reason, we see that to acknowledge moral obliga-
tions is to regard rational agency as a limiting condition on permissible
action, an end-in-itself. If we respect rational agency as an end-in-itself,
then we respect rational agents as ends-in-themselves, i.e., unconditional
ends. And if rational agents are ends-in-themselves, then their relevance
to our choices does not depend on any other ends we may have; i.e., they
are a source of ends for us.
The story is an inspiring one. Unfortunately, I am with those who
cannot persuade themselves to believe it. In particular, it seems to me
that Kant fails to offer a compelling reason for preferring his conception
of practical rationality (according to which there are reasons for action
which are universally valid in the strong sense that they are reasons for
everybody no matter what his/her personal interests or desires may be)
over an alternative conception (according to which there are no such
reasons, but all reasons for action are universally valid in only the weak
sense 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 of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis
White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1956), Part I, Book I, Chapter 1, section 1,
17-19
13 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 76
14 Ibid., 75-8, 80-2
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have reason to treat other rational agents as ends-in-themselves. Nor is
this implied by the fact that, like us, these agents have the capacity to
appreciate the world in a way that exceeds the bounds of sense. Political
and moral philosophers frequently suggest that persons impose cate-
gorical limits on permissible action simply because they are rational. But
I am with the amoralist in failing to see the point. I am willing to concede
that the capacity to reason has a sublimity not shared by the capacity to
fly, to sing, to devour large mammals in one gulp. But to be sublime is
one thing; to impose obligations is another. Even if all values depend on
reason, it hardly follows that the values of other rational agents are
noninstrumentally relevant to what I myself have reason to do.
Such thoughts have led many philosophers to give up the attempt to
make sense of morality as a system of categorical imperatives. Some go
so far as to side with the amoralist. Others suggest that whatever obliga-
tions we have to one another are based on nothing more binding than
our own natural sentiments, or dispositions. Kant himself thought the
categorical status of moral requirements must be abandoned if it could
not be shown that categorical imperatives can be derived from reason
alone.
I believe, however, that it is possible to give an account of our belief
that we are subject to objective, categorical reasons for action which is
naturalistic without implying that there really are no such reasons. With
considerable help from Sartre, I want to offer such an account myself. I
want to describe a special attitude toward persons - a special way of
regarding them- that can make sense of our belief that other persons
impose direct, categorical limits on what we have reason to do. I hope to
show that this natural attitude can play the relevant explanatory role
without discrediting the belief it explains. I will strengthen my case by
noting the role the attitude seems to play in ordinary moral develop-
ment. I will then consider what relation the attitude bears to the attitude
of respect.
1.
In Being and Nothingness Sartre offers a novel response to the solipsise
5
I do not think his argument works. It does, however, contain a very
important insight which I wish to exploit for my own purposes. The
argument begins with the observation that we all do, in fact, have a very
strong conviction that there are other subjects - other minds like our
15 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Pocket
Books 1956), part 3, chapter 1 ('Being-for-others'), 301-400
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524 Sarah Buss
own, with the capacity to apply norms, to evaluate things and events, to
set ends. What, Sartre asks, could possibly provide the grounds for such
a conviction? Nothing, he answers, short of a mode of being conscious
of them which is as incompatible with doubting their existence as the
cogito is incompatible with doubting one's own existence. Just as our
certainty of our own existence as thinkers depends on the fact that we
can be aware of ourselves as something distinct from the objects of our
thought, so too, Sartre argues, our awareness of others must be based on
our awareness of something distinct from any possible object of thought.
But this means that we must be capable of encountering other subjects
as subjects. Unless we have had such encounters, the existence of other
subjects would simply be a matter of conjecture. It would be a mere
hypothesis, the truth of which could never be established with certainty.
There is only one way to encounter other subjects as such: we must
experience ourselves as objects for them. What sort of experience could
this possibly be? Characterized negatively, it is not the experience one
has of 'putting oneself in another's shoes'; it is not the experience of
imagining how things must seem from his perspective, given his desires,
hopes, dreams, etc., and of thereby appreciating that he attributes to one
a 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 the
simple reason that in this experience, the other subject ('the Other')
figures as a special sort of object- a subject-object- whose characteristic
feature is its capacity to interpret the world and set its own ends. This is
Sartre's point when he writes, 'The Other-as-Object "has" a subjectivity
as this hollow box has "an inside."'
16
As long as the Other's subjectivity
is 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 subject
is the experience of really being as one is seen. In other words, it is the
experience of having the particular significance the Other attributes to
us, of having a value that depends on our relation to his projects and his
possibilities. The point is not that we know what he thinks of us. Rather,
we know that, whatever he thinks, his point of view matters. It makes a
difference to who we are and what we have done. It makes a difference,
even if it is not, as Sartre thinks, proof against solipsism -even if there
16 Ibid., 384
17 Ibid., 341-4. For a similar point in the recent 'analytic' literature, see Thomas Nagel,
'Subjective and Objective,' chapter 14 in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press 1979), 196-213.
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really are no other subjects in the world. Just as one's own point of view
as a thinking thing cannot necessarily be identified with one's 'empirical
self,' so too, the point of view of the Other cannot necessarily be identi-
fied with any particular object of experience. Nonetheless, in experienc-
ing oneself as seen from this point of view, one cannot possibly doubt its
relevance to the value of one's own choices and deeds. The experience
just is the direct, prereflective experience of the relevance of an external
point of view, where to say that it is relevant simply means that if the
assessments from this point of view can be dismissed, this is not merely
because they are grounded in a point of view other than one's own.
Putting the positive together with the negative, we get the following
picture. To experience another person as a subject is, necessarily, not to
experience him as an object of one's own experience. It is not to experience
him as something one contemplates, makes something of, evaluates in
the only way possible, viz., in terms of one's own evaluative perspective.
The only way to experience another subject as a subject is to experience
oneself as an object that he contemplates, makes something of, evaluates
from his perspective. But to experience oneself as such an object is
incompatible with regarding the Other's appraisals as just so many
characteristics of an object in one's own world. It is, necessarily, the
experience of these appraisals as playing a role in determining one's
place in the world, and so, as conditioning who one is.
Since this experience is necessarily the experience of living in a world
of values that are neither relative to one's own point of view nor dismiss-
ible as irrelevant from one's own point of view, it is the experience of
living in a world of values that are not reducible to the values things have
for some individual. And since no other experience of other people in-
volves the acknowledgment of such objective values, this experience
effects a dramatic shift in one's conception of oneself and one's possibili-
ties. In becoming conscious of oneself as an object in the world, one
experiences the abrupt demotion of one's self from its exalted position
as the point of view from which everything in the world derives its value.
In other words, one experiences what Kant calls the 'striking down of
one's self-conceit.'
18
Since the Other forces one to recognize one's limita-
tions by transcending these limitations, one's experience of being an
object for the Other is the experience of being in the presence of some-
thing truly sublime.
But have we ever been conscious of one another in this way? I think
that we have. In particular, I think Sartre is right to identify this mode of
18 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 76
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526 Sarah Buss
consciousness with shame. There may well be aspects of shame con-
sciousness that Sartre's account overlooks;
19
and (more importantly)
there may be ways of experiencing subjects as such without experiencing
shame (though I suspect that such modes of consciousness could only
occur in someone who is also capable of shame; this is, for example,
Sartre' s view about pride.
20
) It seems to me, however, that being ashamed
of oneself is a paradigm case of being conscious of oneself as an object
of appraisal for another subject. To experience shame is to experience
oneself as for another; it is to 'confess'
21
that there is more to the signifi-
cance of one's activities than their significance relative to one's own
personal perspective.
According to Bernard Williams, 'the root of shame lies in exposure, in
a loss of power.'
22
Sartre reminds us that what is exposed in shame is,
most fundamentally, one's lack of self-sufficiencf
3
- and that the loss
of power is not simply the loss of power over one's situation, but the loss
of power over the significance of one's situation. To be overcome by
shame is to discover that one's actions have a meaning which one must
affirm even though it is not conditional upon one's own point of view,
and that, accordingly, one's own personal resources cannot determine
all of one's reasons for action. 'Shame is the feeling of an original fall, not
because of the fact that I may have committed this or that particular fault
but simply that I have "fallen" into the world in the midst of things and
that I need the mediation of the Other in order to be what I am.
124
If we focus on shame consciousness as the paradigm case of the
experience of another person as a potential source of ends, then my
19 For a careful analysis of shame, see Gabriele Taylor, Pride, Shame, and Guilt: Emotions
of Self-assessment (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1985). See also Bernard Williams, Shame
and Necessity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1993), chapter 4, 75-102.
20 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 386-7
21 Ibid., 350
22 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 220.
23 In 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 based
on the recognition of inherent and inevitable limitations, whilst shame is an expe-
rience of weakness and inferiority' (Arnold Isenberg, 'Natural Pride and Natural
Shame,' in Explaining Emotions, Amelie Rorty, ed. [Berkeley, CA: UCLA Press 1980],
362). In rejecting Isenberg's contrast, I do not wish to reject his point about modesty
and humility. To the contrary, the force of my argument is that reflection on the
lesson of shame can prompt modesty and humility about one's limitations.
24 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 384
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rather abstract claims that this experience contains an implicit acknow-
ledgment of objective reasons may be easier to understand and more
difficult to reject. Thus, consider a case in which (1) you believe that
someone has a certain negative opinion of you; e.g., she thinks that you
have a terrible sense of humor, an obnoxious laugh, affected manner-
isms, etc.; and (2) you simply regard these appraisals as facts about the
person who is their subject. In such a case, the thought of what you are
for this person could not occasion the least shame. You might, of course,
feel disappointed, or frustrated, or angry that you inspire such distaste
in someone you had hoped to please. But this would just be a special
instance of being disappointed or frustrated or angry that the things in
your world are not exactly (or even approximately) as you would like
them to be. Such emotions are clearly distinct from the emotion of shame.
This little thought experiment shows, I believe, that there is more to
shame-consciousness- more to the content of shame experience- than
the recognition that there is a point of view from which one is just a
particular sort of object. And it also calls attention to the missing ingre-
dient: shame is an acknowledgement that one is, indeed, this very object
-that one is as seen, where this involves not simply acknowledging that
one 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 an
object, without granting any authority to the master's point of view. And
she need not recognize his authority even if she values his opinions, his
power, or anything else about him. In forming these judgments about
him, she relies on her own point of view; her assessments are grounded
in her own attitudes and beliefs. If, however, the master succeeds in
making his slave feel shame, then this is because, no matter how thor-
oughly she may despise all that he stands for, he makes her experience
herself as an object for him; he makes her experience him as a potential
source of (nonstrategic) reasons for her. The experience of shame is
incompatible with the experience of indifference toward all perspectives
distinct from one's own; one cannot in good faith experience shame
while taking a 'so what' attitude toward all values that are not condi-
tional upon one's own attitudes and beliefs; to be ashamed is to be
incapable of truly believing that the only things of value for oneself are
things whose value is grounded in one's own 'motivational set.'
25
Many readers, I know, will take issue with this last claim. Surely, they
will protest, a person can experience shame without acknowledging the
25 The expression is from Bernard Williams, 'Internal and External Reasons,' in Moral
Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981), 101-13.
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528 Sarah Buss
authority of perspectives other than her own. For surely, she can feel
ashamed about failing to live up to her own personal ideals. Could there
be a more obvious counter-example to the claim that shame is a 'confes-
sion' that 'one's own personal resources cannot determine all of one's
reasons for action'? Indeed, why should we think that our capacity to feel
ashamed of ourselves is the capacity to recognize that our own point of
view is not the only point of view that is relevant to what is valuable and
important for us?
In response to this challenge, I want to make two points. First, I want
to make an empirical claim about the origins of our personal ideals: as a
matter of fact, most of us develop our ideals in response to the prodding
of our elders; shame at falling short of someone else's ideals plays an
important role in this moral instruction; and without such moral instruc-
tion, most of us would grow up morally stunted - though we might
have the moral responses that depend on other aspects of our psyche-
e.g., sympathy. Second, I want to argue that anyone who is capable of
feeling ashamed about her failure to live up to her own ideals has the
more general capacity to feel ashamed about her failure to live up to the
ideals of someone else.
The first point calls attention to shame's important role in enabling a
person to bootstrap herself from premoral to moral consciousness:
though shame often presupposes moral commitments - though 'the
look' to which one feels exposed in shame is often the gaze of the moral
judge-the most primitive form of shame is a pre-moral emotion. Shame
does not presuppose any moral consciousness whatsoever. Rather, it
makes such consciousness possible by making it possible to regard the
evaluations of others as directly relevant to the value of one's own
pursuits?
6
The moral development of most children is strong evidence that for
the vast majority of human beings, shame is a precondition of full moral
consciousness.
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 in
order to feel shame, 'it is essential that we ourselves should accept the standard [we
fall short of], otherwise we would not feel badly about falling short of it.' That is, I
am challenging the assumption that we must accept the standard before we feel
ashamed of failing to live up to it (John Kekes, 'Shame and Moral Progress,' Midwest
Studies in Philosophy 13 [1988], 283). In so doing, I am making a point that Anthony
O'Hear has raised against Rawls's account of shame, viz., 'one can be shamed into
accepting new [standards]' (Anthony O'Hear, 'Guilt and Shame as Moral Concepts,'
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 77 [1976-77], 79).
27 As Agnes Heller puts it in The Power of Shame, shame 'has played an enormous part
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is the semivirtue of the leamer.'
28
Most children are capable of feeling
shame before they are capable of feeling guilt. And most parents rely on
the pre-moral emotion in order to engender the moral one. 'Shame on
you,' 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 disap-
proving looks and tones, we prod this moral ignoramus into 'confessing'
that she has overlooked certain considerations relevant to the signifi-
cance of her own actions. We make her painfully aware of a 'transcend-
ing view' that 'confers upon [her] acts the character of a given on which
a judgment can be brought to bear .'
29
It is a remarkable fact about human beings that we are so ready to
confess the limitations of our own personal perspectives. Shame comes
very naturally to us, no matter how single-mindedly we may be devoted
to the pursuit of our own interests.
30
This is why children are so vulner-
able to the disapproval of their parents, even when they have no fear that
they will be punished for provoking this disapproval. It is also why
young teenagers (and many others not so young) find it so difficult to
dismiss the verdicts of their peers. Since it is important that people be
capable of shrugging off, and even standing up to, the disapproval of
others, it is important that their natural disposition to make a confession
of inadequacy is not developed into a hypersensitivity. On the other
hand, if someone lacked the disposition altogether, experience suggests
that she would be a moral monster, i.e., a moral cripple. In order to escape
this fate, she would, it seems, have to be very unlike other human beings
in other respects as well.
31
in the process of socialization' (Agnes Heller, The Power of Shame: A Rational
Perspective [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1985], 6). She also notes that only
domestic animals who have been' confronted with the norms of human culture' are
capable of feeling shame (5).
28 Myles Burnyeat, 'Aristotle on Learning to be Good,' in Essays on Aristotle's Ethics,
Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press 1980), 78
30 As John Rawls notes in A Theory of Justice, 'Unless we feel that our endeavors are
honored by [other people], it is difficult if not impossible for us to maintain the
conviction 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 play no role in determin-
ing which considerations she takes most seriously in deciding what to do. Alterna-
tively, like some beasts, she might be too stupid to act for reasons. In note #35, I
suggest a third sort of abnormality that could enable a moral agent to be shameless.
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530 Sarah Buss
I am not claiming that the capacity to experience shame is a defining
feature of humanity. My point is, rather, that if children who were
otherwise normal human beings did not understand the significance of
'shame on you,' they would be incapable of developing an adequate
moral sensibility. For if they were incapable of shame- if they were, as
we say, 'shameless'- they would be incapable of recognizing that their
own 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 than
strategic value for them. Little amoralists, they would blink with un-
moved 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 moral
code of their parents. But if they did so, this would not be because they
recognized the authority of their parents' evaluative perspective, but
because they feared the consequences of disobeying, or because there
were 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 sympathy
eventually were such as to give them a moral point of view just like that
of their parents.
32
This claim is, of course, an empirical one; and we cannot possibly
conduct the experiments that would be necessary to verify it. I hope few
readers will find it contentious. Even so, it is a claim about 'normal'
human beings. I do not want to insist that there could be no exceptions
-that for all human beings (no matter how different from the rest of
us) 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 given
in to temptation, he is disposed to share their attitude toward his misdemeanors'
(A Theory of Justice, 465). I do not mean to suggest that love and trust are irrelevant
to moral development. As Rawls himself notes, 'many kinds of learning ranging
from reinforcement and classical conditioning to highly abstract reasoning and the
refined perception of exemplars enter into [the] development [of a moral view]' (A
Theory of Justice, 454). I am simply interested in identifying one factor of central
importance to this development. In particular, I am suggesting that the' disposition'
to 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 not
seem wrong from his own point of view. Lacking this capacity, a child might want
to avoid displeasing his parents, and, as Rawls says, he might even' desire to become
the 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 becomes
-his parents may well be right.
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the possibility of full moral consciousness.
33
For the purposes of the
explanatory story I am trying to tell here, it is enough that this experi-
ence is sufficient to reveal extra-personal values, and that it typically
plays an essential role in moral development. I am willing to concede,
for the sake of argument, that someone could use some other method to
discover the nonstrategic relevance of other points of view.
Let us assume, then, that someone has formed her values entirely on
her own, and in particular, without the help of shame. For her, shame is
merely a response to the relationship between what she is and does, on
the one hand, and what, prior to the shame experience, she believed she
ought to be and do, on the other. Her experiences of shame make no
independent contribution to her values; they make no independent
contribution to her beliefs about what she has reason to do. Rather, they
simply 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 experience
shame at failing to live up to the ideals of others?
It seems to me that this could only seem possible if one overlooked the
fact that to experience shame is to experience oneself as an object of
appraisal. For if one takes this fact seriously, then one sees that to be
ashamed at failing to live up to one's own ideals is to have a divided
consciousness: insofar as one is the source of one's ideals, one is critical
of one's behavior; and insofar as one is the object evaluated in light of
these ideals, one is ashamed of this behavior.
34
In this respect, shame
33 In other words, with Kekes, I reject the view that 'those who are incapable of [shame]
cannot be seriously committed to any standard, so they are apt to lack moral
restraint' (Kekes, 'Shame and Moral Progress,' 282). That is, though I believe that
an incapacity for shame will almost always prevent someone from committing
herself to a moral standard, I do not see why we should assume that this association
reflects a necessary connection. One person who seems to make this assumption is
Virgil Aldrich. In 'An Ethics of Shame' he writes: 'you can get a thief to agree that
stealing is improvident, dangerous, etc., but unless that makes him feel some degree
of deterrent shame, it will not for him be morally wrong' (Virgil Aldrich,' An Ethics
of Shame,' Ethics 50,1 [1939], 60). So, too, according to Rawls, 'being moved by ends
and ideals of excellence implies a liability to humiliation and shame, and an absence
of a liability to humiliation and shame implies a lack of such ends and ideals' (A
Theory of Justice, 489).
34 Many people have noted that even though shame does not seem to require another
person, it does seem to require another point of view. Thus, Susan Miller notes that
'the particular type of misery-about-the-self that gives shame its distinctive feel does
seem to depend on some sense, however vague, of the self standing before another
or potentially visible another' (Susan Miller, The Shame Experience, [1985], 32). And
according to Taylor, the 'metaphors of an audience and being seen' 'reflect the
structural features of the agent's becoming aware of the discrepancy between her
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532 Sarah Buss
differs from self-directed anger or regret: when I am angry at myself for
what I have done, or when I regret having done it, I do not occupy two
different perspectives at once, but identify exclusively with the perspec-
tive of the critic.
35
If no one can experience shame without acknowledging the relevance
of a perspective distinct from some aspect of herself with which she
identifies in her shame, then no one who experiences shame can sin-
cerely, and without self-deception, dismiss as irrelevant all evaluative
perspectives that are distinct from the one she occupies at any given time.
In other words, anyone who is capable of feeling ashamed at her failure
to live up to her own ideals is necessarily capable of experiencing herself
as an object of appraisal, and so is capable of experiencing the non-
strategic relevance of a point of view that is distinct from the one she
occupies in her shame. There is no shame in self-criticism unless one
occupies the point of view of the self who is criticized; and if one can
occupy a point of view from which one experiences oneself as criticized,
then one is vulnerable to the appraisals made from other points of view.
There is nothing one can do to render oneself invulnerable, short of
rendering oneself utterly shameless.
This having been said, it is important to stress that certain conditions
may need to obtain if we are ever to exercise the capacity for experjencing
ourselves as the objects of others' appraisal. Thus, for example, we might
never feel shame if other people did not present obstacles to our doing
whatever we wanted; our discovery that our parents can compel us to
accommodate ourselves to their ends might be essential to our discovery
that their ends are of more than strategic relevance to us. This possibility
can be put in terms of Williams' observation that shame is rooted in the
loss of power: for all I have said, the perception that others have power
assumptions about her state or action and a possible detached observer-description
of this state or action, and of her further being aware that she ought not to be in a
position where she could be seen' (Pride, Shame, and Guilt, 66). O'Hear suggests that
this experience only makes sense if 'there is a sense in which the individual
concerned is playing two roles, judger and judged' ('Guilt and Shame as Moral
Concepts,' 77). It seems to me, however, that this divided consciousness is a unique
feature of the one-person case. In the two-person cases (and in the cases where
someone simply believes or imagines that she is observed by another), the person
who feels shame must transcend her own perspective in order to appreciate its
inadequacy; but for this, she need not actually occupy an additional perspective;
she need merely experience herself as an object from this perspective.
35 1his suggests another way in which a moral agent might be sufficiently unlike the
rest of us to be free of shame: she might be incapable of identifying herself with the
very point of view whose inadequacy she acknowledges.
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over the significance of one's actions may depend on the perception that
they have power over the actions themselves. In other words, recogniz-
ing the authority of another point of view may depend on recognizing the
power of the person whose point of view it is.
Even if this were the case, however, it would not affect the content of
shame consciousness. No matter what its preconditions may be, shame
is, intrinsically and essentially, the experience of an external authority-
the experience of the authority of an external point of view. This is why
shame can and does play such an important role in the development of
moral consciousness.
In sum, though we can, indeed, be ashamed of failing to live up to our
own ideals, most of us have not acquired our ideals without the help of
shame at failing to live up to the ideals of others, and, in any case, to
experience shame in relation to one's own ideals is to experience an
external point of view as a source of values for us. What we know about
the relationship between shame and morality thus supports my account
of the content of shame consciousness. And this account, in tum, allows
us to tell a compelling story about the relationship between shame and
morality. According to this story, the capacity to see others as having a
value that is not reducible to their relation to our own ends -the
capacity to see others as ends in themselves - is, at least in normal
human beings, the capacity to experience shame. This does not in itself
entail that we must experience shame in order to see others as ends in
themselves. Rather, it suggests that the experience of shame can boot-
strap us into moral consciousness, and that few of us can be shameless
without being morally handicapped.
36
By appealing to shame to account for one of our most basic moral
beliefs, I side with those who reject the Kantian project of deriving
morality from reason alone. There is, however, a very significant differ-
ence between the role shame plays in my account and the role played in
other naturalistic accounts by the sentiments of self-love or sympathy.
According to these other accounts, some aspect of human nature is a
sufficient condition for the possibility of moral consciousness because it
36 In 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 to
our recognition that we have failed to live up to some standard (Kekes 'Shame and
Moral Progress,' 282-95). In defending his assertion that 'every shame, however
circumscribed, must go' ('Natural Pride and Natural Shame,' 369), Isenberg focuses
on cases in which someone is ashamed of a trait she cannot get rid of (e.g., a physical
deformity, or stupidity), rather than on cases in which someone is ashamed of
something she has done. I refer to his discussion of these latter cases in note #46.
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534 Sarah Buss
is a sufficient condition for the possibility of moral reasons for action. In
other words, the sentiments evoked in these accounts explain our belief
that we have certain moral obligations because, and only because, they
justify this belief: we believe we have certain obligations, so the story
goes, because we really do have these obligations; but we really do have
these obligations insofar and only insofar as we have certain natural
inclinations or sentiments -most famously, the sentiments of self-love
and sympathy, which incline us to be sociable, and more particularly, to
value actions which are useful and agreeable to ourselves and others.
37
In contrast, our capacity for shame explains our belief that we have moral
obligations without justifying this belief. In this respect, it resembles the
sentiments that figure in the naturalistic accounts of Nietzsche and
Freud. Yet it differs from these sentiments, too; for we can acknowledge
its role in our moral life without concluding that we are the victims of
illusion and self-delusion. Shame's role in our moral development is
perfectly compatible with the fact that there really are categorical reasons
for action.
38
Most of us take this fact for granted when we are not doing philosophy.
We believe that the values and goals of other people are relevant to our
own reasons for action, no matter what our personal inclinations may
be. Kant is right to insist that this belief is incompatible with the many
naturalistic accounts of morality according to which an agent's reasons
for action are conditional upon her natural dispositions. If a child's
reason to conform her behavior to the expectations of her parents de-
pended on the fact that she fears them, or wants to please them, or
sympathizes with them, then there would be no principled distinction
between her moral behavior and the behavior aimed at satisfying her
personal desires. But if a child's natural tendency to conform to her
parent's expectations is motivated by her (shameful) awareness that she
is not the sole source of her own reasons for action, then this awareness
is not itself her reason for conforming, and so there is, in principle, no
obstacle to regarding her naturally motivated efforts at conformity as
efforts 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 roots
inHume. Those that appeal to self-love have their roots in Hobbes.
38 Note that, strictly speaking, Nietzsche and Freud's accounts are also compatible
with this possibility. Yet each philosopher suggests that once our errors are exposed,
we can see that there is no independent reason to think that there really are moral
facts of any kind. They offer their error theories as critiques of the possibility of
genuine categorical imperatives -not just as critiques of our reasons for believing
that there are such imperatives.
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dispositions can be essential to our moral motivations without being the
basis of moral reasons; for their motivating role can be a function of the
role they play in enabling us to perceive moral reasons. Shame is moti-
vating in just this way. Moreover, unlike other natural dispositions (e.g.,
sympathy), it exerts its influence, not simply by making us sensitive to
particular reasons for action we would otherwise overlook, but by
making us (painfully) aware of the more general fact that our own
natural 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 story
about respect for persons. I would like now to make this connection
explicit. Having done so, I will briefly consider whether we have any
reason to trust our experience of others as worthy of respect- whether,
that is, we have any reason to believe that the attitude of respect really
reveals something to us about other persons and their relation to our
reasons for action.
Respect, remember, is a complex attitude whose object is something
sublime. We deem something respect-worthy only insofar as it makes us
feel the limitations of our own finitude and thereby 'strikes down' our
self-conceit. According to Kant, our moral attitude toward persons is
grounded in our respect for their sublime capacity to reason. If I am right,
however, Kant has things backwards. The moral significance we attrib-
ute to the rational capacity of persons is grounded in our experience of
them as sublime.
The reason why we believe we ought to accommodate our ends to the
ends of others - to 'treat other persons with respect' - is because we
have had encounters with other persons which are encounters with
something that transcends our interpretive powers and thereby forces
us to acknowledge the limitations of these powers.
39
This experience is
39 When she introduces her own defense of objective, 'shared' reasons, Christine
Korsgaard writes, 'If you are going to obligate me I must be conscious of you. You
must be able to intrude on my reflections- you must be able to get under my skin'
(Korsgaard, Sources ofNormativity [New York: Penguin Books 1997], 136). To explain
how this is possible, and to justify the moral status I grant you when you get under
my skin, Korsgaard appeals, not to Sartre and shame, but to Wittgenstein and the
argument against a private language. I do not think her strategy works, and one
reason why it cannot work is precisely because it lacks the resources to explain how
your evaluations can get under my skin in a way that does not depend on my own
personal evaluations, and the point of view they constitute. This problem is con-
nected, I think, to Korsgaard's exclusive focus on the practical reasoner as autono-
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536 Sarah Buss
not in itself sufficient to ground the belief that we ought to 'treat all
persons with respect.' (For one thing, we may have trouble seeing that
the power which some people have to determine what really matters is a
power they have in common with all other people. For another, to
recognize that other perspectives are relevant is not necessarily to recog-
nize what they imply about how we should act.) Nonetheless, our actual
encounters with other persons make it impossible for us to believe that
our own concerns and interests are the only possible source of reasons
for us. Having experienced other persons as such, we confidently believe
that they are ends-in-themselves.
To say that someone is an 'end-in-herself' is, among other things, to
say that we must take her ends into account in setting and pursuing our
own. Because other people have special access to evaluative features of
our actions, we have good reason to consult them in determining what
we have reason to do. But this means that we have good reason to regard
their ends as making demands on us. A person's ends reflect her views
about what is worth pursuing; and her views about what is worth
pursuing reflect her ends.
40
To acknowledge the nonstrategic relevance of another person's evalu-
ative judgments is thus to acknowledge the nonstrategic relevance of the
ends which at once reflect and determine these judgments. It is to
acknowledge that her ends are directly relevant to our own- that these
ends 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 fact
make 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 simply
consult our own point of view; in deciding what to do, we must treat
others as a potential source of ends.
41
As Thomas Hill puts it, we must
mous agent: if I am right, then we cannot recognize categorical reasons for action
unless we can experience ourselves as the (passive) objects of someone else's value-
conferring activity.
40 As Mackie famously notes, a person's ends are, for him, 'to-be-pursued' (J.L.
Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong [Harmondsworth: Penguin 1977], 40).
Similarly, Heidegger notes that, according to Nietzsche, 'to esteem something, to
hold 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 the
essence of aim' (Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Nihilism [San Francisco, Harper & Row
1982], 15-16).
41 The imperatives to which shame calls our attention are thus of two sorts: (1) the
requirement that we take others' points of view seriously and (2) the requirements
that follow from taking their points of view seriously. The former requirement is
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treat them as '[sharing] the authority to determine how things ought to
be.'
42
If persons as independent subjects (not persons as rational agents) are
themselves the primary target of our respect for persons, then our belief
that we owe one another respect must ultimately be based on our actual
relations with one another. Here is where shame enters the story. Shame
is one of the ways we directly apprehend one another. Though it is an
attitude we take toward ourselves, it is, at the same time, an attitude
toward another person - a perception of this other as something that
transcends the limits of our own personal perspectives, something 'be-
yond [our] world,'
43
something that makes us feel smal1,
44
something
sublime. Shame is respect in its primitive, prereflective mode. It is not
the painful side-effect of having our inclinations 'checked' and our
self-conceit 'struck down.' Rather, it is our most basic way of experienc-
ing our inclinations as checked, our self-conceit as put down. It is our
most basic way of acknowledging a subjectivity other than our own.
45
Experience prompts reflection. And the experience of shame prompts
reflection on what produced this experience. By reflecting on the signifi-
cance of a given transcendent judgment, we easily discover the signifi-
cance of the point of view with which it is associated. And by reflecting
on the fact that this point of view is significant, we discover that what
makes 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. anyone
happens to have. The latter is 'categorical' in the weaker sense that it does not
depend on the desires, etc. of the person to whom it applies. I am grateful to a
question from Gideon Yaffee which forced me to clarify this point. (Again, require-
ment [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), 4
43 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 347-54
44 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 cartoon
depicting someone who becomes ashamed draw someone becoming 'smaller in
size' (34).
45 In a thoughtful discussion of shame, John Deigh reminds us of 'times when things
were going well and we were somewhat inflated by the good opinion we had of
ourselves, when suddenly, quite unexpectedly, we did something that gave the lie
to our favorable self-assessment, and we were shocked to see ourselves in a far less
flattering light' ('Shame and Self-Esteem; Ethics 93 [1983], 226). Our self-conceit can
also be struck down, however, in cases involving evaluations that are not self-di-
rected, but which merely presuppose the adequacy of our own point of view.
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538 Sarah Buss
ative points of view: it is a distinct evaluative point of view.
46
A person
can, of course, fail to engage in the necessary reflection; she can fail, as
we say, to 'put two and two together.' Most of us, however, are capable
of seeing what follows from our experience of shame; and most of us
exercise this capacity from time to time, even though it can be painful to
do so. The result is that, even when we are not filled with awe at the
sublimity of our fellow human beings, we can appreciate that their point
of view is relevant to whether our behavior is justified.
To be sure, this appreciation is vulnerable to the false conviction that
certain people (or certain 'types' of people) do not have their own
evaluative points of view/
7
or that their evaluative judgments are so
flawed that there is nothing sublime about their having a point of view.
My account offers no guarantee that such impediments to respect will
always be overcome. But human history provides ample evidence that
such guarantees would not be credible.
48
The reflection that takes us from one to all also takes us from others to
ourselves. Since other persons are sublime because each has his own point
of view, I, too, must be sublime; since their sublimity makes them worthy
of respect, so too, must I be worthy of respect. Of course, just as one can
respect some others without respecting them all, so one can respect some
others without respecting oneself; the mere fact that one sees other
persons as respect-worthy does not guarantee that one sees oneself the
same way. Someone who lacks self-respect may have failed to 'put two
and two together.' Alternatively (as Robin Dillon suggests
49
), she may
46 Isenberg concedes that when we feel ashamed of something, we often 'go on ... to
weigh and measure, chart and explore' ('Natural Pride and Natural Shame,' 375).
It is 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 suggestions
to 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 of
non-human animals as making claims on us as strong and compelling as the
interests of other members of our own species. For all I have said, however, those
of us who are incapable of being shamed by the gaze of certain nonhuman animals
have 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-re-
lation she calls 'basal self-respect' is the basis of our sense of our own intrinsic worth.
It seems to me that the ultimate ground of our sense that we are intrinsically valuable
is the self-love that every healthy human being shares with every other healthy
animal, i.e., the primitive assumption that one is worth caring for, and so, that one's
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believe that she is worthy of respect but be incapable of seeing herself as
respect-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 stresses
the contingency - indeed, the fragility - of seeing persons, oneself
included, as respect-worthy. If, however, a person does not face, or if she
overcomes, the various impediments to extending her respect, her expe-
rience of shame will be supplemented with a more pleasurable awe
experience. As Kant himself notes, we are filled with admiration and
wonder when we contemplate something that is capable of evaluating
and imposing order on the world of our experience. And it is especially
pleasurable to recognize this power in onesel.
50
Deep pleasure also
comes from recognizing that one's connection with others does not
merely exist in one's sympathetic imagination, but that there truly is a
community of ends.
Here, then, in brief, is my story about our belief that we owe one
another respect. Kant's insistence to the contrary notwithstanding, re-
spect for persons is not based on the recognition that reason has the
power to generate its own ends; it is simply our natural way of recog-
nizing another person as a subject. To feel respect for a person, one need
not first accept any particular premises; and in particular, one need not
believe that one has reason to restrain the pursuit of one's own self-in-
terest.51 Rather, the belief that the existence of other persons constitutes
a reason to restrain the pursuit of one's own self-interest only makes
sense if one already regards other persons with respect. If someone is
blind to the sublimity of other persons, then she will be deaf to appeals
like: 'What if everybody did?' 'How would you like it if?'
According to my story about respect, if other persons constitute limits
on 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. If
this 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 genuinely
ashamed is already to be penitent and with no grudge against having been found
out, despite all appearances and hurtful practical consequences. Indeed, it is often
accompanied by a sense of deeper insight and, therefore, gratitude. Thus only is one
"converted." None of these considerations hold for mere embarrassment or annoy-
ance' ('An Ethics of Shame,' 60).
51 In other words, I reject Carl Cranor's claim that 'one cannot respect another for no
reason at all' ('Toward a Theory of Respect for Persons,' American Philosophical
Quarterly 12,4 [1975], 311).
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540 Sarah Buss
view confers on our own lives a significance that exceeds the bounds of
an exclusively personal scheme of interpretation. Respect is simply the
attitude that persons inspire in us insofar as they have this power. Its
target is other persons as such, and the reason why persons are a worthy
target is because they are ends in themselves.
III The Justification of Respect for Persons
But why should we think that another person's evaluations are really
nonstrategically relevant to the value of our own acts? This question takes
us from the phenomenology of respect for persons to the validation of this
phenomenology. In particular, it calls attention to the big justificatory task
that must be tackled if we are to establish that the conviction intrinsic and
essential to our experience of other persons as persons is a justified convic-
tion. Do we really have good reason to trust our experience? Or is it just
that we are psychologically unable to escape it? Again, Sartre describes for
us a way of being conscious of another person as the sort of being that is
capable of inspiring our respect. But even if he is rightthatthere is no other
way to be conscious of persons as the subjects they essentially are, do we
have any reason to assume that this mode of consciousness yields genuine
knowledge about our relations to other persons? In particular, why
should we assume that other persons really are a potential source of
reasons for us? After all, we can think of countless instances in which
people feel ashamed for no good reason. Isn't it possible that shame is
always unjustified? that it is a distorted and distorting way of perceiving
the relationship between our evaluations and the evaluations of others?
Why should we think that someone who cannot experience the sublimity
of 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 these
pressing questions. And even if I had more confidence, I could not
possibly do them justice here. According to the view I have presented in
this paper, the belief that we owe one another respect is not ultimately
grounded in our reflection on the nonmoral properties of persons. Nor
can it be justified by appealing to such properties, be they the capacity
to reason, the capacity to suffer, or any other capacity. As far as I can tell,
we can acknowledge these capacities without being rationally com-
pelled to adopt any moral attitude whatsoever.
These reservations notwithstanding, I do think it is possible to defend
the lesson of shame. Indeed, one of the advantages of my account of
respect for persons is precisely that it lightens the justificatory burden of
those who confront the skeptic about categorical imperatives: to defend
the belief that persons have categorical obligations to one another, we
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need not provide an argument with uncontroversial premisses (about
rationality or human nature) that rationally compel this conclusion. We
need merely point out to the skeptic that he, too, has had an experience
whose content is incompatible with his skepticism. Unless he is a very
exceptional human being, he, too, has had moments in which he as
'confessed' the nonstrategic value of other people and their points of
view. It is thus up to him to show that the reasons for thinking that such
experiences always distort the truth are more compelling than the reasons
for thinking that they sometimes reveal the truth. And, of course, he must
show this without presupposing that an agent's only reasons for action are
those that are conditional upon her 'subjective motivational set.'
Not only can we indirectly defend shame by challenging the skeptic
to reconcile his experience with his skepticism, but we can also directly
defend the anti-skeptical position by showing how reasonable it is for us
to 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 a
reason for thinking the burden cannot be met. This is what I want to try
to do in the remaining pages. I want to argue that as practical reasoners
we are committed to a possibility which implies that we have no grounds
for rejecting the lessons of shame.
Before I begin, two words of warning are in order. First, in arguing
that shame can reveal something to us about the value of our acts, and
about the nonstrategic relevance of the evaluations of others, I will not
be addressing the difficult metaphysical issue of whether values are in
some sense 'subjective' or 'response dependent.' If values are response-
dependent, then facts about what is valuable are facts about which things
evoke which evaluative responses in ideal judges under ideal conditions.
So if values are response-dependent, then to discover that the evalu-
ations of others are nonstrategically relevant to the value of our actions
is to discover that the ideal judge under the ideal conditions would be
disposed to evaluate our actions from this point of view among others
- that what makes him an ideal judge, or what makes his conditions
ideal, is, in part, that he forms his judgments from a point of view distinct
from our own. Whatever the details, an account of this sort enables us to
distinguish between true evaluative beliefs and false ones, and so it is
compatible with my assumption that there are facts about values.
Second, some readers might suspect that evolutionary accounts of
shame have already given us sufficient reason to reject the lessons of
shame. 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 regis-
tering threats to 'one's candidacy for inclusion in cooperative schemes,'
and that the capacity for shame is a capacity for detecting 'a lack of the
abilities, powers, or resources one needs if one is to be valued for one's
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542 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 and
reciprocate depends on, and is an important manifestation of, the capac-
ity to recognize the relevance of other people's evaluations of one's
abilities. More importantly, though Gibbard's story and my own are
both about shame, there is an important sense in which their subject
matter is quite different. It is one thing to give the developmental history
of shame experience - to identify the various selective pressures that
might have generated the capacity for shame. It is another thing alto-
gether to examine the content of this experience and to consider whether
what one experiences in shame might really be as it is experienced.
Regardless of the evolutionary origins of our shame experiences, regard-
less of what purposes may have been served by our evolving a capacity
for shame, it may be that these experiences really do reveal something,
i.e., that the capacity for shame is a capacity for discovering something
that would otherwise be hidden from us - or at least much more
difficult to discern and accept. To show that a capacity has evolved for
reasons that are independent of the use to which we put it does not show
that this capacity misleads us. 53
With these warnings out of the way, let us focus our attention, again,
on the development of moral consciousness. This surely requires the
development of many different dispositions, such as the disposition to
sympathize with others, and even to appreciate the pleasures of commu-
nity. But it also requires the disposition to regard other people as sources
of reasons just because they are sources of revaluative judgments, capa-
ble of setting their own ends. Rare is the child who lacks this disposition.
52 Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press 1990), 138
53 The extent to which human capacities can function in ways that are independent of
their 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 not pressures to appreciate musical
compositions that were written long since the capacity developed! Yet this does not
rule out the possibility that some musical compositions really do have the complex
structure we hear them as having - nor that we are deluded in thinking that we
are able to detect musical beauty. The point is a familiar one: in seeking the natural
basis 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 are
not genuine abilities, after all. As Bernard Williams notes in a recent review of
Thomas 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 of Books (19 Nov., 1998), 143).
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Even very young children, for example, assume that they have reason to
consider whether the fact that it would be lots of fun to draw on the walls
outweighs the fact that Mommy and Daddy believe there are good
reasons not to draw on the walls; and insofar as they assume this, they
assume that they have good reason to consider what Mommy's and
Daddy's good reasons might be, and to weigh these against the fact that
it would still be lots of fun. I have nothing interesting or helpful to say
about how this 'weighing' does or should proceed. Indeed, it is not my
aim in this paper to defend any particular normative principles. 54 What
matters for the purpose of the present discussion is simply that other
people's reasons do frequently figure in one's own reasoning without
any special significance being assigned to the fact that they are someone
else's. Mommy's and Daddy's reasons are thrown in with the others
when one is trying to decide what to do; and though the fact that they
are Mommy's and Daddy's explains why they are among the things one
considers, this fact itself need not- and often does not- figure among
the considerations. One considers the fact that the drawings cannot be
erased, the fact that to return the walls to their original state would
require lots of work, the fact that there are other surfaces to draw on
which do not have these drawbacks, and - of course - one considers
the fact that the walls belong to Mommy and Daddy, and so are within
the domain of things over which they have special responsibility and
control. One considers all of this, and more, simply because one cannot
sincerely deny that it might be relevant to what one has reason to do.
I have argued that children cannot sincerely deny this because they
have had the experience of being ashamed of themselves. I want now to
argue that we have no good reason to doubt that this natural experience
of the nonstrategic relevance of another point of view reflects a genuine
insight into the relation between our own evaluations and the evalu-
ations of others. My aim will be to show that the practice of taking other
people's reasons seriously is no less justifiable than any other mode of
reappraising one's evaluations. If I can defend this intuition, then I will,
in effect, have defended the claim that our natural capacity for shame is
a natural capacity to detect reasons for action that might otherwise elude
us. Let me stress, again, that even if, as I believe, shame is a source of
genuine insight, this is compatible with its power to reinforce false beliefs
about what reasons there are. Even if shameless people are ignorant of
an important fact about their relation to others, nothing follows from this
regarding what we have reason to be ashamed of.
54 See note # 3.
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544 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 because
it is always possible that new information may come to light, but because
we may come to see the old information differently. In deciding what to
do, we are well aware of this permanent possibility of reappraisal. We
recognize that our conclusions regarding what we have reason to do are
fallible, and that, in particular, concluding that it would be good to do X
does not make it so. In short, we recognize that our present perspective
is not the only perspective relevant to the significance of our decisions;
we may later conclude that we did not really understand what we were
up to in committing ourselves as we did.
Our perspective when we thus reevaluate our past action is external to
the perspective we had at the earlier time. In this respect, it resembles
the perspective of other persons. Of course, unlike the perspective of
others, this later perspective is still our own. But it would be a mistake to
conclude from this that its relevance to the value of our earlier deeds
implies nothing whatsoever about the relevance to our deeds of the
perspectives of others. Again, our belief that our own later perspective
may be relevant seems to depend on nothing but our belief in the
permanent possibility of seeing our behavior in a way that forces us to
reject our prior assessment as mistaken. The whole point is that there are,
in principle, no restrictions on which points of view might play a decisive
role in our reappraisal of our actions; and so there can be no theoretical
restrictions on which points of view we would be right to acknowledge
as relevant to the value of these actions.
Our implicit awareness of this fact is evident when we engage in
reasoning precisely in order to determine whether we should alter our
point of view. We ask ourselves whether there might be more to someone
else's point of view than we are able to see from our own; and in order
to answer this question we try to take this person's reasons seriously, i.e.,
to treat them as reasons for us. 5
5
If, upon reflection, we do come to see our
situation differently, this might simply be because we have reached a
different conclusion about what our priorities have been all along, or
about what these priorities really imply about our reasons for action. But
having admitted the relevance of considerations which, as far as we
know, have no weight from our own point of view, we cannot rule out the
possibility that we have reasons for action that are not conditional upon
55 It 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 is
'at least temporarily' transformative, while nonetheless preserving the distinction
between one's own point of view and that of the other.
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our own 'subjective motivational set.' Even if, from our present point of
view, it seems to us that our reasons are conditional upon our subjective
motivational set-even if we believe that all imperatives are hypotheti-
cal- it could be that when we take up an alternative point of view we
will see things very differently. It could be that we will discover reasons
that do not depend on the motives we already had before. For all we
know, there may be such reasons.
Of course, unless one's point of view is self-defeating, it cannot itself
provide one with reasons for taking up a different point of view instead.
But this does not mean that one cannot reasonably believe that such a
change would be reasonable. We are all familiar with the fact that we
can come to see things differently after undergoing a significant change
of mood. The beliefs and desires we acquire in this way are not the result
of a rational process; they are not intelligible in terms of the beliefs and
desires we had at an earlier time. But there may be reasons to acquire
them nonetheless. Even if the beliefs and desires of a seriously depressed
person give her no reason to take Prozac, she may be quite justified in
taking the drug; for taking it may enable her to appreciate the signifi-
cance of considerations her mood had obscured from her sight. In a case
such as this, greater insight might not be possible without the drug. But
it is a marvelous thing about human beings that we often do not need
chemical help in order to discover reasons which our past point of view
had made inaccessible to us.
In short, the mere fact that we happen to occupy a particular point of
view is not itself a reason for preserving whichever point of view we
happen to have at a time, and so we have no reason to think that the
reasons accessible from this point of view are the only ones that could at
this time possibly be reasons for us. From the fact that our present point
of view does not provide the basis for regarding a particular considera-
tion as a reason it does not follow that this consideration is not, in fact, a
reason for us. And this is because the fact that we happen to occupy one
point of view rather than another gives us no compelling reason not to
change our point of view- no compelling reason not to see how things
look when we treat some consideration as if it were a reason for us. 5
6
We
cannot dismiss someone else's reasons on the purely theoretical ground
56 Of course, one may have ordinary substantive reasons for dismissing certain
evaluative judgments as mistaken or irrelevant. My point, again, is not a normative
one. (As far as I know, however, there are no decisive considerations in favor of
assuming that every evaluation attributable to someone else merits dismissal; and
even if reasons could be found, they would not be reasons for dismissing the person
herself, since, after all, she is capable of changing her point of view.)
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546 Sarah Buss
that, after all, these reasons are a function of her motivational set. Nor
can we rule them out by appealing to the fact that they are inaccessible
to us, given the resources of our own motivational set. The implication
of another point of view for what we have reason to do is, necessarily,
an open question for us as long as we acknowledge the possibility of
repudiating our present evaluations. (This is not to say that we cannot
ever be confident about our practical conclusions. But our confidence is
justified only to the extent that these conclusions reflect our appreciation
of the fact that other points of view - other motivational sets - are a
potential source of reasons for us.)
It may be helpful to compare the preceding argument with a Kantian-
style defense of treating others with respect. The Kantian grants that no
two people have the exact same desires, attitudes, sentiments, etc. But,
she continues, all persons have something important in common: each
must rely on her reason to determine which of her desires are really
worth satisfying. Persons use their reason to figure out what to do not
because it is their reason, but because it is their reason. In determining
what they should do, their ultimate court of appeal is thus something
impersonal. And this means that a practical reasoner can no more wholly
discount the verdicts of other reasoners than she can wholly discount the
verdict of her own reasoning. 5
7
In contrast, my argument begins with the concession that there is an
irreducibly personal aspect to the very exercise of reason: even when we
are unaware of their existence, our personal desires play a decisive role
in determining which considerations we regard as reasons for action;
they necessarily 'color' our evaluations of our options. This egocentric
aspect of reasoning notwithstanding, however, we know that it is possi-
ble for us to conclude at some later time that the point of view from which
we are now assessing our options is in some sense inadequate. It is
possible, that is, for us to conclude that our current reasoning was
short-sighted, or confused, even though it did not overlook a single
element of our 'motivational set.' Insofar as we acknowledge this possi-
bility, we effectively acknowledge that other points of view (other points
of view on the same set of motives) are relevant to what we have reason to
do- that they may yield genuine insight which is inaccessible from our
own point of view. But from this it follows that we have every bit as
much reason to take these other points of view seriously. That is, we are
57 Though, again, having taken these other verdicts into account, she may conclude
that they do not give her a sufficient reason to alter her own evaluations.
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not irrational to r e ~ r d the evaluations of others as relevant to what we
have reason to do.
8
To be sure, each practical reasoner must reach her conclusions from
her own unique point of view. But as the case of theoretical reasoning
makes abundantly clear, the fact that each person can make up no mind
but her own is perfectly compatible with the fact that she can make up
her mind on the basis of considerations- reasons- she could not have
generated from her own purely personal point of view. Indeed, if some-
one is a conscientious reasoner, then she will discover that reasons which
are extra-personal in this sense are indispensable. Paradoxically, she
must appeal to such reasons even if she wishes to justify the belief that
her own inclinations are the sole source of her reasons for action. 5
9
Few of us really believe this, of course. We believe that, whatever our
inclinations may be, we owe one another respect. Yet we are uneasy, too.
We do not know what could possibly justify this belief. We suspect that
it might not be justified.
I would like to bring my story about respect for persons to an end by
suggesting that this story points to a practical source of our theoretical
difficulty: we have difficulty convincing ourselves that we have an
58 On this account, we are justified in taking other points of view seriously because
we are committed to discovering what we have reason to do. Thus, though these
other points of view are nonstrategically relevant in the sense that the evaluations
associated with them have a value (for us) independent of our own particular
evaluations, and though we experience the nonstrategic relevance of other persons
for no reason, what justifies the resulting belief that other persons have a nonstrategic
relevance is our commitment to discovering what we have reason to do. This might
seem to imply that, on my account, persons are not ends in themselves, after all-
since, after all, their value is a function of our own interest in figuring out what we
have reason to do. But this basic interest is a necessary condition for the possibility
of our apprehending anything as a reason, since if we don't really care about what
we have reason to do, nothing can strike us as giving us a reason to do anything.
Accordingly, even things we value for their own sake (as ends) owe the normative
status they have for us to our commitment as practical reasoners.
59 Sarah Buss, 'What Practical Reasoning Must Be if We Act for Our Own Reasons,'
Australasian Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming, December, 1999). See also Jean
Hampton, The Authority of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998),
especially 144, 162-6; James Dreier, 'Humean Doubts about the Practical Justification
of Morality,' in Ethics and Practical Reason, Garrett Cullity and Berys Gaut, eds.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press 1997), 96; Korsgaard, Sources of Normativity, 163-4. For a
very interesting discussion of hypothetical reasons for action, see Korsgaard, 'The
Normativity of Instrumental Reason,' in Ethics and Practical Reason, 215-54.
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548 Sarah Buss
unconditional obligation to treat all persons as ends in themselves
because, for the most part, we do not really see other persons as respect-
worthy. Busy in the pursuit of our own ends, we accommodate ourselves
to the ends of others, out of habit, or self-interest, or simply because
everyone knows this is 'the right thing to do.' We have a vague sense
that others have a claim on us because they are end-setters, just like us
-because each of us is just one end-setter among many. But we cannot
spell out the alleged explanatory connection: for, in practice, as in theory,
we easily forget the fact that our encounters with one another are
encounters with something sublime.
IV Coda
In his deeply suggestive meditation on solipsism, Stanley Cavell makes
the following observation: 'The surmise is not that I ought to see, and live
with, others as human beings; it is that I sometimes do so see them, and
therefore, mostly do not.'
60
If we mostly do not see one another as human
beings - if we do not see one another as subjects - does it follow that
we rarely relate to one another as human beings- that we rarely treat
one another as ends? What relevance, if any, does the attitude of respect
have to whether we succeed in treating one another with respect?
Cavell reminds us that most of the time when we 'respect one an-
other's rights' it does not even occur to us that we are interacting with
something sublime. We remain pretty indifferent to one another, forget-
ful that some of the things we are brushing up against and dealing with
in one way or another have, as George Eliot says, their own 'center of
self.'
61
Sartre is right, I have argued, to tie this indifference to an epistemic
deficiency - a kind of blindness. Someone who is indifferent to others
'scarcely notices' them; to this extent, she relates to them as mere 'func-
tions,' mere means.
62
But does this mean that she does not treat them as ends in themselves?
Her behavior may, it seems, be beyond reproach. What's more, this need
not be a matter of sheer good luck. It is perfectly compatible with the sort
of indifference at issue here that an indifferent person is guided by her
belief that she has a duty to restrain the pursuit of her self-interest in
various ways. Indeed, a person's dedication to doing the right thing may
60 Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1979), 435
61 George Eliot, Middlemarch (London: Penguin Books 1965), 243
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be precisely what prevents her from 'suspecting what the other is.'
63
As
Cavell puts it, 'the idea of a duty toward others as human beings might
itself be a restriction of my knowledge of their existence.'
64
The recogni-
tion of this possibility appears to be one source of recent enthusiasm for
an ethics of care.
65
What is the moral status of dutiful acts, dutifully performed by some-
one altogether lacking in reverence for other persons? Such a person does
what she does because she believes it to be the right thing to do; yet she
is indifferent to the sublimity of other persons, which alone makes sense
of her belief that persons deserve to be treated with respect. It seems to
me that this person's relation to others resembles in certain important
respects the relation of many religious believers to their God. By pursu-
ing the analogy, we can, I believe, reach some plausible conclusions
about the role that the attitude of respect for persons must play in
treating persons with respect.
Many people go to church or synagogue every week in a very dis-
tracted frame of mind. They are true believers - not hypocrites. In
particular, they sincerely believe that God is a being uniquely worthy of
reverence, and that this is why it is appropriate to pray in his name, to
genuflect, etc. As they participate in the weekly rituals, however, these
people are thinking of other things, or of nothing. They rarely experience
the reverence for God which on their own view they must experience
whenever they truly encounter Him.
Does this mean that they rarely treat God with reverence when they
engage in their weekly rituals? I think not. If they never experienced
reverence for their God, then the rituals they enact would not be expres-
sions of reverence, but would merely testify to their belief that reverence
for God is appropriate. Nonetheless, they need only infrequently expe-
rience God as worthy of reverence in order for their ritualistic behavior
to count as their way of revering God.
I wish to say something similar about the moral case. Our natural
emotional responses to one another may be, as I have suggested, essen-
tial to our most basic moral beliefs. But moral imperatives govern our
treatment of others - not our attitudes toward them. Moreover, even if
our acts must have a moral motive in order to be of moral worth, it can
hardly be a moral failing that we mostly do not see one another as Other.
63 Ibid., 496
64 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 435
65 See Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education
(Berkeley: University of California Press 1984); Dillon, 'Respect and Care.'
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550 Sarah Buss
We are weak, finite creatures, with so much to do, so much on our minds.
Even the best of us negotiate our way through our days 'well wadded
with stupidity.'
66
We have, it seems, no other choice.
It is not easy for us to fulfill our obligations to one another. But if we
are motivated by the desire to do the right thing, our actions have moral
worth. As long as we are as responsive to one another's ends as is
necessary to enable one another to pursue these ends, and as long as this
responsiveness reflects our belief that persons deserve this sort of treat-
ment, we succeed in treating one another with respect, even if our behavior
is neither motivated nor accompanied by the attitude without which this
behavior makes no sense. We can treat one another with respect without
seeing one another as Other. Or rather, this is possible, as long as our
natural stupidity is occasionally redeemed by our natural sensitivity to
the presence of the sublime.
67
Received: January, 1998
Revised: December, 1998
Revised: August, 1999
66 Eliot, Middlemarch, 226
67 Thanks to William Buss, Stephen Darwall, Brian Kierland, Maggie Little, Stephen
Menn, Elijah Millgram, Martha Nussbaum, Gabriel Richardson, Connie Rosati,
Gideon Yaffee, two referees for this journal, and members of the philosophy
departments at McGill University, York University, Johns Hopkins University, and
the University of Missouri at St. Louis, where earlier versions of this paper were
presented.
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