Kristen De Man

Topic: The Human Being in Moral Imagination

What is it to recognize someone as a human being? Standard answers to this question presuppose that recognizing another as human is a matter of coming to know something about them, e.g. that they belong to the species homo sapiens or that they are the bearer of a certain capacity. On this view, to recognize someone as human is not yet to make an ethical determination: it is one thing to pick you out as a member of my species, and another to ask how I ought to treat you. In other words, there is a logical gap between the correct application of the sortal concept “human” and judgements about what is owed to the beings who fall under that concept. As critics have pointed out, however, the standard view makes certain basic features of our moral lives seem arbitrary at best, and unintelligible at worst. It leaves little room for such fundamental facts about human life as that we have faces and names, that we have inner lives which may be rich or shallow, that we honor our dead, and that we may love and hate one another in ways that exceed reason. Could it be that such phenomena are not merely accidental features of the life of our species, as the standard view suggests, but are central to our understanding of what it means to lead a human life? How would this alter our understanding of what it means to recognize another as our fellow human being? These questions provide the topic for this course. In the first phase of the class, we will read a few (quite disparate) examples of what I am calling the “standard view” and consider some criticisms from Cora Diamond, Raimond Gaita, and others. In the second phase, we will consider an alternative answer to our initial question: to recognize you as a human being, on the proposed view, is to acknowledge you as standing in a distinctive kind of relation to myself – a relation which Stanley Cavell marks with the term “acknowledgement.” In addition to Cavell, we will read some selections from Immanuel Levinas and Martin Buber. Finally, in the third phase, we will consider how this alternative picture makes room for, and indeed requires, attention to the kinds of phenomena mentioned above. Two further questions for our discussion will be: Are there limits on the extent to which we are all united by a common humanity? What should we say about cases in which someone is, as we say, “dehumanized?” Course readings not mentioned above will include selections from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil, and others.