PHIL 54260 Recent Ethical Theory
What is the role of the other, the second person, in ethics? The class inquiries into the relation between three aspects of being with others - the normative, the recognitive and the communicative: (1) What we owe to each other, (2) what think and know of each other, and (3) what we say to each other. Obviously, they are interrelated in our lives in intricate ways. But what is the conceptual connection between them? Under the heading of 'bipolar obligations' or 'directed duties', the first has recently received quite a bit of attention. A directed duty is a duty I have to someone. And it is correlated with a right the other has against me. Here, 'right' and 'wrong' take on a relational form: wronging someone or doing right by her. The current debate tends to be focused on the following questions: Can this relational form of normativity be explained in terms of non-relation norms or is it irreducible and basic? And if it is basic, what is the 'source' of this form of normativity? Furthermore: Is the relation of right essentially reciprocal and thus a relation between persons; or can the status 'bearer of rights' be extended to kinds of beings that principally have no duties to me (animals, plants, or perhaps the environment)? Moreover, is having rights really essentially relational such that my status as a bearer of rights, a person, depends on there being others who have duties to me? If so, does understanding myself as a person depend on my knowledge of the actuality of other wills? We will approach these questions by investigating the role that the recognitive and the communicative has to play in a proper account of bipolar obligations. Of course, in human life this kind of normativity is connected with specific kinds of attitudes towards persons - respect, blame and resentment - and specific kinds of speech acts that paradigmatically involve the second person pronoun: consent, protest and demand. But common views suggest a conceptual separation: on the one hand, the idea that sub-rational beings can have rights; on the other hand, the idea that knowledge of the fundamental normative principle must be independent of the actuality of communicative exchange with others. The hypothesis of the class is that such a separation is untenable. A proper account of what we owe to each other must at same time be an account of how we know of each other and how we address one another. One might call this "linguistic idealism" about rights and directed duties. In this way, treatment of the other in ethics requires venturing into philosophy of mind and language: the puzzles about knowledge other wills and the puzzles about the logical grammar of 'you.' (I)