Class 9.1: Persons as Things

We’ve seen in recent weeks that conflicts can become personal when the other person’s actions show disregard for us, or reveal that the other person doesn’t take us as seriously, care as much about us, or is not as committed to us as we expected as part of our relationship. And in our last few readings we’ve also started to see that conflicts can also involve treating someone in ways that feel dehumanizing, objectifying, degrading, or lacking respect. What we’re interested in this week is whether we can give any kinds of rationalizing explanations of why we would do this to one another.

For this we’re going to turn to read some work by USC philosophy professor Mark Schroeder. (Sorry! This is the awkward part of the semester where I assign some of my own research and writing.) For today’s class we’re going to read the first thing that I wrote about this topic, and then for Wednesday’s class we’re going to read a paper that ties these questions back more explicitly to how to understand interpersonal conflict.

Mark Schroeder

It’s also awkward to follow my normal pattern of giving an author bio for myself, but you know a little about who I am - I teach philosophy at USC, where I have taught since 2006. Before that I taught for two years at the University of Maryland, and before that I got my PhD in philosophy from Princeton. For most of my career, my research in philosophy was about very different topics from the topics of this class. It was about the nature of moral thought and prescriptive language, about knowledge and what is involved in forming rational beliefs. But I got excited about the topic of conflict about eleven years ago when I read Langton’s article ‘Duty and Desolation’ for the first time.

some things as a person - Archimbolo

Persons as Things

Our reading for today’s class is my paper ‘Persons as Things’, which is pretty directly a response to Langton, Korsgaard, and Strawson, all of which we have already read. As you read, try to write down what the “Kantian Diagnosis” is a diagnosis of, and how it diagnoses it. And try to think about whether Langton, Korsgaard, and Strawson would really disagree with what I say, or whether it is a matter of emphasis. And ask yourself: to what extent, and how, do you want people who you have relationships with to pay attention to the ways in which you are imperfectly embodied, when trying to interpret you?

At one point in the article, the author gives an example involving the “analytic/synthetic distinction”. Don’t worry too much about what this is - it’s an idea from the philosophy of language (originally substantially clarified by Kant, it turns out) that was very controversial at Harvard in the 1960s because it was argued against by a philosopher named Quine. That’s all you have to know about it to follow this example.

Quiz Time!