Transcript Philosophy 224

Philosophy 224
Responding to the Challenge
• Taylor begins by noting something that is going to
become thematic for us in the second half of the semester,
“Where it is more than simply a synonym for ‘human
being’, ‘person’ figures primarily in moral and legal
discourses” (276c2).
• As he insists, this is the cash value of the capacity
accounts of the person that we’ve seen from the western
philosophical tradition.
Taylor, “The Concept of a
Person”
• Summing up this capacity account of the person, Taylor
defines the person as a “…being with his/her own point
of view on things…as a being who can be addressed and
who can reply” (276c1).
• His shorthand term for this is “respondent.”
• Any account of the person that is going to be able to address
the moral/legal features of the person is going to have to be
an account of what it means to be a respondent.
• As such, it is important to recognize that the notion of an
‘agent,’ a being capable of action, is also implicated here.
The Person is a
‘Respondent Agent’
• The aim of Taylor’s treatment of the person as a
‘respondent agent’ is to present two different views of
the person which underlie the variety of attitudes and
claims that we make which rely on a concept of
personhood.
• The first view he characterizes as epistemological and it
is essentially the view we saw emerging in the modern
philosophical era.
• The second view is practical, in the sense that it focuses
on praxis/action.
Two Views
• As we’ve seen, this view is essentially a capacity view,
which typically locates personhood in or as our rational
cognitive capacities.
• Taylor glosses this by reference to representationalism:
consciousness is the capacity to have representations of
things.
• While this view accounts for the respondent features of
persons, it doesn’t do a very good job of accounting for
agency.
• Cf., the difficulties in artificial intelligence research.
The Epistemological
Person
• The key to this conception of person is the recognition that,
“…things matter to them” (277c1), by which Taylor means that we
can attribute “purposes, desires, aversions” to them.
• Of course, we can attribute these sorts of things indirectly to
machines, but a person is something to which these things are
attributed “originally” to them, not derivatively, relative to our
interests.
• Obviously, this view handles the agency side of things, but what
about the response side?
• Taylor insists that it does, but only by shifting the account of
response away from representationalism towards “mattering.”
• That is, it’s responsiveness must be understood as originating in
what matters to it.
The Practical Person
• As we’ve already recognized, one difficulty for many
traditional accounts of agency is the problem of drawing
a line between persons and non-persons.
• Any line that we’ve drawn has seem to include some things
that we don’t want to consider persons and exclude some
that we do.
• For Taylor, this problem is explained by a failure to
properly distinguish between person agents and other
sorts of agents (like Oscar).
Persons vs. Agents
•
Taylor identifies two features of the epistemological account of
personhood which explain why it cannot make the proper
distinction between person agents and non-person agents.
1. Representationalism assumes the independence of that which is
represented, but that clearly is inadequate as an account of our
emotions. Emotions are lived only in reference to what matters
to us; they cannot be independent in the way objects of
consciousness are thought to be (279c1).
2. The epistemological model tends to locate the relevant
difference in scale, but consideration of the emotional
dimensions of our experience reveals, “that there are matters of
significance for human beings which are peculiarly human, and
have no analogue with animals” (279c1).
The Limits of
Representationalism
• There’s a clear advantage to the practical account over
the epistemological account, but as Taylor goes on to
argue, the matter is even clearer when we consider the
nature of morality.
• As he specifies it, morality requires awareness that there
are standards or choice and behavior, by reference to
which things are worthy or unworthy of being done.
• For Taylor, a moral agent is one for whom these things
matter. That is, like with our emotions, our standards
make necessary and immediate reference to the particular
and embedded features of our experience.
What Matters, Morally?
• In contrast to the natural scientific (fundamentally an
epistemological) account of our consciousness and our
actions, which ignores the way things matter or have
significance for us, our behavior is ultimately a matter of
identifying the properly explanatory antecedent features.
• The obvious advantage of this approach is that it seems to
offer an “absolute” account, that is, one that exhausts the
relationship between situation and response (283c1-2).
• What it misses, obviously, is the complex reflexive
relationship between significance and action.
• Cf. example of shame on pp. 284-5.
What Features?
• As you might expect, the epistemological, significancefree model cashes out in an account of moral deliberation
which emphasizes the capacity of a moral agent to
disinterestedly deliberate in the face of moral conflict and
choose to act in way that satisfies some contextindependent moral principle.
• The practical, significance dependent model, on the other
hand, is going to focus on an understanding of moral
agency and the characteristics relevant to mattersensitivity (a virtue-theoretical approach).
Two Models of Practical
Deliberation