The Moral Implications of Being One Among Others (II): Persons, Groups and the Principle of Personal Worth

Abstract

AbstractI articulate and defend The Principle of Personal Worth, which holds that persons, viewed in relational terms, are more morally worthwhile than nonpersons, including those groups—nations, religions, tribes, cultures—to which they belong. We may identify—or be identified—with one or more such groups, but our actual identities as persons depend on the relationships we form and maintain, where these relationships are not limited by or bound to any group, collective, association or institution. To think that they are is to retreat to the mistaken view that our identities are purely qualitative, and that our sense of morality, equity and justice is bound up with the groups and institutions with which we associate, thereby exacerbating our natural tendency toward “groupishness” and the destructive “us and them” tribal mentality evidenced in many societies and party-political systems. I attribute this view to such “communitarian” philosophers as Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Kwame Anthony Appiah. In contrast, I embrace a sense of community which complements the relational conception of persons. I also reflect on notions of community which rely on religion (Jonathan Sacks) and the role of the state in establishing relatively small, localized, and diverse communities (Raghuram Rajan). I then turn to the account of identity offered by Francis Fukuyama, which builds on the Platonic idea of thymos in relation to contemporary thinking about dignity, honour, and pride. I argue that these ideals remain questionable in so far as they, too, rely on a qualitative conception of identity, suggesting that they be understood, instead, in the context of seeing persons as (each) being one among others. I take a similar approach to contemporary—and contentious—discussions about “identity politics”, “intersectionality”, and “soul-blindness”, all of which risk committing the double error of not seeing the qualitative personhood of the other, and of not seeing a this—a unique individual person—at all! I conclude the chapter with an appendix on “collective intentionality”.