1 For helpful discussions of the different types of respect, see Darwall, Stephen ‘Two Kinds of Respects,’ Ethics 88 (1977) 36–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hudson, Stephen ‘The Nature of Respect,’ Social Theory and Practice 6, 1 (1980) 69–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 As I note later, even if we learn about our obligations to persons by learning about our obligations to other human beings — even if a human being is a paradigm case of a person — it is an open question who qualifies as a person. In particular, nothing I say in this paper rules out the possibility that certain nonhuman animals have the same moral claim on us as other members of our own species.

3 I will have occasion to stress this point again later. As Joseph Raz has noted, the duty to give ‘due weight’ to the interests of others corresponds to a very abstract right, from which ‘nothing very concrete about how people should be treated follows … without additional premisses. This explains,’ Raz continues, ‘why [the right] is invoked not as a claim for any specific benefit, but as an assertion of status. To say “I have a right to have my interest taken into account” is like saying “I too am a person“’ (Raz, Joseph The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1986], 190)Google Scholar.

4 According to John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, for example, ‘Justice as fairness rests on the assumption of a natural right of men and women to equality of concern and respect, a right they possesses not by virtue of birth or characteristics or merit or excellence, but simply as human beings’ (Dworkin, Ronald Taking Rights Seriously [Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1971], 182)Google Scholar. Some philosophers have criticized the assumption that all persons are of equal worth as persons. Their criticisms often address particular egalitarian claims. But they sometimes defend quite sweeping anti-egalitarian conclusions, as, for example, when Louis P. Pojman concludes: ‘it is hard to believe that humans are equal in any way at all’ (Pojman, Louis P. ‘On Equal Human Worth: A Critique of Contemporary Egalitarianism,’ in Equality: Selected Readings, Pojman, Louis P. and Westmoreland, Robert eds. [New York: Oxford University Press 1997], 294)Google Scholar. I think such strong antiegalitarianism misses the mark. As I will show, we can make sense of the moral equality of persons without relying on the dogma of ‘a religious tradition’ (‘On Equal Human Worth,’ 296), and without implying that a person has moral values ‘merely as the logical subject of which qualities can be predicated’ (Kekes, John Facing Evil [Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990], 112)Google Scholar.

Perhaps one of the reasons why critics tend to overlook the moral significance of the subject as evaluator is that they are insufficiently sensitive to the distinction between the metaethical claim that each person is a source of (apparent, nonrelative) values, and so an end-in-herself, and the normative claim that each person's ends are of equal importance. Though the former claim is, I believe, relevant to how we ought to treat one another, it does not imply that everyone ought to be treated equally, nor even that the interests of each make an equally strong claim on us. It does not ground ‘a set of thick natural rights’ (290), nor even ‘equal prima facie rights to freedom and well-being’ (290). (For a third critique of moral egalitarianism, see Thomas, Hurka Perfectionism [New York: Oxford University Press 1993], 161–3; see also n.3.)Google Scholar

5 S.I. Benn, for example, explicitly endorses the view that there is nothing more to respecting a person than attributing certain rights to him and refraining from violating these rights: ‘Accepting him as respect-worthy means that one attributes to him certain rights of a very general nature; actually respecting him as a person means attributing such rights to him and acting in accordance with them’ (Benn, S.I. ‘Privacy and Respect for Persons: A Reply,’ Australasian Journal of Philosophy 58 [1980], 55)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 See Dillon, Robin ‘Respect and Care: Toward Moral Integration,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 22 (1992) 105–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also other works on respect cited in these notes. In a recent paper Dillon focuses attention on the sense in which self-respect is a matter of how one experiences oneself. (See Dillon, ‘Self-Respect: Moral, Emotional, Political,’ Ethics 107 [1997] 226–49.)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. Paton, H.J. (New York: Harper & Row 1964), 68–9, 78-9, 128Google Scholar; and Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Beck, Lewis White (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1956), ch. 3Google Scholar (‘The Incentives of Pure Practical Reason’), 74-92. Note that the word typically translated as ‘respect’ is ‘Achtung.’

8 Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Bernard, J.H. (New York: Macmillan 1951), Book 2Google Scholar (‘Analytic of the Sublime’), 82-106. For an explicit reference to the link between the aesthetic and the moral, see 104-6. For another such link in the Groundwork, see 89-91.

9 Kant identifies the sublimity of persons with the dignity of persons. But Aurel Kolnai seems right when he writes: ‘What is dignified is not necessarily sublime, and Dignity is not just a lesser degree of sublimity. Our response to the sublime has something awe-struck about it, as if the presence of the sublime edified us but at the same time shocked or crushed us. Whereas, when faced with the quality of Dignity as such we certainly also feel edified but not so much “crushed,” overwhelmed or even deeply excited as, rather, tranquilized…’ (Kolnai, Aurel ‘Dignity,’ Royal Institute of Philosophy 5 [1976], 55)Google Scholar.

10 Kant, Critique of Judgment, ‘The feeling of the sublime is … a feeling of pain arising from the want of accordance between the aesthetical estimation of magnitude formed by the imagination and the estimation of the same formed by reason. There is at the same time a pleasure thus excited, arising from the correspondence with rational ideas of this very judgment of the inadequacy of our greatest faculty of sense, in so far as it is a law for us to strive after these ideas’ (96). Again: ‘That the mind be attuned to feel the sublime postulates a susceptibility of the mind for ideas. For in the very inadequacy of nature to these latter, and thus only by presupposing them and by straining the imagination to use nature as a schema for them, is to be found that which is terrible to sensibility and yet is attractive’ (104-5).

11 In ‘The Ethics of Respect for Persons’ William Frankena claims that ‘Respect for persons in its ethical or moral sense does not involve having awe of persons or regarding them as sacred or holy’ (Frankena, William K. ‘The Ethics of Respect for Persons,’ Philosophical Topics 14,2 [1986], 154)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The burden of this paper is to argue that we can better understand respect for persons in its ethical or moral sense once we see it as the consequence of a natural, nonmoral, awe-filled encounter with persons.

12 Kant, Groundwork, chs. 2 and 3, 74–131Google Scholar; and Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Beck, Lewis White (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1956), Part I, Book I, Chapter 1, section 1, 17–19Google Scholar

13 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 76Google Scholar

14 Ibid., 75-8, 80-2

15 Sartre, Jean-Paul Being and Nothingness, trans. Barnes, Hazel E. (New York: Pocket Books 1956)Google Scholar, part 3, chapter 1 (‘Being-for-others’), 301-400

16 Ibid., 384

17 Ibid., 341-4. For a similar point in the recent ‘analytic’ literature, see Nagel, Thomas ‘Subjective and Objective,’ chapter 14 in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1979), 196–213Google Scholar.

18 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 76Google Scholar

19 For a careful analysis of shame, see Taylor, Gabriele Pride, Shame, and Guilt: Emotions of Self-assessment (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1985)Google Scholar. See also Williams, Bernard Shame and Necessity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1993), chapter 4, 75–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 386-7Google Scholar

21 Ibid., 350

22 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 220Google Scholar.

23 In making this claim (and developing it in the pages that follow), I am in disagreement with Arnold Isenberg, according to whom ‘modesty and humility are based on the recognition of inherent and inevitable limitations, whilst shame is an experience of weakness and inferiority’ (Isenberg, Arnold ‘Natural Pride and Natural Shame,’ in Explaining Emotions, Rorty, Amelie ed. [Berkeley, CA: UCLA Press 1980], 362)Google Scholar. In rejecting Isenberg's contrast, I do not wish to reject his point about modesty and humility. To the contrary, the force of my argument is that reflection on the lesson of shame can prompt modesty and humility about one's limitations.

24 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 384Google Scholar

25 The expression is from Williams, Bernard ‘Internal and External Reasons,’ in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981), 101–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 With this claim, I am taking issue with those who, like John Kekes, believe that in order to feel shame, ‘it is essential that we ourselves should accept the standard [we fall short of], otherwise we would not feel badly about falling short of it.’ That is, I am challenging the assumption that we must accept the standard before we feel ashamed of failing to live up to it (Kekes, John ‘Shame and Moral Progress,’ Midwest Studies in Philosophy 13 [1988], 283)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In so doing, I am making a point that Anthony O'Hear has raised against Rawls's account of shame, viz., ‘one can be shamed into accepting new [standards]’ (O'Hear, Anthony ‘Guilt and Shame as Moral Concepts,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 77 [1976-77], 79)Google Scholar.

27 As Agnes Heller puts it in The Power of Shame, shame ‘has played an enormous part in the process of socialization’ (Heller, Agnes The Power of Shame: A Rational Perspective [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1985], 6)Google Scholar. She also notes that only domestic animals who have been ‘confronted with the norms of human culture’ are capable of feeling shame (5).

28 Burnyeat, Myles ‘Aristotle on Learning to be Good,’ in Essays on Aristotle's Ethics, Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press 1980), 78Google Scholar

29 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 348Google Scholar

30 As John Rawls notes in A Theory of Justice, ‘Unless we feel that our endeavors are honored by [other people], it is difficult if not impossible for us to maintain the conviction that our ends are worth advancing’ (Rawls, John A Theory of Justice, [Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press 1971], 178)Google Scholar.

31 Thus, she might resemble God: her personal desires might play no role in determining which considerations she takes most seriously in deciding what to do. Alternatively, like some beasts, she might be too stupid to act for reasons. In note #35, I suggest a third sort of abnormality that could enable a moral agent to be shameless.

32 Rawls notes that if a child does ‘love and trust his parents, then, once he has given in to temptation, he is disposed to share their attitude toward his misdemeanors’ (A Theory of Justice, 465). I do not mean to suggest that love and trust are irrelevant to moral development. As Rawls himself notes, ‘many kinds of learning ranging from reinforcement and classical conditioning to highly abstract reasoning and the refined perception of exemplars enter into [the] development [of a moral view]’ (A Theory of Justice, 454). I am simply interested in identifying one factor of central importance to this development. In particular, I am suggesting that the ‘disposition’ to which Rawls refers depends on the child's capacity to experience himself as an object of appraisal, whose actions may really be wrong, even though they do not seem wrong from his own point of view. Lacking this capacity, a child might want to avoid displeasing his parents, and, as Rawls says, he might even ‘desire to become the sort of person that they are’ (465). But it would probably not occur to him that, regardless of what he desires — and regardless of what sort of person he becomes — his parents may well be right.

33 In other words, with Kekes, I reject the view that ‘those who are incapable of [shame] cannot be seriously committed to any standard, so they are apt to lack moral restraint’ (Kekes, ‘Shame and Moral Progress,’ 282). That is, though I believe that an incapacity for shame will almost always prevent someone from committing herself to a moral standard, I do not see why we should assume that this association reflects a necessary connection. One person who seems to make this assumption is Virgil Aldrich. In ‘An Ethics of Shame’ he writes: ‘you can get a thief to agree that stealing is improvident, dangerous, etc., but unless that makes him feel some degree of deterrent shame, it will not for him be morally wrong’ (Aldrich, Virgil ‘An Ethics of Shame,’ Ethics 50,1 [1939], 60)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. So, too, according to Rawls, ‘being moved by ends and ideals of excellence implies a liability to humiliation and shame, and an absence of a liability to humiliation and shame implies a lack of such ends and ideals’ (A Theory of Justice, 489).

34 Many people have noted that even though shame does not seem to require another person, it does seem to require another point of view. Thus, Susan Miller notes that ‘the particular type of misery-about-the-self that gives shame its distinctive feel does seem to depend on some sense, however vague, of the self standing before another or potentially visible another’ (Miller, Susan The Shame Experience, [1985], 32)Google Scholar. And according to Taylor, the ‘metaphors of an audience and being seen’ ‘reflect the structural features of the agent's becoming aware of the discrepancy between her assumptions about her state or action and a possible detached observer-description of this state or action, and of her further being aware that she ought not to be in a position where she could be seen’ (Pride, Shame, and Guilt, 66). O'Hear suggests that this experience only makes sense if ‘there is a sense in which the individual concerned is playing two roles, judger and judged’ (‘Guilt and Shame as Moral Concepts,’ 77). It seems to me, however, that this divided consciousness is a unique feature of the one-person case. In the two-person cases (and in the cases where someone simply believes or imagines that she is observed by another), the person who feels shame must transcend her own perspective in order to appreciate its inadequacy; but for this, she need not actually occupy an additional perspective; she need merely experience herself as an object from this perspective.

35 This suggests another way in which a moral agent might be sufficiently unlike the rest of us to be free of shame: she might be incapable of identifying herself with the very point of view whose inadequacy she acknowledges.

36 In reaching this conclusion, I am, again, in opposition to Isenberg, who, with Kekes, thinks that it would be a good thing if we did not experience shame in response to our recognition that we have failed to live up to some standard (Kekes, ‘Shame and Moral Progress,’ 282–95)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In defending his assertion that ‘every shame, however circumscribed, must go’ (‘Natural Pride and Natural Shame,’ 369), Isenberg focuses on cases in which someone is ashamed of a trait she cannot get rid of (e.g., a physical deformity, or stupidity), rather than on cases in which someone is ashamed of something she has done. I refer to his discussion of these latter cases in note #46.

37 There are many theories of this sort. Those that appeal to sympathy have their roots in Hume. Those that appeal to self-love have their roots in Hobbes.

38 Note that, strictly speaking, Nietzsche and Freud's accounts are also compatible with this possibility. Yet each philosopher suggests that once our errors are exposed, we can see that there is no independent reason to think that there really are moral facts of any kind. They offer their error theories as critiques of the possibility of genuine categorical imperatives — not just as critiques of our reasons for believing that there are such imperatives.

39 When she introduces her own defense of objective, ‘shared’ reasons, Christine Korsgaard writes, ‘If you are going to obligate me I must be conscious of you. You must be able to intrude on my reflections — you must be able to get under my skin’ (Korsgaard, Sources of Normativity [New York: Penguin Books 1997], 136)Google Scholar. To explain how this is possible, and to justify the moral status I grant you when you get under my skin, Korsgaard appeals, not to Sartre and shame, but to Wittgenstein and the argument against a private language. I do not think her strategy works, and one reason why it cannot work is precisely because it lacks the resources to explain how your evaluations can get under my skin in a way that does not depend on my own personal evaluations, and the point of view they constitute. This problem is connected, I think, to Korsgaard's exclusive focus on the practical reasoner as autonomous agent: if I am right, then we cannot recognize categorical reasons for action unless we can experience ourselves as the (passive) objects of someone else's valueconferring activity.

40 As Mackie famously notes, a person's ends are, for him, ‘to-be-pursued’ (Mackie, J.L. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong [Harmondsworth: Penguin 1977], 40)Google Scholar. Similarly, Heidegger notes that, according to Nietzsche, ‘to esteem something, to hold it worthwhile, also means to be directed toward it. Such direction toward has already assumed an “aim.” Thus the essence of value has an inner relation to the essence of aim’ (Heidegger, Martin Nietzsche: Nihilism [San Francisco, Harper & Row 1982], 15–16)Google Scholar.

41 The imperatives to which shame calls our attention are thus of two sorts: (1) the requirement that we take others’ points of view seriously and (2) the requirements that follow from taking their points of view seriously. The former requirement is ‘categorical’ in the strong sense that it does not depend on what desires, etc. anyone happens to have. The latter is ‘categorical’ in the weaker sense that it does not depend on the desires, etc. of the person to whom it applies. I am grateful to a question from Gideon Yaffee which forced me to clarify this point. (Again, requirement [1], not requirement [2] is the focus of this paper. See note #3.)

42 Hill, Thomas ‘Respect for Humanity,’ Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Peterson, Grethe B. ed. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press 1997), 4Google Scholar

43 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 347-54Google Scholar

44 As Susan Miller puts it, ‘shame consists of an experiencing of the self as diminished’ (‘The Shame Experience,’ 32). People who have been asked to draw a cartoon depicting someone who becomes ashamed draw someone becoming ‘smaller in size’ (34).

45 In a thoughtful discussion of shame, Deigh, John reminds us of ‘times when things were going well and we were somewhat inflated by the good opinion we had of ourselves, when suddenly, quite unexpectedly, we did something that gave the lie to our favorable self-assessment, and we were shocked to see ourselves in a far less flattering light’ (‘Shame and Self-Esteem’; Ethics 93 [1983], 226)Google Scholar. Our self-conceit can also be struck down, however, in cases involving evaluations that are not self-directed, but which merely presuppose the adequacy of our own point of view.

46 Isenberg concedes that when we feel ashamed of something, we often ‘go on … to weigh and measure, chart and explore’ (‘Natural Pride and Natural Shame,’ 375). It is not clear to me whether he credits shame with prompting this reflection. Insofar as it has this effect, it does ‘serve [a] useful purpose,’ despite Isenberg's suggestions to the contrary (‘Natural Pride and Natural Shame,’ 374).

47 For most of us, human beings are unique in their capacity to apply norms. This is, I believe, what makes it so difficult for so many of us to regard the interests of non-human animals as making claims on us as strong and compelling as the interests of other members of our own species. For all I have said, however, those of us who are incapable of being shamed by the gaze of certain nonhuman animals have the same sort of handicap as the shameless sociopath.

48 Indeed, as Martha Nussbaum has reminded me, until recently, respect for persons as such was a pretty rare phenomenon.

49 Dillon, ‘Self-Respect: Moral, Emotional, and Political.’ Dillon suggests that a self-relation she calls ‘basal self-respect’ is the basis of our sense of our own intrinsic worth. It seems to me that the ultimate ground of our sense that we are intrinsically valuable is the self-love that every healthy human being shares with every other healthy animal, i.e., the primitive assumption that one is worth caring for, and so, that one's basic desires to eat, groom, find shelter, etc. are worth making an effort to satisfy. If this is a different relation than Dillon has in mind, then it is an even more basic one.

50 There seems to be another sort of pleasure associated with the recognition of one's own limitations — a pleasure Aldrich associates with shame: ‘To be genuinely ashamed is already to be penitent and with no grudge against having been found out, despite all appearances and hurtful practical consequences. Indeed, it is often accompanied by a sense of deeper insight and, therefore, gratitude. Thus only is one “converted.” None of these considerations hold for mere embarrassment or annoyance’ (‘An Ethics of Shame,’ 60).

51 In other words, I reject Carl Cranor's claim that ‘one cannot respect another for no reason at all’ (‘Toward a Theory of Respect for Persons,’ American Philosophical Quarterly 12,4 [1975], 311).

52 Gibbard, Allan Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1990), 138Google Scholar

53 The extent to which human capacities can function in ways that are independent of their evolutionary origins is, I think, nicely illustrated by the human capacity to hear (and appreciate) melodies and harmonies. Whatever evolutionary pressures produced this marvelous capacity, they surely were not pressures to appreciate musical compositions that were written long since the capacity developed! Yet this does not rule out the possibility that some musical compositions really do have the complex structure we hear them as having — nor that we are deluded in thinking that we are able to detect musical beauty. The point is a familiar one: in seeking the natural basis of our ability to ‘appreciate music' — or our ‘sense of humor’ — or any other ‘recognitional capacity’ — we are not thereby seeking an account of why these are not genuine abilities, after all. As Bernard Williams notes in a recent review of Nagel's, Thomas The Last Word, ‘What we want is naturalism without reductionism. We want not to deny the capacities we undoubtedly have, but to explain them…’ (New York Review of Books (19 Nov., 1998), 143).Google Scholar

54 See note # 3.

55 It is very difficult to say anything very precise about what this amounts to. Clearly, ‘taking someone else's reasons seriously’ requires an exercise of imagination that is ‘at least temporarily’ transformative, while nonetheless preserving the distinction between one's own point of view and that of the other.

56 Of course, one may have ordinary substantive reasons for dismissing certain evaluative judgments as mistaken or irrelevant. My point, again, is not a normative one. (As far as I know, however, there are no decisive considerations in favor of assuming that every evaluation attributable to someone else merits dismissal; and even if reasons could be found, they would not be reasons for dismissing the person herself, since, after all, she is capable of changing her point of view.)

57 Though, again, having taken these other verdicts into account, she may conclude that they do not give her a sufficient reason to alter her own evaluations.

58 On this account, we are justified in taking other points of view seriously because we are committed to discovering what we have reason to do. Thus, though these other points of view are nonstrategically relevant in the sense that the evaluations associated with them have a value (for us) independent of our own particular evaluations, and though we experience the nonstrategic relevance of other persons for no reason, what justifies the resulting belief that other persons have a nonstrategic relevance is our commitment to discovering what we have reason to do. This might seem to imply that, on my account, persons are not ends in themselves, after all — since, after all, their value is a function of our own interest in figuring out what we have reason to do. But this basic interest is a necessary condition for the possibility of our apprehending anything as a reason, since if we don't really care about what we have reason to do, nothing can strike us as giving us a reason to do anything. Accordingly, even things we value for their own sake (as ends) owe the normative status they have for us to our commitment as practical reasoners.

59 Buss, Sarah ‘What Practical Reasoning Must Be if We Act for Our Own Reasons,’ Australasian Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming, December, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Hampton, Jean The Authority of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998), especially 144, 162–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dreier, James ‘Humean Doubts about the Practical Justification of Morality,’ in Ethics and Practical Reason, Cullity, Garrett and Gaut, Berys eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1997), 96Google Scholar; Korsgaard, Sources of Normativity, 163-4Google Scholar. For a very interesting discussion of hypothetical reasons for action, see Korsgaard, ‘The Normativity of Instrumental Reason,’ in Ethics and Practical Reason, 215-54Google Scholar.

60 Cavell, Stanley The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1979), 435Google Scholar

61 Eliot, George Middlemarch (London: Penguin Books 1965), 243Google Scholar

62 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 495Google Scholar

63 Ibid., 496

64 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 435Google Scholar

65 See Noddings, Nel Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press 1984)Google Scholar; Dillon, ‘Respect and Care.’

66 Eliot, Middlemarch, 226Google Scholar

67 Thanks to William Buss, Stephen Darwall, Brian Kierland, Maggie Little, Stephen Menn, Elijah Millgram, Martha Nussbaum, Gabriel Richardson, Connie Rosati, Gideon Yaffee, two referees for this journal, and members of the philosophy departments at McGill University, York University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Missouri at St. Louis, where earlier versions of this paper were presented.