Abstract
Few moral criticisms cut deeper than the allegation that one is not being treated as a person. Sometimes these criticisms give voice to our indignation at the ways in which others fail to accord us the basic respect to which all human beings are entitled. People are not mere objects to be manipulated to serve one’s personal or other ends, and if we are not deficient in self-respect, we resent others’ failure to acknowledge our equal worth as persons and to treat us accordingly. But using another is only one way of failing to treat another as a person. Complaints that one is not being treated as a person are frequently lodged against the institutionalized practices of modern bureaucratic society, for example, and, typically, the way in which bureaucracies fail to respect persons is through their impersonality. We may feel that, even if we are not being used, we are not being treated as the particular persons we are, which is how we are entitled to be treated at least sometimes by some people. Treating others as particular persons may just be what treating others as persons requires, in some instances.
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Blustein, J. (2004). Self-Conceptions, Agency, and the Value of Individual Persons. In: Thomasma, D.C., Weisstub, D.N. (eds) The Variables of Moral Capacity. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 21. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2552-5_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2552-5_2
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