Abstract
Kevin Mulligan has argued that intuitionism about values is a powerful tool to explain, among other things, “the distinction between what I ought to do and what I must do (practical necessity)” (Mulligan, Leben mit Gefühlen: Emotionen, Werte und ihre Kritik, pp 141–164, 2009). The distinction concerns the difference between moral norms, conceived of as external reasons of acting, and personal norms, conceived of as internal reasons. The kind of intuition the argument relies on is affective and characterized in terms of “being struck by value”. One crucial assumption is that affectivity subsumes epistemic states (non-reactive knowledge) and motivational states (reactive emotions). Value feeling is presented as a kind of non-propositional knowledge that can and often does acquaint us with what we value most, with the inner norms or “vocations” that constitute the person we are. The aim of the present paper is to explore to what extent this specific view on personhood that links the knowledge-emotion-value relation of affectivity (KEV) to a personal property of inner normativity (IN) can modify or improve theories of so-called social persons or plural persons. In a first step, I will outline the criteria established for “plural persons” by their advocates. On the basis of these criteria, I will then discuss some reasons for the claim that “plural persons” do have inner norms of the kind mentioned before. In a third step, I intend to show how the KEVIN account interferes with some of the criteria for “plural persons”, mainly because of its emphasis on affective knowledge. I conclude that accepting KEVIN either leads to abandoning the claim that plural persons have inner norms or requires the criteria for plural persons to be modified.
“The whole doctrine of personalism […] would be ultimately a matter of indifference to ethics if it did not indirectly foster the axiological prejudice […] that the higher values attach to the persons of the higher order […] but to man only the lowest moral values.”N. Hartmann
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Notes
- 1.
Gilbert sometimes says that the social unit generated in a joint commitment might properly be called a “person”: “Quite generally, if Anne and Ben are jointly committed, they are jointly committed to doing something as a body, or if you like, as a single unit or “person”. Doing something as a body, in the relevant sense, is … a matter of “all acting in such a way to constitute a body that does it”. Doing is here construed very broadly. People may be jointly committed to accepting (and pursuing) a certain goal as a body. They may be jointly committed in believing that such and such as a body (Gilbert 1999, p. 147, my emphasis). On the other hand, Gilbert uses the qualification “personal” to distinguish individual members’ attitudes, states and acts from those of the “plural subject”, which seems to suggest that plural subjects are not persons.
- 2.
The discontinuity claim suggests that all predicates F applied to groups are per se “collective”, no matter whether they are semantically collective such as playing a symphony or semantically distributive such as going for a walk. It suggests that application of a concept to a group implies the concept’s inevitably falling in the scope of the operator “cum” or “together”, and that this cum- or together-“modality” inhibits any distributive reference of the concept.
- 3.
In the following, I focus on the axiological personalism developed by Max Scheler. For an overview of different strands of personalism see Bengtsson 2006.
- 4.
In his writings, Hartmann uses the word “Personalität” for the property of being a person, which has been translated as “personality” in the English translation of the Ethics. Since “personality” is commonly used to refer to one’s individual person or character (in German: “Persönlichkeit”), I will use this term only in the latter sense and refer to the general property of being a person by the term “personhood”. Quotations from Hartmann’s Ethics, however, contain the term “personality” wherever the translator chose to use it.
- 5.
Husserl 1989, pp. 20–41.
- 6.
Hartmann expresses similar views on the essential relationship between vocation and the human condition when he characterizes man as the “appointed mediator” (“der berufene Mittler”) between the “realm of reality” and the “realm of the values”: Only man has the “clairaudience” (“Hellhörigkeit”) needed to “discern” the “calling” of values, and only man has the ability to realize their “demands”. This “Weltberuf” of human beings implies, on the one hand, their having the absolute “freedom of intention attached to ethos”, and, on the other hand, their being in the bonds of an “ethos of participation and attending to values” that is “akin to the ethos of love” (Hartmann 1949, pp. 159–174).
- 7.
Scheler considers the ideas of an “individual ethos of a people and a nation” and the idea of a “peculiar ‘national conscience’” as equivalent (Scheler 1973a, p. 513, note 155).
- 8.
This is compatible with the fact that ethos reveals her “missions” to a person and that mission disclosing is often positive (e.g. “You/I must design functionally perfect buildings!”).
- 9.
Collective conscience so conceived is explicable in terms of an aggregate attitude that concedes more weight to the attitudes of some particular individuals such as experts or a dictator. These cases require that constraints on aggregation functions such as anonymity and/or systematicity be relaxed (List and Pettit 2011, pp. 42–58).
- 10.
The intimate person is incommunicable and non shareable, i.e. absolutely alone, and this “absolute solitude […] expresses an indestructible ( unaufhebbare) essential relation of a negative kind among finite persons” (op. cit. 562). The genuine separateness of persons encompasses the aspects of essential individuality on the one hand and of absolute privacy on the other hand. “Even in our greatest intimacy” with another person, “we know a priori” of the absolute privacy of her intimate person “both that it necessarily exists and that it must remain absolutely inaccessible to any sort of community of experience. The realization that as finite beings we can never see right into one another’s hearts […] is given as an essential feature in all experience of fellow-feeling (not excluding spontaneous love)” (Scheler 1954, p. 66).
- 11.
Scheler uses alternatively the notions “social person” and “collective person” to designate the non intimate twin of a full person. Since the latter expression is also used to denote personal social units, I suggest to use “social person” exclusively to denote the twin aspect of being the unified center of social acts, and “collective person” to denote social units having the status of persons.
- 12.
Scheler’s account of the social person is not consistent. On the one hand, the social person is defined in terms of being the author of social acts, on the other hand we read that “the social person first appears as the bearer of a peculiar group of values” (Scheler 1973a, p. 566), whereby “values of the person” are not identical with “values of acts” (op. cit. 101). Given that the person “exists solely in the pursuance of his acts” (op. cit. 25), values of acts must, however, be intimately related to values of the person. One such intimate relation is manifest in the fact that the values of the social person “‘exact’ and require specific acts of recognition, esteem, praise, etc.”, to the extent that the degree of violation of honor, for example, “is determined by the absence of the social acts” correlative to honor, and not by the “social consequences” that violations of her honor have for the person, nor “by the degree to which one ‘feels’ one’s honor violated” (op. cit. 566).
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Acknowledgements
I am deeply indebted to Kevin Mulligan whose extensive advice helped improve an earlier version of this paper. Knowing Kevin strongly supports my belief that the ethos of an institution, whatever it might be, is participative, i.e. non-contingently continuous with the individual ethos of its constitutive members. Thank you, Kevin, for your commitment and care! I also wish to express my gratefulness to Natalja Deng and Anne Reboul for helpful comments.
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Konzelmann Ziv, A. (2014). Knowledge, Emotion, Value and Inner Normativity: KEVIN Probes Collective Persons. In: Reboul, A. (eds) Mind, Values, and Metaphysics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05146-8_5
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