Philosophy 224 Responding to the Challenge

Taylor, “The Concept of a Person” 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.

The Person is a ‘Respondent Agent’ 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.

Two Views 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.

The Epistemological Person 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 Practical 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.

Persons vs. Agents 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).

The Limits of Representationalism 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).

What Matters, Morally? 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 Features? 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

Two Models of Practical Deliberation As you might expect, the epistemological, significance- free 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 context- independent 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 matter- sensitivity (a virtue-theoretical approach).