CRÉ members welcome Samuel Dishaw (University of Louvain), who will give us a presentation entitled “Justifiability and the Other’s Point of View”.

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Abstract

Other people deserve our respect. But what is it to respect another person? According to the contractualist, to respect another person is to be moved to act only in ways that we could justify to them. Other influential accounts of respect share the same structure: respect is understood in terms of a hypothetical conversation. I argue that these accounts all leave out something crucial: a concern for the other person’s actual attitudes about our conduct towards them. After motivating such actualism about respect, I defend it against two important objections: that it invites moral conformism, and that it essentially self-regarding. Finally, I argue that actualism about respect illuminates one of the central insights of contractualism itself: that morality concerns our relations to other people. For any relation, no matter how thin, is sensitive to the actual rather than hypothetical attitudes of its members towards it and each other.