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Show Chapter VIII. First-Person Anomaly 336 Despite the suspicion that our beneficent act may have been motivated by unacceptably self-interested or self-aggrandizing considerations, Kant says, we convince ourselves that our action was motivated by ethical principle rather than personal politics. Let us take an example. We have a moral obligation to respect the uniqueness and singularity of each individual we encounter. We have an obligation to recognize them as who they are and treat them accordingly: to not confuse our life partner with our father or mother, not treat salesclerks or other service providers as though they were inanimate instruments of our will, not view friends and colleagues merely as service providers. This obligation is entailed by Kant's fourth formulation of the categorical imperative, that we are to treat others' humanity as an end in itself (G, Ak. 429). We may sincerely wish to live in a world in which everyone's uniqueness is respected. We may deeply believe that human beings should not be treated as though they were prefabricated items on an assembly line. These convictions naturally assume special salience when we ourselves are so treated; when we feel insufficiently acknowledged or valued for the particular combination of needs, goals, talents, and idiosyncrasies that define us. We may experience this failure of basic regard in a wide variety of circumstances. At the trivial end of the spectrum, there is the customer service representative who cuts off our question before we have finished asking it with an irrelevant formulaic answer that fails to address it. At the serious end is the friend who rewards us with approval when we satisfy his legitimate needs, but resists the reciprocal obligation to satisfy ours. Both kinds of mistreatment and all of those in between are painful, but not only because they devalue us morally. They are painful because they fail on a more elemental, epistemological level to see us clearly, and so fail even to meet the fundamental requirements for genuine intersubjective communication. The resulting feeling, of interacting with oneself alone in a vacuum, is extremely unpleasant. Yet we often treat others in this way, applying convenient preconceptions or behavioral formulas that obscure another's singularity. We may not interrupt our interlocutor with a formulaic answer. But we may still call it forth at the appropriate pause in the conversation. We may not overtly resist our reciprocal obligation to satisfy another's legitimate needs. But we may still chafe under it silently, or find ways to subvert or evade it. In such cases we implicitly judge respect for the other's uniqueness to be inconvenient, inefficient, or inconsistent with the promotion of our own best interests. Despite the frequency with which we may make such morally partial judgments, we generally are not eager to acknowledge that we do; and indeed may evince genuine surprise, or even heartfelt outrage, at the mere suggestion. When such judgments nevertheless intrude on the rational © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
