Colloquium Lecture: Cheshire Calhoun (Arizona State University), "Public Kindnesses and Valuing Persons as Persons"

Abstract: There’s an upsurge in cultural attention to kindnesses to strangers and mere acquaintances.  Are there reasons other than, or in addition to, the reasons favoring general beneficence and personal relationship kindnesses, that face-to-face kindnesses to strangers and acquaintances matter? I explore their connection with valuing, treating, and attitudinally recognizing persons as persons. Rather than taking “valuing persons as persons” to be an exclusively moral notion, I suggest that to value persons as persons is to value them under three distinct descriptors: as bearers of moral personhood, as irreplaceable individuals who are the particular persons they are, and as individuals with whom we are in society. The first two notions are familiar from the literature on recognition-respect and on personal love. I introduce the last to illuminate the way everyday social interactions between strangers and acquaintances communicate a distinctive form of recognizing persons' value as persons; I suggest that the companion valuing attitude is friendly non-indifference; I conclude with some comments on greetings and chattings.

Free and Open to the Public