Valuing Persons: A Philosophical Inquiry into Love, Pride, Shame, and Contempt

FAIN: FT-58764-11

Michelle Mason Bizri
University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN 55455-2009)

Persons are both valuers and valued. We love cherished friends, take pride in our accomplishments, feel shame for our petty cruelties and, perhaps, contempt for the petty cruelties of others. These person-focused attitudes are forms of valuing (and disvaluing) ourselves and others that demand a place in a philosophical moral psychology. Addressing this demand, I question the place of such attitudes in the emotional repertoire of the mature moral agent who embodies prominent consequentialist or Kantian commitments in moral theory. The result, Valuing Persons, is a book that uses examples drawn from pubic life and art to conceptualize these attitudes in a compelling way: proposing conditions on their identification, defending standards for their justification, and probing their implications for moral theory. I seek funding to enable me to complete a chapter of the book on love and, hence, to advance our understanding of the forms of valuing and disvaluing rightly central to morality.