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.A natural response to this argument may be to agree that if the pre-supposition that addressees can freely acknowledge and make authorita-tive demands of themselves from such a common standpoint is part ofthe very idea of second-personal address, then perhaps it does commitus to the equal dignity of free and rational persons, but then to deny thatsecond-personal address, so understood, is anything we need have muchof a stake in.Surely people can presume authority without having tothink anything about whether those over whom they think they have itcan be expected freely to accept it and comply on that basis.Alternatively,it seems that someone might be content with simply having power overothers without any kind of authorizing narrative at all.I agree that even Kantian self-conceit, the idea that one has an authoritythat no one else has, is coherent as an abstract proposition, and nothingI argue will assume otherwise.What I do argue is that taking up a second-Copyright © 2009 The President and Fellows of Harvard CollegeRespect and the Second Person 139person standpoint toward others and addressing second-personal reasonsto them commits us to mutual accountability and, therefore, to denyingself-conceit (however intelligible that proposition might otherwise be).Ido not claim or assume that it is impossible to have or want power overothers irrespective of any authority requiring second-personal reasonswould that it were so! Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that neitherself-conceit, at least in a pure form that excludes an underlying moralizingrationalization, nor the desire for power pure and simple, exclusive of anauthorizing rationale, is at all common among human beings as we findthem.Consider Stalin, for example.Stalin would seem to have been as hungryfor power or as liable to self-conceit as they come, but at least in EdvardRadzinsky s riveting biography (1997), he also appears to have been some-one who was motivated by richly elaborated reactive attitudes, which, tobe sure, he marshaled for his own ends.As Radzinsky describes him,Stalin s self-conceit was not pure.His emotional life was replete withepisodes, frequently staged, in which a justified authority over othersseemed manifest to him, justified in ways that, as it seemed to him, othersshould be able to appreciate.And even his cruelest murders were accom-panied, indeed fueled, by self-justifying emotions and narratives.It seemsno exaggeration to say, in fact, that Stalin s distinctive form of evil essen-tially employed a cynical and distorted form of moral self-justificationthat he manipulated for his own purposes.Thus, Radzinsky tells us, astandard ploy of Stalin s was to catch someone he wished to  eliminatein a lie, after which Stalin  felt entitled to feel a moral hatred for the liarand traitor (237).Radzinsky describes a poignant scene from Stalin sboyhood in which, when fellow students in the Gori Church School made a back to enable an elderly teacher to cross a wide and turbulentstream, Stalin was overheard to say:   What are you then, a donkey? Iwouldn t make a back for the Lord God himself.  To which Radzinskyadds,  He was morbidly proud, like many people who have been humil-iated too often (29).I, for one, find it impossible to read Radzinsky s accounts of Stalin sfury-fueled, but coldly calculated, in-fighting, purges, murders, andwilling sacrifice of his own innocent citizens without seeing in it a formof ressentiment that takes itself to be seizing and wielding power, notnakedly, but righteously.In my view, this sort of distorted self-servingmoralizing is actually quite common, although not, thankfully, on Stalin sCopyright © 2009 The President and Fellows of Harvard College140 Respect and the Second Personscale.People frequently manipulate aspects of the moral framework innarratives that rationalize their special exemptions and departures.It isactually quite rare, I think, for human beings to reject the second-personstandpoint outright, since, for one thing, our emotional lives are full ofreactive feelings and attitudes that essentially involve it.Although  hyp-ocrite is perhaps not the first epithet one would use, even Stalin seemsto instantiate Rochefoucauld s dictum that  hypocrisy is the tribute thatvice pays to virtue (Rochefoucauld 1973: 79).Respect as Second-PersonalWe are now in a position to see that respect for persons is second-personal in two distinct, but related, senses: it involves recognition of asecond-personal authority and the recognition itself comes from asecond-person standpoint.Consider the former aspect first.Someonemight accept the first-order norms that structure the dignity of personsand regulate himself scrupulously by them without yet accepting anyone sauthority to demand that he do so.He might even accept these as man-datory norms without accepting any claim to his compliance.I hope itis now clear that although such a person would thereby respect the dutieswith which persons can demand compliance, in failing to respect theirauthority to demand this, he would also fail, in an important sense, torespect them.He would fail to acknowledge their equal authority as freeand rational and so fail to relate to them on terms of equal respect.In The Realm of Rights, Judith Thomson says that respect for personscan have no foundational role in morality if  respect for persons just isrespect for their rights (1990: 210 211).37 But is respect for someonesimply respect for her rights? If we think of respecting someone s rightsas according her the specific things that Thomson maintains we have aright to forbearing trespass, coercion, and causing undue harm and dis-tress; keeping promises; and so on, then respect for her as a person cannotconsist just in that.For we could respect persons rights in this sensewithout respecting these as their right, as anything they have the authorityto claim or demand from us.This is the first way in which respect is second-personal: a fundamen-tally second-personal authority.But this form of authority is itself some-37.I am grateful to Judith Thomson for discussion of these points.Copyright © 2009 The President and Fellows of Harvard CollegeRespect and the Second Person 141thing that is appropriately recognized second-personally also, through re-lating to others in a way that acknowledges this authority.And this is thesecond way in which respect is second-personal.Not only is the authorityit recognizes second-personal, but its distinctive form of recognition issecond-personal also.We accord authority within the second-personalrelations that structure mutual accountability by relating to one anotherin ways that acknowledge each other s standing to demand, remonstrate,resist, charge, blame, resent, feel indignant, excuse, forgive, and so on.Since accountability is, in its nature, second-personal in both senses, re-spect for persons is as well.It seems possible to respect the fact that someone has second-personalauthority for example, that she can claim certain conduct as her rightwithout relating to her in the way that genuine respect for her as a personinvolves.38 To see this, consider, first, an analogous case in theoreticalreasoning.Suppose you are disinclined to trust someone s judgment informing your own beliefs, but that, on reflection, you reject your distrustand think you should take his testimony as evidence.When he says,  p,this does not increase your inclination to believe p or to give his testimonyevidential weight until you recall your considered view about his relia-bility, which corrects your distrust [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]