https://aeon.co/essays/on-hope-philosophical-personalism-and-martin-luther-king-jr
created by ddgr815 on 27/01/2025 at 16:57 UTC
22 upvotes, 2 top-level comments (showing 2)
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Comment by Shield_Lyger at 27/01/2025 at 23:21 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
As a belief and a practice, [moral agency personalism] can ground a virtuous, as opposed to vicious, self-regard that human and nonhuman persons can exercise for themselves and for other persons. This kind of self-regard is distinct from self-importance.
Here, I started wondering just who Professor Gilbert was addressing with this piece. I've met a lot of people I've considered "self-important" in my day, and the one thing they *all* had in common was that they didn't see themselves that way. That's kind of the thing about "self-importance." It's like being "heinously vicious." People don't normally see themselves that way. The Effective Altruist doesn't see themselves as "dangerous," whether they subscribe to longtermism, transhumanism or whatever other "I don't like it-ism" that Professor Gilbert can come up with. They're doing what they think is right, and the Professor doesn't attempt to speak to such people on their terms. In other words, his moral agency personalism isn't better at getting a transhumanist to *their own* idea of the right and good; it's simply a different bucket for people to sort themselves into. And it's when people start to see those in other buckets as bad, or even merely misguided, that things start to go off the rails.
If Professor Gilbert's "we" is going to include all of humanity (or at least all those humans capable of the Professor's understanding of moral agency), it's going to have to speak to everyone on their own terms, rather than down to them as some sort of dupe who doesn't realize that they're being played by "the purposes of infomaniacal hypercapitalism."