A Matter of Principle, Part One: The Betrayal of Personhood

James R. Otteson

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511607042.003

2 - A Matter of Principle, Part One: The Betrayal of Personhood

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 November 2009

James R. Otteson

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James R. Otteson: Affiliation:
Yeshiva University, New York

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Summary

I argued in the previous chapter that human beings are ‘persons,’ which I defined as something able to develop ends deliberately and exercise judgment with respect to them. I also argued that one could not be a ‘person’ without judgment, and hence that in order to respect people's personhood we had to respect their judgment. That meant that we must grant each other not only a wide scope of freedom to exercise, develop, and fine-tune our judgment, but also the responsibility of accepting the consequences, good or bad, of the decisions we make and the actions we take. This view of human personhood, along with the privileges and responsibilities it entails, has political implications, some of which I suggested in chapter 1. In this and the next chapter I propose to spell out those implications a bit more carefully. My ultimate goal is to persuade you that only a government limited in certain specific ways is consistent with human personhood. In this chapter I argue that certain familiar forms of government are not consistent with personhood as I have described it; in the next chapter I lay out what form I believe is consistent. I hope in the end to give you strong reason, based both on moral principle and, later, on empirical evidence to endorse this kind of limited government.

SOCIALISM?

Every society has some form of organization or other, and there are probably indefinitely many potential schemes of organization.

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Type: Chapter
Information: Actual Ethics , pp. 45 - 101

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511607042.003 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2006

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