The Phenomenology of Kantian Respect for Persons

: Emotions can be understood generally from two different perspectives: (i) a third-person perspective that specifies their distinctive functional role within our overall cognitive economy and (ii) a first-person perspective that attempts to capture their distinctive phenomenal character, the subjective quality of experiencing them. One emotion that is of central importance in many ethical systems is respect (in the sense of respect for persons or so-called recognition-respect). However, discussions of respect in analytic moral philosophy have tended to focus almost entirely on its functional role, in particular the behaviors that respect disposes us to engage in (or refrain from). Here we wish to investigate the phenomenal character of respect, what it is like to feel respect for persons. Since Kant is the reference point for modern discussions of respect, we try to reconstruct Kant’s account of the phenomenology of respect, but endeavoring to refine his account in light of our own phenomenological observations. 1. Respect and Moral Phenomenology In the opening chapter of his book The Conscious Mind, David Chalmers (1996) argues that many mental terms lead a “double life”: they have a psychological life and a phenomenological life. To say that a term T leads a double life is to say that Ttokens tend to cluster into two distinct types, each expressing a different concept. Thus, we use the word “pain” in two discernibly different ways, which express two different concepts, which we may call the psychological concept of pain and a phenomenological concept of pain. These concepts may or may not pick out the same property, but however that turns out, they are distinct concepts.2 1 This chapter is thoroughly collaborative; the order of authorship is alphabetical. Work for it was supported by the French National Research Agency’s grants ANR-11-0001-02 PSL* and ANR-10LABX-0087. 2 Chalmers himself thinks they turn out to also pick out different properties, but this does not fall out of the thesis of the double life of mental terms. The argument for it arrives rather later in the book