Rethinking the Value of Humanity

To treat some human beings as less worthy of concern and respect than others is to lose sight of their humanity. But what does this moral blindness amount to? What are we missing when we fail to appreciate the value of humanity?

The essays in this volume offer a wide range of competing, yet overlapping, answers to these questions. Some essays examine influential views in the hi...

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To treat some human beings as less worthy of concern and respect than others is to lose sight of their humanity. But what does this moral blindness amount to? What are we missing when we fail to appreciate the value of humanity?

The essays in this volume offer a wide range of competing, yet overlapping, answers to these questions. Some essays examine influential views in the history of Western philosophy. In others, philosophers currently working in ethics develop and defend their own views. Some essays appeal to distinctively human capacities. Others argue that our obligations to one another are ultimately grounded in self-interest, or certain shared interests, or our natural sociability. The philosophers featured here disagree about whether the value of human beings depends on the value of anything else. They disagree about how reason and rationality relate to this value, and even about whether we can reason our way to discovering it. This rich selection of proposals encourages us to rethink some of our own deepest assumptions about the moral significance of being human.

Sarah Buss is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. She is the author of articles on autonomy, moral responsibility, practical rationality, respect for persons, and various issues in ethics, and co-editor of The Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt (2001). Nandi Theunissen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh...

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Sarah Buss is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. She is the author of articles on autonomy, moral responsibility, practical rationality, respect for persons, and various issues in ethics, and co-editor of The Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt (2001). Nandi Theunissen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. She works on foundational topics in ethics, with a focus on the nature of value, and is the author of The Value of Humanity (OUP, 2020), as well as essays on Kant's moral philosophy, regress arguments, moral realism, and the nature of well-being.

Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
Introduction
Sarah Buss
1. Decomposing Humanity
Jon Garthoff
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Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
Introduction
Sarah Buss
1. Decomposing Humanity
Jon Garthoff
2. Do the Ancients See Value in Humanity?
Richard Bett
3. Spinoza's Anti-Humanism: Human Value and Dignity
Yitzhak Melamed
4. Slavery, Freedom, and Human Value in Early Modern Philosophy
Julia Jorati
5. Valuing Humanity in 'Common Life': Grotius and Pufendorf on Equal 'Sociable' Dignity
Stephen Darwall
6. The Dignity of Humanity
Ralf M. Bader
7. Great Beyond All Comparison
Kenneth Walden
8. Fichte on the Value of Rational Agency
Michelle Kosch
9. Explaining the Value of Human Beings
L. Nandi Theunissen
10. Are We of Equal Moral Worth?
Andrea Sangiovanni
11. The Normative Significance of Humanity
Peter Railton
12. Finding the Humean Value in Humean Humanity
Don Garrett
13. Other People
Kieran Setiya
14. Learning from Love: Reasoning, Respect, and the Value of a Person
Kyla Ebels-Duggan
15. The Invention of Value and the Value of Humanity
Elijah Millgram
16. The Human Foundations of our Political Ideals: An Essay on Gandhi's Political Radicalism
Akeel Bilgrami
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