SOURCE: Code, Lorraine. “Persons and Others.” In Power, Gender, Values, edited by Judith Genova, pp. 143-71. Edmonton: Academic Printing & Publishing, 1987.

[In the following essay, Code explores issues of responsibility, morality, and dependency in Sarton's As We Are Now.]

I INTRODUCTION

In her short novel As We Are Now,¹ the American novelist May Sarton tells a story of the personal disintegration of a woman in a nursing home for the aged. This disintegration is aided and encouraged by the systematically degrading nature of her treatment by the women in charge of the home, and by the gradual severing of all her personal ties. I want to use this novel to raise some epistemological and moral questions about interaction with human beings of all ages, and about interaction with the aged in particular. My purpose is to try to understand the moral requirements of situations where persons have others in their care who are extraordinarily vulnerable to assaults upon their sense of self. This purpose arises out of a more general interest in discerning the implications of a respect for persons moral principle. And in conducting this enquiry, it will be one of my central claims that, for all of the difficulties inherent in such a task, it is important to attempt to know other people responsibly and well if one is to act justly toward them.

It is always difficult to see just how one might follow such an imperative; and it is peculiarly difficult when—as in the Sarton story—the ‘identity’ of the person in question is even more than usually fluctuating. If any sort of core is increasingly indiscernible within this fluctuation, it is hard to sustain a belief that this is the ‘same’ person. So one risks being tempted by the view that, with someone like this, ordinary respect-for-persons considerations need not apply. Yet it is from the convictions, first, that some version of respect for persons is a viable moral principle; and secondly, that its viability as a moral principle is dependent upon the quality of the cognitive activity—i.e., the alleged ‘knowing’—at its basis, that I am looking at Sarton's novel.

II AS WE ARE NOW

The novel is written as a journal kept by Miss Caroline Spencer while she is in the nursing home, a run-down farmhouse in New England. She says she is writing the journal because ‘There is no reality now except what I can sustain inside me. My memory is failing. I have to hang on to every scrap of information I have to keep my sanity …’ (4). Hers is a struggle to maintain some sense of self against people and circumstances wittingly or otherwise bound to destroy her. She sees herself as an inmate in ‘a concentration camp for the old’ (3); and she observes a connection between ‘any place where human beings are helpless, through illness and old age, and a prison.’ The analogy is borne out not only by ‘the heroic helplessness of the inmates, but also [by] what complete control does to the nurses, guards, or whatever’ (43). Looking for a means of self-preservation, she recalls a former student who, during two years' solitary confinement, made a study of spiders and mice, composed novels in his head, and did mathematical problems to keep his mind alert. So Caroline Spencer keeps her journal.

Until illness made it impossible for her to live alone, Caroline Spencer has, in common parlance, led a good and a full life. She is both cultured and educated, a mathematician and a former teacher. A woman of strong, independent spirit, she has travelled widely, and has had good, close personal relationships. But the ‘home’ where she now finds herself is small, cramped and dirty; the food is dreadful. It is run by two women, mother and daughter, the former meaner and nastier than the latter. Both resent Miss Spencer for her refinement, her education, her difference. Consciously or unconsciously, they set out to obliterate these aspects of her being.

They give her tranquilizers, which she hides so that the women will not ‘steal her mind’ (23). They insist that she has done and said things she cannot remember at all, or that she has not done things she is sure she has. So she thinks they want to persuade her that she is not quite sane. When she is angry, she is punished for it, kept in a dark room for days on end. Her responses are construed as abnormal, driven underground. ‘My anger, because I am old, is considered a sign of madness or senility,’ she writes. ‘Is this not cruel? Are we to be deprived even of righteous anger? Is even irritability to be treated as a symptom?’ (75) Reflecting upon the process in which she is, willy nilly, taking part, she asks: ‘If keepers are corrupted by having absolute power, what about those they keep? We learn to ingratiate ourselves, to pretend we do not notice the slights and humiliations. Or we close ourselves off into that terrible place of anger, rage and despair …’ (68).

In the end, unable to face a gradual fading away, Caroline Spencer triumphs over her circumstances in the only way left open to her. She has saved a quantity of lighter fluid. On a night in January when the farmhouse is snowed in, she places her journal in the refrigerator and sets the place alight, feeling ‘free, beyond attachment, beyond the human world at last’ (119). The manuscript is published by a friend, at her request.

I cite the Sarton text in order to raise questions both about the kinds of moral judgment that could reasonably be passed upon the characters and actions of these people, and to raise more general questions about the implications of allowing stereotype-based ‘knowledge’ to form the cognitive basis of moral judgments. In this story, one might be inclined to see the women in charge of the nursing home as indolent or blind rather than outrightly evil. ‘We take them in, poor things,’ they say (10); and they seem to see themselves as somewhat reluctant doers of good deeds. They are blind to their cruelty and duplicity; and this blindness grows worse as they permit themselves further indulgence. Yet they feel justified, one suspects, because they are convinced that the human beings they are dealing with are not persons like themselves at all—just ‘poor things,’ senile, deranged, simple minded. Except for Miss Spencer. She requires firm, even cruel, treatment so that she, too, can be brought to a condition where she can be treated as just a ‘poor thing.’ Initially, then, and rather simply, one might say that theirs is an epistemic failure: the cognitive acts that lead them to think they know Miss Spencer and their other charges as they do are consistently distorted. The moral attitudes and activity based upon their ‘knowing’ follow almost as a matter of course.

The effects of this ‘knowing’ are to deprive the woman in the story of her conviction in her own sanity, and in her capacity for ordinary human interaction. All of those interpersonal expectations which (to paraphrase Wittgenstein's On Certainty observation),² form the very background against which one distinguishes true and false, are systematically eroded for her. Sarton's story suggests something of what Wittgenstein might mean by his claim that the foundation of all judging would be taken away if one were ‘contradicted on all sides’ (O.C. 614).

The story shows something of the value of narrative to philosophy in fleshing out the implications of philosophical theses by showing what it is like to live their effects.³ One sees something of the delicacy of the construct that enables human beings to have reasonable, constant expectations, and of the fragility of human integrity, credibility, and self-respect even in persons of evident moral strength. Hence one can come to understand something about the often imperceptible power human beings have over one another, and about the obligations which that power creates. The story points to the injustice of attributing moral weakness to those who, on account of an undermining of the foundation of all of their judging, cannot rise above the objectification of their being. Yet plainly it is best to think in terms of levels, degrees of weakness, culpability and corruption. For Miss Spencer cannot be declared as corrupt as her keepers, whatever her acknowledged complicity.

III KNOWING PERSONS

I have said that I take some version of respect for persons to be a fundamental moral imperative, and have suggested that to fulfill it one must, at the same time, recognize a set of cognitive imperatives which centre around questions about what it is to know another person, and how one can do so well enough to engage responsibly in one's interactions with that person. When one thinks of the constant interplay of opacity and transparency (or semi-transparency) in human efforts to know one another, and indeed in efforts to achieve an interim sense that one knows oneself, it is clear that these questions admit of no easy answers. Recognition of the extent to which what one is at any point in one's history is shaped by fluctuating circumstances, both ‘subjective’ and ‘objective,’ makes it clear that any answers put forward will at best be tentative. But if it can be granted that stereotyping people, at least, is wrong, it is clear that other approaches must be sought, however tentative they may be.

Stereotyping people seems to be something like treating them as objects. And I think I can embark upon this exploration of what it is to know a person from the uncontroversial claim that persons are significantly different from objects, and that one's attitudes to them must, accordingly, be different. To treat another person as little more than an object, in certain contexts of interaction, might sometimes be necessary, and hence justifiable in terms of the exigencies of that context. But it always requires justification as opposed to mere rationalization.

Treating a person as little more than an object, in its cognitive dimension, in fact seems to imply seeing no significant difference between that person and an ordinary, everyday object. Plainly, at the simplest level, there is a mistake here. One ought to know better. But the cognitive problem involves more than this. To acknowledge what, for want of a better term, I shall call the ‘personhood’ of another human being involves recognizing responses, conditions, actions of persons as worthy of respect just because they are manifestations of the choices, or responses to choice-constraining circumstances, of active, sentient, thinking beings. It involves recognizing persons as capable, frequently, of making choices, and of learning how to live with them. But difficulties occur when another person's capacity to make ‘reasonable’ responses and choices is intermittent. There arises a temptation to generalize from instances where these capacities fail, and to reduce one's conception of the person to those features, hence to see her or him as no longer worthy of respect.

Yielding to this temptation contributes to a moral problem which the notion of treating a person as an object is too crude to capture. Even if a person is capable of making certain kinds of responses and choices only from time to time, it is morally incumbent upon those involved with that person to learn to be sensitive to those times, and to respond appropriately to them. What is at issue, then, is a more subtle matter, to do with how one is to treat a person as a person, in such a way as to take her sense of herself into account.⁴ This is always a delicate matter; it is extraordinarily so when a person's self-perceptions are fluctuating and evanescent.

My initial endorsement of a version of the respect for persons principle is by no means unproblematic. The Kantian formulation of the principle that one must always treat humanity, whether in one's own person or in the person of any other ‘never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end,’⁵ which is the basis of the derivative claim that persons are inherently worthy of esteem simply qua persons, is puzzling when one considers how it might serve as a practical guide to human interaction. Certainly there are degrees, levels of knowing other people. I am not suggesting that a tacit injunction underlies our dealings with one another, such that if these dealings are to be good, morally speaking, then we must be on close personal terms with everyone. Yet to specify exactly how people should know one another so as to treat one another well, as persons, is difficult indeed. The attitude one is inclined to encourage requires knowledge of the other person of a sort naturally found in intimacy; yet intimacy is not a requirement of it.

Now the Kantian principle is particularly puzzling in its formal structure where a necessary separation is postulated between duty and inclination: between doing what one should do, rather than what one wants to do. I think it is this rift in the structure of Kantian morality that Thomas Nagel sets out to repair in The Possibility of Altruism,⁶ where he constructs an ‘internalist position’ (7), according to which ‘one has a direct reason to promote the interests of others’ (15). Altruistic reasons are parasitic upon self-interested reasons, in Nagel's view, and are both possible and permissible bases of moral motivation, properly so-called. He connects the principle of altruism with one's ‘conception of oneself as merely one person among others’ (19), a conception of human commonality which derives from a ‘metaphysics of the person’ (58), understood as a temporally extended unity of body and soul (or mind or personality), the facts of whose ‘past, present and future life [are] … truths about different times in the history of a being with the appropriate kind of temporal continuity’ (62). Taken together with the Kantian notion of rational self-conscious agency, there emerges a conception of a person as one who has a history which she or he lives into the future, in such a way as to own the choices which characterize the past and will characterize the future.

One is justly concerned about one's future precisely because it is one's own: this is reason enough, and is, for Nagel, the fundamental prudential reason for action. And he finds it reasonable to assume that there is an equivalent concern in every other person for his or her future. This is the rational foundation of the possibility of altruism: the recognition of a significant measure of human commonality, together with an effort to understand how one might put oneself in another person's place. An altruistic respect for persons, in this sense, then becomes a fundamental moral requirement, partially repairing a rift implicit in the Kantian scheme.

For this to be fruitful as a general moral requirement, the notions of recognition and understanding require further elaboration. In Nagel's account, these processes are still presented as the cognitive moves of a rational, and autonomously separate, agent. They do not, as he depicts them, extend to affectionate, concerned, or sympathetic recognition and understanding. Nagel's analysis remains too purely Kantian to allow the validity and rationality of such emotional responses. Hence the altruism whose possibility he demonstrates seems to be a response to the other, from one's own separated stance as a rational self-conscious agent. But it is difficult to discern any sense in which it becomes engagement with the other. While such engagement could not be held up as a universal requirement of all dealings between persons, there are situations, of which I think Miss Spencer's is one, which elicit imperatives that seem to require going beyond the scope of Nagel's analysis.

Lawrence Blum, by contrast, in Friendship, Altruism and Morality,⁷ extends the scope of such recognition and understanding so as to make a different conception of concern for others coherent with a Kantian-derived moral position. His point is to show that there are two aspects to any occasion of moral judgment: the apprehension of a situation, and the action based upon that apprehension. It would be an oversimplification to take the apprehension—the right perception—of any situation for granted, and to restrict moral judgment to actions alone. The moral quality of an action is dependent upon the cognitive quality of a prior apprehension, itself a proper object of evaluation. Writing of beneficience, sympathy, and altruism, Blum maintains:

the kind, compassionate, sympathetic, or concerned person perceives someone differently from someone lacking these qualities. … This is connected with his having more empathy, and therefore seeing the other more from the point of view of how he is experiencing things rather than … in terms of the other's effect on him.

(134-5)

Blum's discussion takes a different direction from Nagel's in allowing both validity and rationality to altruistic emotions as well as to the reasons for altruism Nagel adduces, even though it leaves unanswered the question as to how one is to achieve this right apprehension of situations and persons which is the basis of appropriate response and just action. Without empathetic understanding at its basis, such recognition would be a formal and empty thing indeed; yet we cannot be expected to know all other people in the intimate detail of their lives. We do not have the time, even if we should want to, or if they should want us to.

It might be thought that I am implying in what I have just said that feelings and attitudes can be legislated, and it might be objected that this cannot be so. But I would take a categorical claim to the effect that feelings cannot be legislated to be false, because there is a sense in which they can. It is not that they can be conjured up on command: that I can direct someone to be angry or to care, and that she or he can do so accordingly. But feelings can be cultivated and educated, both in oneself and in others, and this is a sort of indirect and gradual legislation in that it can take place normatively, with a goal in mind as to how one wants and/or ought, or is led to see that it could be right, to respond. This notion, in one form or another, is at least as old as Plato's Republic,⁸ and it suggests that Kant and others are perhaps misguided in granting no place to emotion in ethics, on the assumption that it is merely experienced passively, undergone, and hence is not properly a matter of agency. Feelings can be shaped in such a way as to give genuine content to the otherwise purely formal notion of the good will, good simply in itself. Sensitivity is, at least in part, an acquired characteristic, which one can set about to cultivate in oneself.⁹

If this point is granted, the answer to the question as to how one is to achieve just perceptions of one's fellow human beings becomes a little plainer. Part of that answer, too, is as old as Plato's Republic. For human perceptive and cognitive capacities are likewise amenable to training and education. This is a truism in all but a narrowly empiricist conception of learning. And the juxtaposition with Plato shows something of the value, in this context, of works like the Sarton novel, and of literary narrative per se. For one source of empathetic training is to be found in the way one's sensibilities are educated in engagement with literature: in vicariously experiencing another mode of thinking and feeling, so that it makes a difference to one's own subsequent thinking.¹⁰

What I am concerned with here is a process of educating the imagination. The role played by the imagination both in cognitive and moral life is often underestimated in philosophical discussion.¹¹ But the fact that one cannot know everyone intimately indicates the cognitive and moral importance of an educated imagination so that one can be in a position to move empathetically beyond instances one has taken the trouble to know well to other, apparently related, instances. Such responsible cognitive endeavour seems to be essential to a moral life in which engagement with other people as the people that they are is a serious concern.¹²

There are quite good reasons for the narrowness of scope accorded to the imagination in theory of knowledge. They extend to provide an analogous explanation for the minimal consideration given to questions of imagination in the cognitive basis of ethics. To allow that imagination has a role to play in the acquisition of knowledge might well seem to blur important distinctions amongst such notions as truth, conjecture, fantasy, and falsehood, on something like a sliding scale of epistemic carelessness.¹³ But in fact to minimize or deny the role of imagination in knowledge leads, again, to the barest caricature of an empiricist account of knowledge. One need only think of the creativity in scientific revolutions, in the postulation of novel historical hypotheses, or in the discovery of archeological sites. It is the activity of imaginations trained to go beyond the purely empirically given that provides the impetus for growth and change in scientific, and other, knowledge.¹⁴

There is a notable recent exception to the persistent neglect of the role of the imagination in ethics, and in the cognition in which a realist theory of ethics is based. This is Sabina Lovibond's book, Realism and Imagination in Ethics.¹⁵ Lovibond indicates that what is required to bring about right perception in those cases that stand outside the boundaries of one's own experience is just this: imagination. She writes of ‘the process of seeking out new moral perceptions by cultivating a receptive attitude toward the perceptions reported by others …’ (198), and accords great importance to a ‘faculty of moral “imagination,” by which speakers represent to themselves how things might be different and better …’ (200). Morally imaginative agents are contrasted with moral conservatives, who emphasize strict obligation and a closely rule-oriented conception of virtue (199).

Such narrowness of moral perception is well illustrated in Sarton's story. For on a conservative viewing one might maintain that Miss Spencer's keepers are fulfilling their moral duties quite well. Their obligations to provide shelter and food and a minimal level of care are in fact being met. They acknowledge the rights Miss Spencer has purchased, as a paying client of the home. But the story brings out the inadequacy of an unimaginative morality. For Miss Spencer's keepers come across as blind to the discrepancies between her self-conception and their conceptions of her; and reprehensibly so. Their actions and attitudes illustrate the crucial differences Spelman pinpoints, between treating someone as a person understood merely as a bearer of rights, and treating someone as the person that she is.¹⁶

The notion of ‘moral blindness’ requires some amplification. Lovibond is right to insist that, ‘we cannot meaningfully speak of “moral blindness” except in relation to the “normal vision” of some historically existing community’ (217). She is aware of the parochialism that might be implicit in such a declaration. But this can be avoided by self-critical moral agents, mindful of the imperatives inherent in moral reflection, to do with a need to comprehend a multiplicity of perspectives, and hence to transcend the ‘local peculiarities’ of any one form of life. There is no suggestion that this will be easy; only that the attempt has to be made if one is to accord proper respect to persons like oneself who probably view the world from perspectives quite different from one's own. Emancipation from parochialism is an essential part of a non-conservative moral vision.

For a charge of moral blindness not to be empty, it needs to be based in a cognitivist position, a position of moral realism. Although such a position could not adequately be articulated in the space of one paper, an analogy with colour-blindness captures something of what I have in mind. One can come to know that one's capacities for discerning colours are not ‘normal.’ One need not then assert either that colours are ‘objective,’ or that colour observations are merely social conventions. But having become aware of one's colour-blindness, one might justifiably be hesitant about pronouncing on certain kinds of case. Moral blindness is a little like this, though with two central points of disanalogy. First, it seems to be a corrigible failing. And secondly, awareness of moral blindness may more often be a third person awareness. One can perhaps be brought to awareness of it in oneself, just as colour-blindness is in the first instance brought to one's attention by others. But it is to be hoped that a person who comes genuinely to understand the fact of his or her moral blindness would seek to overcome that blindness. And this is not an option for the colour-blind.

The realism that is fundamental to a realization of the cognitive imperatives at the heart of a respect for persons principle construed as I have been construing it takes as one of its central tenets that there is such a being as what Spelman calls ‘the person one is.’ One may never be wholly—or permanently—knowable either to oneself or to others, as the person that one is. (Nor would it be appropriate to think of ‘the person that one is’ as a fixed or static entity.) But such knowledge admits of degree; and working with a purely formal notion of persons as bearers of rights, or as rational, self-conscious agents, requires minimal cognitive effort. What is primarily lacking from the approach of Miss Spencer's keepers is any effort, then, to see her as the person she is. They are unwilling to take into account any of the evidence she tries to offer about how she sees herself, to take her expressed self-perceptions at face value. They make no space for, reserve no judgement out of respect for, her self-conception: they are not open to considering that she might, at least sometimes, be the person that she thinks she is.

The point is not that Miss Spencer—or anyone—is bound to be absolutely and incorrigibly right in her self-conception. It is not that one must take her strictly at her word. Rather, it is that to assume that she must be wrong, to refuse to take her at her word at all, does violence to her. Treating a person as a person involves recognizing the relevance of her self-conception to the person that she is, working to understand the interplay of correctness and incorrectness that goes on when that self-conception is wholly at odds with one's perceptions of her. It is a difficult task; but without trying to perform it, one cannot claim to be treating her as a person.

Yet there would seem to be nothing in the keeper's conduct that is at odds with Nagel's kind of rational altruism. Indeed, they might justifiably claim that they are being altruistic in just the sense Nagel elaborates. Hence the story shows some of the sparsity of this conception of altruism, and some of the incursions into another's sense of self that it can condone. There seems to be nothing in Nagel's construal of the notion to impede the kind of colonization of another's being that can go on, here as elsewhere, in the name of altruism, where the keepers can aptly be described as constructing herself for her. Without a basis in right cognition moral goodness is not possible.

IV OTHERS

In my introductory remarks I observed that cognitive and moral imperatives at the heart of respect for persons observant modes of conduct are difficult to follow in cases where the ‘identity’ of a person is more-than-usually fluctuating. I have explained how, if the doctrine of respect for persons is to have more than a purely formal structure—i.e., if it is to have content relevant to actual situations involving actual persons—then it must be interpreted in a sense which takes Nagel's minimal conception of the selfhood of persons as beings just like oneself as its starting point, and extends that minimal concept to allow for empathetic engagement with other people.

But Sarton's story points to a curious situation. Whatever ‘wholeness’ one might be inclined to attribute to a human life is ruptured in this case: to borrow another Wittgensteinian metaphor, it is harder to be sure of the firmness of the river bed beneath the movement of the waters (O.C., 97), harder even for the person presumably in the position of most privileged access. To put the problem bluntly, then, is one to say, morally, that a time can come when one need no longer think of respecting this person because there is a sense in which she no longer is this person—or indeed any person—but just a ‘poor thing’? And if one can reasonably say this, then what does it say about our ethics? Do our ethical theories apply only to persons of a certain age, with fluctuating boundaries surrounding that notion of age as well? Surely Miss Spencer's keepers might justify their position along just such lines: that these ‘poor things’ are not really persons any more at all, hence there is no meaning to the idea of treating them as the persons that they are.

Lest my question about whether there is a stage at which human beings stop being persons seem preposterous, it is worth recalling the not-so-different question often argued about with regard to the other end of life: the question as to whether, or when, fetuses are to be considered persons. When one asks whether, in the personality disintegration of the aged, there comes a point where a line can be drawn to indicate the end of personhood, the question is not so different from the question about the point in fetal development at which the beginning of personhood can be declared. There is the significant difference that an aged person has lived a human life, and is continuous with the person she has been. Such a person, too, is generally part of a network of personal ties of the sort a fetus has not yet developed. Hence there will be many more to protest on her or his behalf. But a genuinely maintained, concerned respect for persons would be a respect maintained toward that person, and not toward or in deference to friends or relatives. This may be difficult when that same person seems no longer to be.

In calling the identity of this woman ‘more-than-usually-fluctuating,’ I mean to emphasize ‘more-than-usually.’ The point is a delicate one. Knowing persons is different from knowing other aspects of the world partly because of their fluctuations, and their self-making capacities, where change is different in kind even from the change of natural process in the rest of animate nature. The very effort to see a core in the fluctuation is dangerous if it leads to too strong a conservatism in one's view of the other: to an unjust perception wherein one fails to perceive significant change which the person may have struggled to achieve. It should be emphasized that this is also a characteristic of self-knowledge. There is a comparable danger of perceiving oneself ‘historically,’ or even stereotypically, and hence constraining one's own capacity to acknowledge and to live actual or potential change. I speak of a more-than-usually fluctuating core in recognition of the danger of knowing people ‘fixedly,’ ‘historically,’ so that one's knowing cannot accommodate changes people are capable of bringing about even in their fundamental attitudes and reactions.

One's expectations, then, should not be too narrow, for people are seldom fixed, ‘complete’ beings at any time prior to their death. Indeed, evidence of an ‘historical’ attitude on the part of others can work to undermine changes just on the verge of fruition: a serious moral harm indeed, and by no means unrelated to the doubts Miss Spencer's keepers repeatedly create for her about her own sense of self. This underlines the importance, for those who would act justly toward their fellow human beings, of trying to know their situation empathetically. Only thus can one have an inkling of the ontological implications of how a person is perceived, in terms of how this contributes to that person's self-perception, and hence has a structuring influence upon all of her or his possibilities. Indeed, as studies of madness, for example, have shown—both Foucault's and Szasz's ‘factual’ studies, and Solzhenitsyn's fictional study in The First Circle—a systematic perception of and response to a person's actions and reactions as manifestations of madness makes it exceedingly difficult for that person to behave as, and hence ultimately to be sane. It is surely the grossest violation of even the coldest interpretation of the respect for persons principle to work at eroding the sense of self in another person. In Kantian terms, this is to work at edging that person out of the kingdom of ends.

One might be inclined to think of the term ‘person’ as a purely descriptive, neutrally designating term, and to see it as a central strength of the Kantian doctrine that it recognizes this. But I am drawing attention to the troublesome truth that ‘person’ can in fact be a normative, and by no means merely a descriptive designation. The idea is really not so new. It goes back at least as far as Aristotle, where slaves and children and women were not persons in any meaningful sense. Women's struggle to achieve full personhood continues, and promises to be a long and bitter one. And it is hardly necessary to observe that all manner of injustice in the treatment of blacks, or (in Nazi times) of Jews, has been rationalized on the basis of claims that these really are not persons in the appropriate sense, and hence (on a sort of derived ‘natural kinds’ doctrine) that they deserve different treatment and attitudes. Where women are concerned, the case has notoriously been made (most notably by Aristotle and Rousseau) by declaring them deficient in rationality; hence, for Aristotle, quite on the fringes of the ‘rational animal’ kind of being. As I read it, Sarton's novel illustrates the difficulties of being rational when one's irrationality is declared and asserted, in word and deed, by everyone about one. It demonstrates the power of stereotypes to create people in the mold the stereotype prepares for them. And it shows something, too, of how the structures of certain institutions confer a legitimacy upon such stereotypes, and hence require moral evaluation in their own right. Miss Spencer's story suggests that, in circumstances such as hers, it is virtually impossible even to begin to establish a ‘foundation of all judging.’ Arguments in terms of logical possibility are of little help here, where the practical possibilities are both limited and limiting.

From Sarton's story one might draw the conclusion that stereotyped ways of knowing and acting toward the aged need to be rethought if people are to avoid committing all manner of serious moral wrongs, through dogmatism and blindness. But there is a broader conclusion, too: the story points up the deep perniciousness of treating people as stereotypes. Miss Spencer's keepers get away with much of what they do and say precisely because of the strength of such stereotyped ways of responding, where saying ‘she's failed,’ or ‘she's having one of her spells,’ or touching one's forehead to indicate that she's a little mad, fits in only too well with their hearers' expectations. Such is the insidious power of stereotypes.

So, closely attendant upon the respect for persons principle is the further injunction to be vigilant, in attempting to observe that principle, against stereotypical viewing, knowing, and acting. It is possible to become aware of, and to guard against, tendencies to see people on the model of other people; to resist temptations to ‘tuck [a person] neatly away into a category of personalities.’¹⁷ Even the notion of persons in a definitional sense needs to be framed so as to accommodate the unexpected turns personhood can take. Otherwise one lays the ground for relegating the too old, the too young, the strangely tinted, or the putatively irrational to the realm of otherness.

Part of what is at issue here is a counterpart of Sartrean bad faith, where the fixing in the mode of being of the en soi is performed vis-à-vis another human being, rather than as a flight from one's own existence as être pour soi. But the moral implications I draw from it are not Sartrean, though a case might be made for seeing them to be implicit in the spirit of his writing. It is the ontological implications that are more plainly Sartrean: one cannot be an appropriately autonomous, self-creating and -sustaining human being when one is constantly and continuously aware that one is known and treated as object, as other. One can neither establish nor maintain one's sense of self against such odds. A respect for persons principle which fails to recognize this altruistic claim at its core is an empty principle indeed.

Women, in particular, have long felt the sting of the stereotype and lived under its aegis. For Miss Spencer one could substitute any woman, of any age, living at the mercy of those who define her being, who are blinded to the moral reality of her situation by the seductive power of the stereotype. Filtered through this stereotype, women are perceived as irrational, fragile, mere sex-objects, incapable of voting or working or thinking; their very being is defined for them, and their personhood is defined away in the characterization of their otherness.¹⁸

V CONCLUSION

Reflecting on what he sees as the Stoic nature of the Kantian moral doctrine, R. S. Peters writes:

In this attitude another individual is viewed as a possessor of rational capacities, as a centre of evaluation and choice … [H]e is viewed under these very general descriptions, without necessarily any sense of his uniqueness. Neither need there be any warming to him as an individual, any outgoingness toward him. Indeed, respect for persons is compatible with a purely negative determination not to exploit someone or to treat him purely as an occupant of a role.¹⁹

This characterizes well the formal implications of the respect for persons principle, both in its strengths and in its weaknesses.

In view of my initial endorsement of this principle, amenable as it is to the gloss Peters gives it, the question poses itself as to what can reasonably be demanded of Miss Spencer's keepers, and of other persons in comparable situations. As one meets them in the novel, these women seem to be irresponsible in failing to make any attempt to know Miss Spencer for who she is, despite her fluctuating personality and sense of self. She is simply a patient, who must fit in to the routine, and conform; a category who, thus categorized, can be forgotten as a person. So that her life will be manageable for them, it is rendered unlivable, for her.

Now it would be too harsh, and in fact linguistically as well as practically impossible, to ban categorizations of people outright. The problem and the paradox about stereotypical characterizations is that they are often useful, and sometimes, in fact, quite accurate.²⁰ But they are more problematic than they are useful. Cultural, racial, and sexual stereotypes are crude epistemological tools which fail to fit all but a few cases. This is borne out by the surprise and amusement one may feel when one actually discovers a ‘fit.’ One does not really expect to be able to short-circuit one's processes of thinking and judging in this way. Stereotypes are morally problematic in that they are both damaging to the person stereotyped, and corrupting for the person doing the typing. They help to create the illusion that things are summed up, understood, and under control. Hence they contribute to a cognitive and moral laziness on the part of the one who employs them: an attitude of not bothering to know well, and act accordingly.

Evidently, the best way to know a person, to the extent that this is possible, is to enter into a personal relationship with that person. Yet there can be no general social imperative to do this fully. There is a strong presumption, however, in support of the claim that persons who deal with the Miss Spencers of the world need to know their charges better than these women do. What we expect from such people as doctors, nurses, lawyers, judges, social workers—hence from people like Miss Spencer's keepers—‘is that they respond to us sympathetically, that they be … in their professional roles, sympathetic. … We don't expect them to have any particular feeling for us, and in certain crucial circumstances it would interfere with their being sympathetic if they did.’²¹ The kind of sympathetic response that can appropriately be expected is a kind of caring, based in a recognition of shared humanity, even with those who have perhaps lost, or never had, the capacity for autonomy and/or rationality. In a human community, they still deserve our care. Sympathy, in this sense, is what can and must be expected from people in such professional roles. And to be properly sympathetic they have to cultivate their moral sensibilities, educate their imaginations, learn to see and to know well.

It might be argued that the doctrine of respect for persons is more valuable in its purely formal conception than with the kind of content I have given it here. But the strength of the formal structure is in the impartiality it enjoins, and this is also its weakness. On the formal interpretation, the doctrine may prevent a prejudicial reduction of people to object-like status in consequence of stereotypical viewing: all are to be treated equally, impartially. But its formality negates the very possibility of responding to others as the persons that they are—of really caring that this is a person who might be unhappy, and of counting that caring among valid reasons for action.²²

Notes

1. May Sarton, As We Are Now (New York: W. W. Norton 1973)

2. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, eds., translated by Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1969), para. 94.

3. See in this connection Roger Shiner's interesting discussion of the way ‘philosophical illumination [can come] not from understanding statements but from seeing what is enacted in [a] play,’ in his ‘Showing, Saying and Jumping,’ Dialogue 21 (1982). One is reminded, too, of Alasdair MacIntyre's insistence that moral evaluation cannot be based upon abstract or contrived examples, but must be rooted in the context of a narrative ‘conception of a whole human life as the primary subject of objective and impersonal evaluation, of a type of evaluation which provides the content for judgment upon the particular actions or projects of a given individual’ (Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue [London: Duckworth 1981] 32).

4. In my thinking on this aspect of treating persons as persons, I am indebted to Elizabeth V. Spelman's perceptive discussion in her ‘Treating Persons as Persons,’ Ethics (1978). I am grateful to Dianne Romain for bringing this article to my attention.

5. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper & Row Torchbooks Edition 1964), 96

6. Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1970)

7. Lawrence Blum, Friendship, Altruism and Morality (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1980)

8. I am thinking here of the discussion, in Book III of the Republic, of the kinds of narrative it will be appropriate for future guardians to be exposed to, if certain traits are to be inculcated into their souls.

9. Consider, in this connection, John McDowell's analogous observations in the context of his discussion of a virtue-based morality: ‘The deliverances of a reliable sensitivity are cases of knowledge; and there are idioms according to which the sensitivity itself can appropriately be described as knowledge: a kind person knows what it is like to be confronted with a requirement of kindness. The sensitivity is, we might say, a sort of perceptual capacity … [And] the knowledge constituted by the reliable sensitivity is a necessary condition for possession of virtue’ (‘Virtue and Reason,’ The Monist 62 [1979]).

10. On a conceptual level, as one recent writer on literature and knowledge has argued: ‘A person may learn from a novel … if he is forced to revise or modify, e.g. his concept of “reasonable action” through a recognition of an alternative presented in the novel.’ (See Catherine Wilson, ‘Literature and Knowledge,’ in Philosophy 58 [1983].) On an emotional level an analogous process takes place as one comes to recognize the inappropriateness of past reactions to other persons in the face of another perspective upon what it is like to be a person of that sort, in such circumstances. Yet one must neither underestimate nor overestimate the extent to which this is possible. It is a central point common to the argument in Thomas Nagel's ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ and ‘Subjective and Objective’ (in his Mortal Questions [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1979]) that there are stringent metaphysical limitations upon the possibility of entering into another's subjective point of view. To name limitations does not, however, amount to a declaration of impossibility: it does not negate the responsibility to try.

11. For an interesting and instructive exception, see Pall S. Ardall's paper, ‘Of Sympathetic Imagination,’ in Understanding Emotions (Bowling Green Studies in Philosophy [Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press 1979]).

12. Fuller conditions for responsible cognitive endeavour are spelled out in my Epistemic Responsibility (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England/Brown University Press 1987).

13. Iris Murdoch, for example, observes that ‘As moral agents we have to try to see justly, to overcome prejudice, to avoid temptation, to control and curb imagination, to direct reflection.’ (In The Sovereignty of Good [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1970], 40; my emphasis.) The first three and the last of these injunctions I endorse wholeheartedly. But the point about the imagination must be interpreted with care. The notion of controlling the imagination could well be consistent with what I am urging: curbing the imagination might not be. Certainly I do not mean to suggest that we must let our moral imaginations run wild. But without a well-developed moral imagination (e.g., to enable one to ask intelligently ‘what would happen if I did that?’ etc.) it is difficult to see how one could be a sensitive, empathetic moral agent.

14. It seems to be with something like this in mind that Alasdair MacIntyre urges the relevance of narrative for scientific thought. See his ‘Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science’ (The Monist 60 [1977]).

15. Sabina Lovibond, Realism and Imagination in Ethics (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press 1983)

16. Cf. Spelman, 151.

17. Spelman, 153

18. This is something of an oversimplification of what goes on. Men are not the only stereotypers of women: women are often guilty of stereotyping other women. But the theoretical points and the moral implications apply across all such instances.

19. R. S. Peters, Reason and Compassion (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1973), 30-1

20. Joan Gibson drew my attention to this paradox.

21. This is Naomi Scheman's way of expressing the point, in her paper, ‘On Sympathy’ (The Monist 62 [1979], 322).

22. Work on this paper was made possible by a Strategic Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Earlier versions were read at the Queen's University Philosophy Colloquium, to the Ontario Philosophical Society, and to the Departments of Philosophy at the Australian National University in Canberra, and at the University of Auckland. I have benefitted from the discussions on these occasions, and from the comments of an anonymous reader.