Kaitlyn Creasy

We are valuing beings, beings who possess the capacity to value things. But what is it “to value” something? The most common accounts in the literature hold that to value an item is either to have a first‐order or a second‐order desire toward it; or to believe that item to be valuable; or to care about that item; or to have a combination of all these mental states. In our paper, we raise some objections against all these accounts and defend a new affective account of valuings. Unlike standard affective accounts, according to which the term “valuing” refers to a single type of affective state, such as care, we hold that “valuing” refers to the members of a class of affective states, namely, the class of sentiments. On our view, to value something is to have a particular sentiment toward it. Since sentiments can be of different types, our account implies that there are as many ways of valuing things as there are types of sentiments.

I will present three accounts of bearing witness vis-à-vis epistemic reparation of subjects’ violation of their right to be known. I will argue that the Understanding Account of bearing witness more fully captures bearing witness’ epistemically reparative features than the Knowledge Account and the Belief Account. To this end, I will present three conditions that compose the epistemically reparative features of bearing witness. These conditions are the Recognition Condition, the Relational Information Condition and the Modal Condition. This argument will put into view not only the kind of epistemic state into which truth and reconciliation commissions should aim to put their audiences, but also a way of judging more and less epistemically reparative instances of audience uptake of the testimony of those who have suffered injustice and grave moral wrongs.

There is a tragedy at the heart of human relationships. Each of us merits a demanding form of appreciation, but this appreciation is, both individually and in aggregate, impossible to pay. The existence of this tragedy is, in a certain sense, obvious, but there is a powerful temptation to avoid any recognition of it. What we need is not so much an argument for the existence of the tragedy but something that might help us acknowledge it. Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway offers us exactly this. Through the novel, we come to experience the tragedy of appreciation as an inescapable practical conflict.

Knowledge and respect exhibit a puzzling self-other asymmetry: Self-respect generates an imperative to know oneself, but as the objectionability of paternalism and privacy violations illustrate, respect for others can require that we avoid acquiring, or making use of, knowledge we have about them. This article elaborates this asymmetry and offers a solution to it, rooted in the distinctive importance that self-knowledge has for self-respecting rational agents: Self-respecting agents have reasons to have others defer to their ‘surfaces’ or self-presentations in order to inhibit making themselves vulnerable to others in ways that undermine their self-respect by subordinating their wills to the wills of others, as well as to ensure that self-knowledge can play its desired role in the lives of self-respecting agents.