Kate Manne

In this article, I argue that interpersonal cruelty can often be explained in ordinary moral terms in conjunction with facts about social hierarchies. Specifically, I argue that misogynistic cruelty often stems from the sense that certain women are wrongdoers; it often stems from the sense that certain, privileged men are entitled to violate women; and it often stems from the sense that, at least when they threaten such men, women simply do not matter. Misogynistic cruelty is thus more a product of moral vilification, entitlement, and devaluation than dehumanization proper. I explore the implications for the need to posit dehumanization as a mechanism to explain cruelty elsewhere.

Many contemporary theorists take practical reasons to have their _source_ either in objective facts about what to do, or subjective facts about what we want as individuals. This chapter discusses the alternative possibility that at least some practical reasons have their source in _social practices_. Particular attention is given to the practices of friendship and marriage. It is suggested that there are important advantages to allowing that the norms of such practices can provide reasons directly, when certain background conditions hold. For example, we can then allow that the husband who saves his wife with the simple thought ‘She’s my wife—I’ve got to save her’ is doing the _right thing_ for the _right reason_, thus acting in a morally worthy way. It is then argued that the background conditions that make a social practice ripe to provide reasons plausibly have to do with its tendency to promote human flourishing.

This chapter discusses manipulation as an aspect of ordinary social life, which need not stem from a sense of entitlement or contempt for other people, let alone a Machiavellian sense that these others are puppets or pawns in their own schemes. In some cases, it is the opposite: people behave manipulatively as the result of feeling that they have lost control or that they have been written off. The chapter argues further that ordinary manipulative behavior need not be conscious or intentional, even in a weak sense of what such a conscious manipulative intention might be held to be, for people’s motives in behaving manipulatively are often quite opaque to them. This suggestion runs counter to certain accounts of manipulation, such as that of Robert Noggle. And it would also have tricky—and interesting—moral implications, which the chapter explores as well.

This chapter explores the possibility of identifying core moral claims with the states of mind which are called _bodily imperatives—_e.g. the ‘make it stop’ state of mind which is plausibly an aspect of, if not identical with, severe pain states and states such as severe thirst, hunger, sleeplessness, humiliation, terror, and torment. The chapter combines this idea with another, that the desire-like, conative, or ‘world-guiding’ states of mind which make normative claims on agents need not belong to the agent on whom the claim is made, on a broadly Humean or desire-based view in metaethics (‘Democratic Humeanism’, or ‘Democratism’). On the view defended, _any_ subject’s bodily imperatives can make moral claims on _any_ moral agent. The case is made that bodily imperatives are a good candidate for constituting the core moral claims or basic imperatives of morality, which all others are either built from, or at least constrained by.

This chapter discusses Humean or desire-based theories of reasons, and sketches a novel “Democratic” alternative to a standard, agent-centered Humean view. According to Democratic Humeanism, any subject’s desires can in principle give rise to reasons for action for any agent. It is argued that reasons should be construed, on this picture, as consisting in desires that some agent do something on behalf of some subject, in service of one of the subject’s ends (and where the agent and the subject may, but need not, be one and the same person). During the second half of the chapter, a suitable theory of the weight of reasons for Democratic Humeanism is developed. It is argued that the weight of a reason should be held to be proportional to the depth or fundamentality, rather than the strength or phenomenological intensity, of the desire that constitutes this reason.

This chapter explores a way of tempering motivational internalism that is held to render it more plausible, while preserving at least something of the spirit of the original position. According to this proposal, when an agent makes a first-person moral judgment about what she ought to do, there is still an expectation that she will be motivated to act accordingly. But the expectation here is normative rather than purely predictive. Essentially, such judgments will entail moral motivations when the agent occupies the appropriate _practical stance_ with respect to said actions—namely, the participatory stance, following P. F. Strawson; whereas if the agent lacks the sense of herself as an active participant in practice, then her moral judgments about what she ought to do may fail to do what _they_ ought to do, i.e. to mobilize her for action. This is held to constitute a _defect_ in a judgment of this kind.

Philosophers have turned their attention to gaslighting only recently, and have made considerable progress in analysing its characteristic aims and harms. I am less convinced, however, that we have fully understood its nature. I will argue in this paper that philosophers and others interested in the phenomenon have largely overlooked a phenomenon I call moral gaslighting, in which someone is made to feel morally defective—for example, cruelly unforgiving or overly suspicious—for harbouring some mental state to which she is entitled. If I am right about this possibility, and that it deserves to be called gaslighting, then gaslighting is a far more prevalent and everyday phenomenon than has previously been credited. And it can also be a purely structural phenomenon, as well as an interpersonal one, which remains a controversial possibility in the current literature.

Kate A. Manne is an associate professor at the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University, where she has been teaching since 2013. Before that, she was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, did her graduate work at MIT, and was an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne, where she studied philosophy, logic, and computer science. Her current research is primarily in moral, feminist, and social philosophy. She is the author of two books, including her first book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny and her latest book Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women. Manne has also published a number of scholarly papers about the foundations of morality, and she regularly writes opinion pieces, essays, and reviews in venues—including The New York Times, The Boston Review, the Huffington Post, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

This chapter explores the possibility of identifying core moral claims with the states of mind which are called bodily imperatives—e.g. the ‘make it stop’ state of mind which is plausibly an aspect of, if not identical with, severe pain states and states such as severe thirst, hunger, sleeplessness, humiliation, terror, and torment. The chapter combines this idea with another, that the desire-like, conative, or ‘world-guiding’ states of mind which make normative claims on agents need not belong to the agent on whom the claim is made, on a broadly Humean or desire-based view in metaethics. On the view defended, any subject’s bodily imperatives can make moral claims on any moral agent. The case is made that bodily imperatives are a good candidate for constituting the core moral claims or basic imperatives of morality, which all others are either built from, or at least constrained by.

This paper considers the moral psychology of interpersonal conduct that is cruel, brutal, humiliating, or degrading. On the view I call “humanism,” such behavior often stems from the perpetrators’ dehumanizing view of their targets. The former may instead see the latter as subhuman creatures, nonhuman animals, supernatural beings, or even mindless objects. If people recognized their common humanity, they would have a hard time mistreating other human beings. This paper criticizes humanism so understood, arguing that its explanatory power is often overstated, and that there are alternative, “socially situated” explanations that are better in many cases.

Internalists about reasons following Bernard Williams claim that an agent’s normative reasons for action are constrained in some interesting way by her desires or motivations. In this paper, I offer a new argument for such a position—although one that resonates, I believe, with certain key elements of Williams’ original view. I initially draw on P.F. Strawson’s famous distinction between the interpersonal and the objective stances that we can take to other people, from the second-person point of view. I suggest that we should accept Strawson’s contention that the activity of reasoning with someone about what she ought to do naturally belongs to the interpersonal mode of interaction. I also suggest that reasons for an agent to perform some action are considerations which would be apt to be cited in favor of that action, within an idealized version of this advisory social practice. I then go on to argue that one would take leave of the interpersonal stance towards someone—thus crossing the line, so to speak—in suggesting that she do something one knows she wouldn’t want to do, even following an exhaustive attempt to hash it out with her. An internalist necessity constraint on reasons is defended on this basis