L. Theunissen

This chapter develops a relational account of the value of humanity that makes essential reference to the value of a well-lived life. It begins with a widely shared assumption that the value of human beings in some way depends on our capacity for valuing other things. But it makes the distinctive proposal that the capacity for valuing makes people of value because it makes them capable of leading a good life, a notion that is explicated in broadly Aristotelian terms. People are of value because they can be “good for themselves” in the sense that they bear a special relation to their own flourishing. The chapter shows how the resulting proposal provides a justification for basic forms of ethical behavior that are owed to others.

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? In exploring the value of humanity, the essays in this volume offer a wide range of competing, yet overlapping, answers to this question. 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.