Abstract
While psychologists lavish their attentions on the study of personality, they devote surprisingly little to the question of what is a person. Apart from the work of a few notable theorists (e.g., Baldwin, 1897; the early work of James, 1890; Mead, 1934; and others; and more recent theorizing by scholars like Harré, 1998; McAdams, 1988; and Woolfolk, 1998), the student of psychology wishing to know what a person is finds little guidance in the vast expanse of psychological literature. It might safely be presumed that we all know what it is to be a person. However, as the history of philosophy shows, it takes more to know one than being one. It is more likely the case that “person” is not considered a proper scientific concept, and so is beyond the ken of legitimate psychological inquiry. Scientific naturalism concerns study of the nature of things in the world. But a person, by definition, designates those features of human beings that make them more than mere things. Consequently, if persons are beings bearing certain rights, or having interests and recognizing what is and what is not in their interest, or capable of rational choice, or originating genuine purposes, or conceiving themselves autobiographically as persisting through time with a past and future, or justly deserving of praise or blame, then, in comprehending persons, we are forced to deal with what actually matters to human beings beyond their physical and biological constituents.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Throughout his various works, Taylor has been consistent in his critique of naturalism and claims regarding a moral ontology. His major opus, Sources of the self (1989), contains the most elaborated statement of his ideas.
- 2.
It should be noted that Taylor has been accused of being unclear in his use of the terms “agent,” “person,” and “self” (Olafson, 1994). For instance, Olafson (p. 191) observes that in the opening of Sources of the self, Taylor (1989) states that the book will be concerned with “our modern notion of what it is to be a human agent, a person or a self” (p. 3), as if these terms might be used interchangeably. However, in two previously published essays (see Taylor 1985a, 1985b), Taylor goes some distance in clarifying his notion of persons.
- 3.
In Sources of the self, Taylor provides only faint gestures of his theism and a “hunch” about the indispensability of transcendent moral sources. More recently, he has elaborated explicitly what he sees as the role of theism in moral life (see Taylor, 1994, 1999, 2004). Having said this, what we wish to take from Taylor’s thought does not require his theism, let alone any commitment to it on our part.
- 4.
Taylor pursues his exploration of modernity and its effects in a more recent book, Modern social imaginaries (2004). In this text, he deals less with the specific difficulties of the modern personal identity than with the historical conditions by which it has arisen. He describes how the innovations of modernity changed our understanding and envisioning of three dimensions of human life (i.e., the economy, the public sphere in which opinions are formed and expressed, and the sovereignty of people). This shift led to the overturning of the premodern grasp of humanity’s place in the cosmos, in which the physical, human, and spiritual worlds were arranged in “hierarchical complementarity,” and replaced it with a “direct access society” in which the individual is privileged over the collective in a way that is “immediate to the whole.”
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag New York
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Martin, J., Sugarman, J.H., Hickinbottom, S. (2010). Persons and Moral Agency. In: Persons: Understanding Psychological Selfhood and Agency. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1065-3_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1065-3_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-1064-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-1065-3
eBook Packages: Behavioral ScienceBehavioral Science and Psychology (R0)