8 - Persons, friendship, and moral value

Summary

I began this book signaling sympathy with the idea that to be a person is to be a rational animal. My aim since then has been to offer an account of at least part of the kind of rationality characteristic of persons, namely the sort of practical rationality involved both in deliberating about value and in motivating ourselves to act accordingly. In the context of a sustained attack on the cognitive–conative divide, I developed as a replacement for the notion of conation an account of disclosive assents to import, articulated in terms of a distinctive kind of rationality characteristic of the rational interconnections among evaluative judgment and felt evaluations. This new conception of rationality therefore enables me to present a more refined conception of what it is to be a person.

To see this, consider Harry Frankfurt's account of the distinction between persons and mere animals, or “wantons,” as he calls them. Wantons, on the one hand, have beliefs and desires and are able to reason about how best to fulfill these desires, but they “not only … pursue whatever course of action [they are] most strongly inclined to pursue, but [they do] not care which of [their] inclinations is the strongest” (p. 17). Wantons, therefore, can have a kind of freedom, but this is merely freedom of action. Persons, on the other hand, can care about their motives for action. This means that for a person, but not for a wanton, there is the potential for a difference between the motives for action he in fact has and those he thinks he ought to have, and this opens up the possibility of freedom of the will.