'Beyond Reason and Beyond Merit': Practical Wisdom and the Second-Person

My dissertation argues that we can only adequately understand our moral lives from within a second-person standpoint. This is the standpoint we initiate when we open ourselves to another, and it is completed when the other reciprocates that regard. Through this mutual openness, we come to understand others and develop specific responsibilities to them. These responsibilities cannot be separated from the contexts in which they arise. It is in our intimate relationships that the shape of these second-personal considerations becomes fully apparent. For only within such relationships can we clearly grasp our capacity to affect one another 'beyond reason and beyond merit,' as Raimond Gaita puts it in A Common Humanity (p. xxiii). This fact, I argue, tells against any understanding of morality that defines the moral domain in terms of minimal decency.;Starting from a critique of Stephen Darwall's respect-based construal of the second-personal nature of our moral lives in chapter one, in the next two chapters I argue for the love-based picture outlined above. In chapter two, I compare Darwall's respect-based concept of persons to a love-based concept. By examining the differences in how each understands the moral status of children I argue that a love-based concept gives a clearer picture of the scope and content of our moral lives. In the third chapter, I expand my account of the second-personal nature of our moral lives by presenting an argument for the ways in which our intimate relationships both constitute who we are and allow for self-knowledge and an understanding of the particular value of individual human lives. I argue that grasping the ontological and epistemological consequences of our second-personal nature in these ways is necessary for a proper understanding of human freedom. The final chapter develops and defends the idea that practical wisdom is the success of a certain kind of perception of the world that is a consequence of our gestalt towards it. This gestalt is embodied in the (inherently connected) emotional and cognitive content of our concepts. These concepts can only be learned and applied through second-personal engagement with particular others.