Jan 17
For the Love of Humanity
I believe that we can magnify the wrongness of oppression by looking closely at how we, human beings, must describe ourselves. If we examine what we are, we should see that we cannot help but see ourselves as making sense of ourselves in a world that we partially but never fully control or understand. In order to validate this regard for ourselves, we must certify the legitimacy of humanity’s claim to self-determination and self-constitution. If this is right, we can move from claims about how individuals must see themselves to claims about how we must see each other, and in both cases we must defend an account of humanity that establishes the moral authority of each person to narrate and determine themself. Where systems of oppression function by limiting the capacity of classes of individuals to determine themselves according to their own narratives, systemic oppression is clearly incompatible with the concept of humanity that we must defend. If oppression is incompatible with the very idea of humanity, and if the idea of humanity provides the only tenable ground for a regard we cannot help but have towards ourselves, then any instance of oppression will be noxious to us all. If we accept that there is oppression in the world, then for a love of oneself as much as for a love of each other, for the love of humanity, we must work to undermine it. Sponsored by the Eshelman Fund and the Philosophy Department.