Assholes Read Online Free Page B

involve feeling superior to someone. Yet we invariably and rightly do care about how we are regarded by others in our social relationships. If the way of the world is often simply to compete for status, to try to better someone, Rousseau vividly explains how this gives rise to untold personal misery and grave social ills. 20 Even so, nothing in the human social condition per se requires status competition. Instead, Rousseau suggests, we can acknowledge each person’s need for status recognition without treating anyone as either better or worse than another; we need only recognize each as fundamentally equal. All can rest content with this solution—except, of course, the asshole. His feelings of
amour propre
are an unquenchable fire. He won’t settle for mere equality. 21
    Other philosophers have developed ideas of “moral status” and “mutual recognition,” most notably Fichte (e.g., on how one person’s “summons” can awaken another person into freedom and mutual regard), Hegel (on the unequal regard between master and slave), Sartre (on shame or sexual desire), and Buber (on the “I-Thou” relation we stand in to each and all Others, in contrast with the “I-It” relation we bear to mere things). Or as contemporary moral philosophers might say, in blander but perhaps clearer terms, morality is “second personal,” in at least the following way. 22
    If being a person with basic moral status means anything, it at the very least means that one is owed respect and consideration as a being endowed with capacity to reason. In particular, people are endowed with powers that enable them to consider and evaluate how someone has acted. A mountain, whale, or tree, though deserving of consideration and appreciation in its own right, lacks the range of abilities needed to question the justifiability of what others have done. The community of persons is, in this way, special. 23 I, as an ordinary human person, have special powers of self-consciousness, reasoning, and judgment. I can observe someone acting, as a mere event in the order of things, but also ask (if only to myself) certain questionsof justification. Why, I might ask, should an act such as that be acceptable? In particular, is such an act justifiable to me if it was done in my direction, given how it might affect me?
    Likewise, any one of us, so endowed, can ask what would be justifiable to
another
person, from his or her particular point of view. Is that something
she
can reasonably find acceptable, given the consequences for her? Or could she reasonably complain of how she is in effect being treated? In that case, what we think another could or could not accept should have special significance for us and how we act. It will influence our choices, at least if we are at all morally concerned. Each of us, in acting, has to consider not only what might make the world go better rather than worse from an impersonal point of view—factoring in the mountain, the whale, and the tree—but also what could be acceptable
to
each and every other one of us, for reasons arising from the different, distinctive personal standpoint of each separate person in our common world.
    That is not to say that just any complaint someone voices in a conversation should carry the day, as though one always needed explicit or implicit permission from everyone who could be affected by one’s choices, no matter how unreasonable those people might be. The objections or complaints we actually voice sometimes reflect ignorance of crucial facts or lack of concern with what is reasonably acceptable from everyone’s point of view. We can be ignorant or selfish, or both.
    Neither are our complaints and objections always or inevitably ill founded in these ways, however. So when someone does object to a particular act, with a quizzical glare or loud words, there is usually
some
reason to think that the person may have a reasonable complaint. Even if the objection is ultimately unreasonable, it