“Public Kindnesses and Valuing Persons as Persons” – Cheshire Calhoun (Arizona State University)
October 30 @ 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Friday, October 30, 2026
4:00 – 6:00 PM
Dodd Hall 175
RSVP HERE
Join us on Friday, October 30, 2026, for a colloquium with Cheshire Calhoun, Arizona State University. The talk will take place from 4:00 – 6:00 PM with a reception to follow.
Public Kindnesses and Valuing Persons as Persons
There’s an upsurge in cultural attention to kindnesses to strangers and mere acquaintances. Are there reasons other than, or in addition to, the reasons favoring general beneficence and personal relationship kindnesses, that face-to-face kindnesses to strangers and acquaintances matter? I explore their connection with valuing, treating, and attitudinally recognizing persons as persons. Rather than taking “valuing persons as persons” to be an exclusively moral notion, I suggest that to value persons as persons is to value them under three distinct descriptors: as bearers of moral personhood, as irreplaceable individuals who are the particular persons they are, and as individuals with whom we are in society. The first two notions are familiar from the literature on recognition-respect and on personal love. I introduce the last to illuminate the way everyday, mundane social interactions between strangers and acquaintances communicate a distinctive form of recognizing our value as persons; I suggest that the companion valuing attitude is friendly non-indifference; I conclude with some comments on greetings and chattings.
Cheshire Calhoun is Professor of Philosophy Emerit at Arizona State University. She works in normative ethics and moral psychology. Her most recent books are A Social Practice Account of Responsible Persons (Open Press TIU) and Doing Valuable Time: The Present, the Future, and Meaningful Living (OUP). She is series editor for Oxford University Press’s Studies in Feminist Philosophy and co-editor of a new Oxford series on Positive Moral Philosophy. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Science in 2020.
Join our mailing list!
Sign up for our mailing list to stay up-to-date with future UCLA Philosophy events, conferences, and colloquia!