@article{Contingency:3352,
      recid = {3352},
      author = {Dupree, Emily},
      title = {The Contingency of Moral Personhood},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2021-08},
      pages = {163},
      abstract = {The Contingency of Moral Personhood challenges conceptions  of the person on which moral personhood is an inviolable  feature of the human condition. In its place, I argue for a  novel account of moral personhood in which having the  status as an end in oneself is contingent on the social and  political factors of one’s environment. By investigating  the moral psychology of living under conditions of  oppression, I argue that its distinct interpersonal trauma  has the potential to transform full moral beings, ends in  themselves, into mere means for the advancement of others’  ends. Furthermore, I argue that this is a  moral-metaphysical transformation and not merely a  distortion in victims’ moral self-understanding. This moral  vulnerability is at the heart of what it is to be human,  and our ethical theories must be revised on account of it.  Further, I expand this idea into political philosophy, and  argue that theories of justice containing inviolability  conceptions of the person will fail to account for the  contingency of moral personhood, and thereby fail to  articulate principles that fully capture the injustice of  oppression. Finally, I argue that consideration of the  contingency of moral personhood reveals that revenge is a  rational moral motivation under conditions of oppression  where the requirements of justice have not been met.  Rejecting those accounts of revenge that view it as both  irrational and morally objectionable, I instead develop a  view on which the act of revenge is also an interpersonal  act of moral emancipation.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3352},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.3352},
}