Communities of Respect : Grounding Responsibility, Authority, and Dignity

Bennett W. Helm presents a new approach to understanding persons as responsible, rational agents, by developing an account of communities of respect and our place within them. Through the interplay of reactive attitudes, community members are held responsible to norms which shape their identities, as essentially social creatures.

Communities of respect are communities of people sharing common practices or a (partial) way of life; they include families, clubs, religious groups, and political parties. This book develops a detailed account of such communities in terms of the rational structure of their members'' reactive attitudes: emotions like resentment, gratitude, guilt, approbation, and indignation, whereby people hold each other responsible to certain norms. Helm argues that these communities are fundamental in three interrelated ways to understanding what it is to be a person. First, it is only by being a member of a community of respect that one can be a responsible agent having dignity; such an agent therefore has certain rights as well as the authority to demand that fellow members recognize her dignity and follow the norms of the community, compliance with which norms they likewise have the authority to demand from her. Second, by prescribing or proscribing both actions and values, communities of respect can shape the identities of their members in ways that others have the authority to enforce, thereby revealing an important interpersonal dimension of the identities of persons. Finally, all of this is grounded in a distinctively interpersonal form of practical rationality in virtue of which we jointly have reasons to recognize the dignity and authority of fellow members and so to comply with their authoritative demands, as well as to respect (and so comply with) the norms of the community. Hence we persons are essentially social creatures.