The Value of Humanity by Nandi Theunissen (Oxford University Press, 2020).
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Abstract
Nandi Theunissen’s The Value of Humanity tackles the distinctively modern topic announced in its title – one most famously associated withKant’s moral philosophy – by providing an account that is explicitly inspired by the ancients. According to Theunissen, Plato and Aristotle held that what it is for anything to be good, or valuable, is for it stand in a relation of benefit to something. Theunissen’s book is an extended argument for the application of this general conception of value to human beings in particular. Theunissen thereby hopes to provide an alternative to the Kantian understanding of human value, which she takes to be centered around the claim that human beings differ from all other things of value in virtue of being good ‘in themselves’, i.e., independently of any relation they stand in to anything else. In Chapter 1 Theunissen makes a series of distinctions concerning value – including the relational/non-relational distinction central to the book – and defends the idea that the ethical significance of human beings is best explained as a species of recognition they are due in virtue of their being valuable. She goes on to voice initial skepticism in Chapter 2 about the Kantian notion of ‘absolute’ or non-relational value before defusing the argument, in Chapter 3, that states some things must be valuable in themselves if a vicious regress is to be avoided. She concludes that there need be no such regress if we recognize that something can stand to itself in a reflexive relation of selfbenefit. Chapter 4 gives a positive account of the all-important relation inwhichwe stand to ourselves.Theway inwhichwe benefit ourselves is by exercising our capacity to lead good lives – which capacity is the