Between Persons: How Concepts of the Person Make Moral Experience Possible

Moral theories often conflate morality with society or mind, while detaching mind from society, and society from subjectivity. This eliminates the existential space between persons where morality is a process of making mutually recognized lives possible. Moral experience is a cultural experience of intersubjectivity, which has social and cultural, subjective and reflective, imaginative and practical, and existential and bodily dimensions. Concepts of the person organize the moral possibilities of intersubjectivity; they can help situate culturally formulated ethics in the space between persons in ways that help generate the moral presence afforded others and self.