Unbecoming Persons

"In the face of impending ecological crises, injustices perpetrated around the world, and unsustainable consumption patterns in nations like the US, the moral demands of being a good person are almost too much to bear. No matter what we choose to do, we seem able only to lessen our complicity and guilt in some small measure rather than to enact our values positively. In Unbecoming Persons, Ladelle McWhorter confronts the frustrations and difficulties that come with trying to be a good person in this globalized, commodified, ecologically compromised world by raising an unexpected question: do we have to be persons at all? Might there be better ways of living ethically, ways of living not constrained by individualism, possessiveness, and the illusion of autonomy? Unbecoming Persons distances us from our notions of modern moral personhood-its extreme possessiveness, its preoccupation with self-identity, its often exclusive concern with individual enrichment or salvation-to discover and create ways to live well together in this world. Failure to become or be good persons does not mean we are doomed to be bad or failed persons, McWhorter assures us. There are other ways to live. Instead, McWhorter proposes an ethos of active belonging in which selves arise in networks of dynamic processes. She suggests that a good life is one that enacts an awareness of belonging to those networks. While the project to redefine personhood for a better way to live will take time, Unbecoming Persons gives us a set of vital, livable possibilities as we start down that path"--

Ladelle McWhorter is the Stephanie Bennett-Smith Chair of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Emerita at the University of Richmond. Her books include Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy.