the adversarial conception

I might have talked about this before; I'm not sure. I'll start with an example, drawn very closely from my life: say a friend of mine comes to me in class one day and asks me a logic problem (this is a good one). Now, I can take this problem as a challenge, as it were: if I win, I'll have beaten the person who asked me the problem. Or I can take it as a gift: there's a joy and a beauty to mathematics, and this is my friend trying to share a piece of that with me.

The idea of the adversarial conception of other people is that we treat others primarily as engaged in competition with us for various resources (prestige being one of them). The aim of the game is to pull others' levers in order to ensure the most advantageous outcome. (A lot of game theory examples demonstrate this way of living). I treat others as adversaries.

Basically what this is is one way of putting the Kantian distinction between treating others as mere means, and treating them as ends-in-themselves. As it happens, while a lot of Kantian ethicists will talk about this contrast, I don't think they spend enough time on it. It's a really worthwhile way of getting at the Kantian critique of non-Kantian ethics, especially things like utilitarianism. That is, treating others as mere means can involve being very nice to them. For example, working hard to satisfy another's desires can in fact involve treating them merely as a means.

Of course, understanding the ("the"?) alternative is the tricky part (and without an alternative, it's hard to see what's wrong with utilitarianism). Kantians talk about "respect," or "treating others as ends-in-themselves." I'm actually not a fan of the latter phrase. In general, too many Kantian ethicists seem to talk as if it is the unreformed desires of others to which we must respond. I'd rather say that the whole point of Kantian ethics, an ethics of freedom, is to understand that everyone else is, more or less, in the same boat we are: wondering what is true and what is worth doing. We work together insofar as we work together on figuring out what that is.

* I can't take credit for the phrase "the adversarial conception;" that is due to someone else.