Advith's Calendar

Join us for a lecture by Ladelle McWhorter, a professor of philosophy at the University of Richmond. 

The Person Trap: A Genealogically Informed Critique of a Key Moral Concept

In her 2025 book Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demise of the Modern Moral Self, McWhorter describes the agony of trying and failing to be a good person, an agony that she believes is widely shared in this society and may explain a lot of the despair and rage we see around us. The moral concepts, values, and goals associated with personhood make unfulfillable demands on people in a globalized capitalist economy and trap us in destructive patterns of thought. Looking for a way out of the trap, McWhorter began to wonder: Why do we imagine that living a good life is a matter of being a good person? Using a genealogical approach most commonly associated with Michel Foucault, she traced the notion of personhood, its history, its effects, its exclusions, its political and economic investments, and the sources of its power to shape our ethical lives. In this talk, McWhorter will discuss how she went about that work and some of what she discovered, including the possibility that we might lead ethical lives without being persons at all.