Seeing What’s Right Before Us: Alienation and Moral Vision

Abstract

Alienation is a slippery concept. This thesis aims to deepen our understanding of what alienation is, and to investigate how being alienated may be problematic for perception. First, I take a close look at a particular theory of a particular kind of alienation: Pascal Brixel’s account of alienated labor. Next, I show that Brixel’s account contains a helpful idea for understanding alienation more generally. Roughly, this is that alienation involves what I call a "motivational split". I then offer a rough sketch of a moral epistemology. This sketch allows me to better illustrate how alienation could thwart our ability to form apt moral perspectives. It also allows me to offer some final remarks on what we might want a theory of alienation (and perhaps of slippery concepts in general) to look like.