Alien Experience

Abstract

If I were a better human being, that person’s voice wouldn’t sound so shrill to me. Many of us may have had such thoughts. They give voice to the worrying intuition that if we were less affected by sexism and racism, or better at keeping our tempers, our fellow humans would look and sound differently to us. Alien Experience argues that we should take this sense of unease seriously. It is as philosophically significant as our unease over desires or fears that we disown. Making sense of this unease requires us to re-think the relation between experiences and standing commitments; to re-consider what we mean by self-control; and to attend to empirical questions about perception, attention, and tacit cognition. Alien Experience contests the assumption that while we may be answerable (morally, ethically, legally) for our attitudes and emotions, we are not answerable, at least not in any interesting way, for our perceptions and sensations. That assumption is threaded through debates in the philosophy of mind, moral psychology, and ethics, but it leads to a flattened view of the ways experiences are related to agency. Recognizing that we in fact can be alienated from our experiences leads us to a more nuanced view of agency, and helps us appreciate distinctive opportunities for self-improvement.