Ladelle McWhorter, "Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demise of the Modern Moral Self" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
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What is the central question about how to live a good life that frames the book?
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Sarah Tyson, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver, and co-host of the channel, along with Carrie Figdor, Robert Talese, and Malcolm Keating. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Liddell McWhorter, Stephanie Bennett-Smith, Chair of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Emerita, at the University of Richmond. Her book, Unbecoming Persons, The Rise and Demise of the Modern Moral Self, is just out from the University of Chicago Press.
How should one live? What should one do? And what do these questions have to do with being a good person? In Unbecoming Persons, McWhorter reorients these questions through a genealogy, the concept of personhood. That genealogy is in the service of showing us not only that personhood is historically contingent, but that it is also optional. In unbecoming persons, we can feel relief, vital belonging, and exhilaration. We can also embrace an ethos of active belonging, a mode of living that eschews the trappings of personhood for the possibilities of life together. Liddell McWhorter, welcome to New Books and Philosophy. Thank you for having me. Delighted to be here. Well, let's start off with hearing a bit about you and your background as a philosopher and how you came to write this book.
Well, I grew up in Alabama in a blue-collar family and was fortunate enough to be able to go to college as a scholarship student. And so my background really is always somebody that has been just a little bit out of place almost everywhere I've ever lived or been. And as a result, I guess people who feel a little bit out of place are oftentimes, they try to be pretty observant and listen carefully to figure out what's going on. I often have felt over my life that things were just a little weird or hard to understand. And I think that's what drove me into philosophy. It's the questioning of things.
Yeah.
Not necessarily to prove anything or expose anything, but just to figure out the world. Or at least if I can't figure it out, to ask some interesting questions that propel me in interesting directions. So that's really where I come from in some basic way. This is the third monograph that I've written. And I came to it... Well, I write very slowly. My career has been primarily in undergraduate education and at good liberal arts colleges. And I've enjoyed that work very much. But it is, as you know, labor intensive. You spend a lot of time in the classroom, a lot of time with students, a lot of time on committee work. So writing is something you do when you have a little bit of extra time, summers or sabbaticals, breaks.
Yeah.
So it usually takes me about a decade to do a book, and so that explains why there have been just the three. This one took about 12 years, really, I think, from beginning to end. It began in frustration, as books often do, when I just couldn't figure something out. I couldn't figure out how... to deal with some of the big issues of our time, I guess you might say. The second book that I wrote, the one that had come out before I began this one, was on race and racism and sexual oppression and connections among those things. And I had found that I was able to grapple with questions of race, which had been part of my life growing up in Alabama, you can imagine that that had been something that I was always aware of, but always also felt overwhelming.
It was hard to get any kind of handle on race and racism when it was so ubiquitous and so powerful. So I spent 10 years grappling with that and coming to terms in a certain way, learning how to think about it conceptually, historically, and all of that. So when I finished that book, And I was, I guess at that point, I had been involved with various kinds of activism for some time. But I was more and more drawn to issues that had to do with climate change and environmentalism.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central question about how to live a good life that frames the book?
0:01–9:06
2
How does McWhorter’s personal background shape her interest in personhood and moral self?
9:06–16:22
3
Why does the genealogy of the word “person” matter for understanding modern moral obligations?
16:22–25:35
4
How did the 17th‑century Roman legal concept of “person” evolve into today’s corporate personhood?
25:35–33:52
5
What role did the doctrine of the Trinity and early‑modern theology play in redefining personhood?
33:52–42:58
6
Why does the notion of ownership underpin contemporary ideas of personhood and accountability?
42:58–52:12
7
How can we move from “owning” our actions to belonging with communities, ecosystems, and nations?
52:12–1:02:15
8
What future directions does McWhorter suggest for rethinking personhood beyond ownership and toward active belonging?
1:02:15–1:09:35
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