Assholes Read Online Free PDF Page A

also might have an element of truth. Accordingly, one of our basic moral responsibilities is to hear people out, to atleast take seriously the reasons they give for wanting to be treated differently, even if we ultimately object. The expectation, in other words, is for us to
recognize
the person objecting, in something like the way a deliberative body grants someone in the room the right to speak before the group. This is, as we might put it, part and parcel of basic
moral respect
—that is, respect not simply for the person’s complaint but for the
person
who makes it.
    The asshole, by contrast, is wholly
immunized
against the complaints of others. Whether or not the complaint is ultimately reasonable, the person is not registered, from the asshole’s point of view, as worthy of consideration. The person who complains is not seen as a potential
source
of reasonable complaint but is simply walled out. If the person complaining is “standing up for herself,” in order to be recognized, it is as though she were physically present but morally nonexistent in the asshole’s view of the world.
    That is why otherwise coolheaded people fall into a fit of rage or lash out at the asshole: they are fighting to be recognized. They are
not
fighting for the small benefit of having the asshole move to the back of the line or, more generally, for a slightly more fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of cooperation. The person taking a stand against the asshole is fighting to be registered in the asshole’s point of view as morally real. She struggles not simply to be heard but to be seen. She struggles to be seen, in Thomas Nagel’s phrase, as “one among others equally real.” 24
    The fight can become extraordinarily frustrating because the asshole usually wins: his sense of entitlement is entrenched, so there is usually no getting through. (Hence one may spontaneously desire to give the man a sound beating, as though that would help.) 25 The fully cooperative person is accustomed to listening when people complain, and used to being heard when even a suggestion of complaint is made. That is how cooperative people normally work out what is acceptable to all, what the moral equality of each person requires. This comes to feel natural, expected, a matter of course. The asshole, by contrast, is equally accustomed to walling others out. He does it all the time. This is comfortable for him. And he is exceptionally good at it: when others complain, he easily dismisses the objection, or quickly finds convincing arguments that rationalize the objection away, and moves on. He compliments himself on how good he is at this because he is very good at it indeed.
OVERMORALIZATION ?
    We have seen that the asshole is important to us for moral reasons. His sense of special entitlement clashes with our own sense that he morally should recognize us as an equal. We have built this sense of entitlement into our basic account of what an asshole
is
. Here, however, one might object that we areovermoralizing the asshole concept. Can’t someone count as an asshole but wholly lack a sense of moral entitlement? Can’t he simply be thoroughly self-absorbed, like Turnbull or Updike, or most teenagers? Can’t he simply be extremely difficult or just clueless?
    This line of questioning is important because our theory is a proposal about what all assholes have in common. It is a problem if some people fit our definition but do not count as assholes, or if there are true assholes our definition leaves out. Apparent counterexamples such as those just noted could well mean that we should wipe the slate clean and relax our claim that the asshole has a moral sense of entitlement—that we should de-moralize the concept. How, then, might those examples be accounted for?
    It is of course fine to
call
someone an asshole when he is simply self-absorbed or extremely difficult to get along with. When someone cuts one off in traffic, one can appropriately call him