Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Interview with Ladelle McWhorter, "Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demise of the Modern Moral Self" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Host: Sarah Tyson
Guest: Ladelle McWhorter
Date: October 20, 2025

This episode features a wide-ranging philosophical conversation between Sarah Tyson and Ladelle McWhorter about McWhorter’s latest book, Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demise of the Modern Moral Self. Through a mix of personal story, historical analysis, and social critique, McWhorter argues that the modern concept of “personhood” is historically contingent, conceptually fraught, and perhaps no longer serves emancipatory or ethical purposes. The discussion explores the genealogy of personhood, its links to ownership and corporate power, its foundations in law and theology, and possible alternatives for living and belonging beyond “being a person.”

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Personal Background and Motivation for the Book

• [02:59] McWhorter shares her background growing up in Alabama, her blue-collar roots, and feeling “just a little bit out of place almost everywhere,” which made her “pretty observant and listen carefully to figure out what's going on.”
• Writing the book stemmed from frustration about large-scale social issues: environmental crisis, corporate dominance, race and activism.
• The catalyst was feeling powerless as an individual against the influence of corporations, exemplified by a moment debating whether to use an electric dryer to protest Dominion Energy ([09:00]: “I just lost it...it actually won't make any difference. It really won't. If I use this dryer or I don't use this dryer, it's not going to save the planet, it's not going to save the world, it's not going to even be noticed… So we use the dryer. And that was just a feeling of defeat.”)

2. The Problem with Personhood

• [14:03] McWhorter moved from asking “Can I be a good person?” to a deeper questioning: “Maybe there’s something wrong with trying to be a person.”
• Personhood, as a concept, is not natural or universal but a historically-specific way of organizing moral life.
• The “good person” ideal is entangled with frustrated and atomized moral agency in a world structured by forces beyond individual control.

3. Why a Genealogical Method?

• [14:56] Genealogy (inspired by Foucault) allows tracing the concept’s history without metaphysical presuppositions, instead tracking the social and historical shifts that shaped current ideas.
• Stories discovered in historical documents—especially English texts from the 17th century—illustrate changes in how “person” was understood ([15:56]: “I had come across this set of documents...where the word person occurs...in contexts where it makes no sense to me...So something seemed to have happened when people. When a word changes its meaning...”)
• Two main sources identified:
  • Roman Law: 'Person' as legal status, not as human being; not all humans were persons, and some persons were not human.
  • Trinitarian Theology: The doctrine of three divine persons in Christianity influenced debates and definitions.

4. The Modern Emergence of Universal Personhood

• [22:19] The English context of the late 17th century, especially around John Locke, melded these traditions to retool “person” as a universal, egalitarian moral subject—ostensibly raising everyone up but with significant drawbacks.
• Locke makes personhood about ownership: all are accountable because they “own their actions,” but this does not equate to economic or political equality ([27:52]: “He makes everybody an owner. Personhood was about ownership property in the...world...But everybody's a person. And that means everybody is, Locke thinks, accountable for their actions.”)
• Being a person did not, in practice, protect from slavery or dispossession; it justified them by a twisted logic of accountability and property rights.

5. Personhood, Slavery, and Dispossession

• [26:42] The personhood discourse justified colonial dispossession of indigenous peoples and rationalized chattel slavery.
• Locke and contemporaries used the language of persons to argue that indigenous people and slaves were accountable as persons—but could (and, in Locke’s argument, should) be dispossessed or enslaved if failing the expectations of “proper” persons.
• “Being a person didn't get you freedom...Your station in life was to be a slave. And that was. That was simply right. And of course, being a person didn't mean you could hold on to your land...” ([35:56])

6. Rise of Corporate Personhood

• [38:06] The Roman legal tradition's “corporate person” resurged in 19th-century America, enabling business entities ever-greater power and legal protection.
• Originally, incorporation was tightly controlled and justified by “public benefit,” but over time, corporations gained increasing independence, culminating in legal recognition of corporate civil rights, especially after the 14th amendment and cases like Citizens United ([43:00]).
• Memorable explanation: “Corporations came to be able to exercise civil rights. And because they are...so much assets, and so much now political power and now claim civil rights against any governmental body that tries to regulate them, that individual persons, the rest of us really can't fight them. Not in those terms anyway.” ([44:44])

7. Ownership as the Core of Personhood

• [47:32] Modern moral personhood is pervaded by the notion of ownership—of actions, emotions, even one's health and destiny.
• McWhorter scrutinizes management jargon about “owning your feelings/career/education,” finding it comically inadequate: “Take ownership of your life, you know, and it seems to mean all kinds of things about just, you know, take the bull by the horns, get ahead, whatever...but when I started substituting other kinds of words for take ownership of, I came to see that most of those words brought me into context of relationships.” ([51:30])
• Changing language from ownership to relationality can shift moral imagination: “When we really put that in alternative phrasing, we end up with things like, I need to be more responsive to my friends or my spouse, more honest with my children about my expectations… it brings up all the ways in which we're actually related to other people rather than the ways in which we're responsible and on our own.” ([52:17])

8. Learning from Indigenous and Alternative Traditions

• McWhorter discusses how some Indigenous American groups and historical experiments (like St. Francis and the Franciscans) actively resisted the imposition of ownership categories onto land, beings, or themselves ([55:00]).
• Suggests we have much to learn from traditions that treat land, life, and community as belonging, connection, or stewardship rather than property.

9. Dismantling Individualism: Rethinking Individuation and Relationality

• [57:17] Addresses the limits of radical individualism and resists jumping to “radical monism.” Instead, she advocates for an account of difference and individuation rooted in relationship and interdependency, citing work such as Leanne Simpson’s on Indigenous diplomacy and boundary-rituals.
• Looks to science for speculative accounts of how difference and self/other distinctions emerge even in animal biology.

10. Toward an Ethos of Active Belonging

• In the concluding section, McWhorter proposes “belonging” as a more fruitful alternative to ownership or personhood: “Instead of that things belong to me, that I belong. I belong to a community, I belong to an ecosystem, I belong to a nation, you know, all kinds of things. And those, those belongings...are not claims of ownership and obligation, but they are connection, claims of connection. And we belong to things we hate sometimes or things that don't want us...but that does not mean we don't belong. The belonging is first.” ([63:32])
• She frames this as a “framework of exploration or experimentation” rather than prescription, urging creative practices for active belonging.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Ladelle McWhorter on the futility of individual moral gestures:
  “It actually won't make any difference. It really won't. If I use this dryer or I don't use this dryer, it's not going to save the planet, it's not going to save the world, it's not going to even be noticed. Dominion Energy is not going to notice my paltry little protest.” ([09:00])
• On the core of personhood:
  “Personhood was about ownership property in the...world...But everybody's a person. And that means everybody is, Locke thinks, accountable for their actions.” ([27:52])
• On Locke’s use of personhood to justify colonization:
  “The argument for dispossessing them was it was our duty to dispossess them because they were basically abusing this big...all these resources. They weren't using it like they were supposed to and as persons should have been doing so they were irresponsible, bad persons. So dispossess them. Sure, take it.” ([30:58])
• On corporate power and personhood:
  “Corporations came to be able to exercise civil rights. And because they are...so much assets, and so much now political power and now claim civil rights against any governmental body that tries to regulate them, that individual persons, the rest of us really can't fight them. Not in those terms anyway.” ([44:44])
• On replacing ownership with relationality:
  “When we really put that in alternative phrasing, we end up with things like, I need to be more responsive to my friends or my spouse, more honest with my children about my expectations… it brings up all the ways in which we're actually related to other people rather than the ways in which we're responsible and on our own.” ([52:17])
• On “belonging” as foundational:
  “The belonging is first. That's what I'm striving to think with anyway. The belonging is real. We really do belong. We belong together, we belong here, we belong on this planet.” ([63:32])

Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | |------------|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 02:59 | McWhorter’s background and the book’s origin | | 09:00 | Story of the dryer, frustration, and question of being a good person | | 14:32 | Turn to genealogy; why investigate the history of personhood | | 22:19 | The transformation of “person” in English history and via Locke | | 26:42 | Personhood’s role in justificatory projects of slavery and dispossession | | 38:06 | Corporate “personhood,” its history, and consequences | | 47:32 | The concept of ownership: management literature and the language of “owning” | | 55:00 | Indigenous and religious resistance to owning land, people, or being | | 57:17 | The challenge of moving beyond radical individualism; individuation as difference in relationship | | 63:32 | An “ethos of active belonging” and concluding reflections |

Flow & Tone

The conversation is candid, searching, sometimes wry, and deeply philosophical but always attentive to concrete historical, social, and personal contexts. McWhorter’s approach is self-aware—she avoids grand prescriptions, uses personal stories to make abstract discussions vivid, and acknowledges the exploratory and unfinished character of philosophical questioning.

For Listeners

If you have not read the book or heard the episode, this discussion offers a profound, critical look at how the very notion of the “person”—so central to modern politics, ethics, and law—might actually entrap us, and how other forms of belonging, relationship, and difference might serve us better in confronting planetary crises, corporate power, and our desire to live good lives together.