ABSTRACT
From the Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Crystal Palace to the Columbia Exposition’s White City in Chicago in 1893, huge and increasingly global institutions and networks absorbed cognitive, social, and moral labor in ways mostly new to human relationships. The notions of morality and personhood suggest or require, a critic might say, essentialism, that is, the views of a specific culture on these matters elevated into universal truths, especially by the claim of explaining the single, unitary, and stable human nature. Everything from the encounter with a dilemma up to value judgments about persons or actions connected with the dilemma, judgments that exist not so much in the direct experience as they do in the memory of the experience, is the span of the experience of moral problems. Without a moral standpoint, the critique of anthropocentrism could not show that our sense of the importance of our well-being is a wrong.
