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www.​observer.​com/​1997/​10/​john-​updike-​champion-​literary-​phallocrat-​drops-​one-​is-​this-​finally-​the-​end-​for-​magnificent-​narcissists/ .
    16 . Many assholes may have what psychologists call “narcissistic personality disorder,” which is generally very resistant to therapeutic treatment. As psychologist Sander Koole explained (in conversation), when the therapist asks, “How do you feel?” the narcissist answers, “I feel I am not getting the respect I deserve.” While this is characteristic of narcissistic personality disorder, we are not assuming that every such person counts as an asshole. Being an asshole is probably only one version of the disorder. Even so, the near plague of narcissism in our culture might explain why there are more assholes than there used to be. We touch upon this theme at several points later.
    17 . As Kant illustrates, even in encountering “a humble plain man, in whom I perceive righteousness in a higher degree than I am conscious of in myself,
my mind bows
whether I choose or not, however high I carry my head that he may not forget my superior position.” Kant is responding to this remark by French popular philosopher Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle: “I bow to a great man, but my mind does not bow.” “Of the Drives of Pure Practical Reason,” in
Critique of Practical Reason
, 3rd ed., ed. and trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1993), part 1, book 1, chap. 3, 80. For related discussion, see also
Lectures on Ethics
, trans. Louis Infield with foreword by Lewis White Beck (1963; repr., London: Methuen, 1979), 126–29.
    18 . Or at least in this one reading of Kant’s idea that self-love becomes self-conceit when it “makes itself legislative and the unconditional practical principle” (
Critique of Practical Reason
, p. 77). It also fits with the passage from
Lectures on Ethics
(p. 128) quoted in the epigraph, in which Kant speaks of the conceited person taking a “lenient view of the moral law” and thus having a “false standard.” We develop the point further in “Letter to an Asshole.”
    19 . See Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Émile; or, On Education
, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
    20 . Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality Among Men,” in
A Discourse on Inequality
, trans. Maurice Cranston (New York: Penguin, 1984).
    21 . In
Émile
, Rousseau speaks of “inflamed
amour propre
” (p. 247) as well as the difficulty of overcoming this mentality (see the passage on p. 245, which is quoted in the epigraph). We return to Rousseau’s view that destructive status consciousness has a social cause and a political solution in chapter 7 .
    22 . See T. M. Scanlon,
What We Owe to Each Other
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), and especially Stephen Darwall,
The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
    23 . But can’t one be an asshole for kicking a dog? It seems so, though I’m not sure one would count as an asshole (as opposed to being simply cruel) if one only kicked dogs and treated people perfectly well. But maybe; we can leave the matter open.
    24 . Thomas Nagel,
The Possibility of Altruism
(1970; repr., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). Nagel uses this phrase to explain how the ethical egoist, who only sees reason to do what is ultimately in his own interests, fails to see
himself
as but one among equally real others, and so falls into a kind of solipsism. The asshole is not the pure egoist, but otherwise we merely have a different emphasis: the objector seeks to intrude upon the asshole’s solipsistic view of the moral world.
    25 . Thus one post to the Urban Dictionary says the asshole is “Someone who seriously needs their ass kicked” (Thomas Huang, www.​urban​dicti​onary.​com/​define.​php?​term=​asshole&page=17 ). The