From Shotter, J. (1984) Social Accountability and Selfhood. Oxford; Blackwell, pp.15-16

Rights and Duties: The Moral Ecology of Everyday Life

The rights and duties associated with these grammatical categories {the grammatical distinctions between first, second, and third persons] will also influence the style and function of expected accounts. In everyday life, one may be a first-person performer, a second-person ‘understanderer’ or [end p.15] recipient, or a third-person observer, judge or critic, or ‘object’ of another’s action. As a second-person recipient one has a status quite different from those in third-person roles: one is involved in and required to maintain the action; one must attend to what is intended and ignore what just happens (what is unintended). As second-persons in everyday life, we do not have the right to step out of our ‘personal involvement’ with other people, and attend to aspects of their person to which they do not intend us to attend – and to ask them to account for matters for which they do not deem themselves responsible. In the ecology of everyday social life, there seems to be a moral sanction against such shifting troles; unless, that is, one is physician, hairdresser or dentist, or suchlike, and then people do intend you to examine the unintended of their behaviour and appearance. The obligation second persons are under, however, does not extend to third persons. Hence our unease when, as first-person performers attempting a tricky interpersonal encounter, we notice ourselves observed by a third-person outsider; we experience ourselves as someone else’s ‘object’, as under surveillance, fearful that we shall be judged and questione3d about something over which we have no control. The rights, duties, privileges and obligations of the different ‘persons’ in everyday social life are such as to give rise to two kinds of accounting: (1) that from within the flow of action, when one clarifies one’s action as a first-person to a second-person in some way by further action; and (2) that in which one breaks off, or is uninvolved in the flow of action, and delivers one’s account as a third person outsider.

              .... My point in making these distinction is this: the conduct of social life is based on a right we assign to first-person to tell us about themselves and their experiences, and to have what they say taken seriously as meaning what they intend it ot mean (Cavell, 1969)) – as long as we feel they can observe a duty both to distinguish in their conduct those activities for which they are responsible from those they are not, and to execute the former in an intelligible and legitimate manner. All out valid forms of inquiry are based on such a right, and it is this right which I aim to re-assert. For it seems to me the authority of first-persons has been usurped in recent times by the third-person, external observer position. Thus, if this book is read as a treatise aimed at increasing the authority of that position yet further, it will be misunderstood.