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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 29 Gibbard, Joseph Raz, and Elizabeth Anderson rejects the rationality of moral principle - but then resurrects rationality as a prescriptive criterion for moral emotions and attitudes. In all of these cases, moral guidance is given by a nonrational component of the self: We ought to perform those actions we intuitively know to be right, or, respectively, feel most deeply. No consistent Humean Anti-Rationalist normative view can have a developed practical or casuistical component, because what any particular individual ought to do depends on their particular intuitions, feelings, or desires - not on impartially conceived principles. Nevertheless, the value-theoretic parts of these views are articulated and developed within the impartial normative constraints of Socratic metaethics. Volume I will contain much, and Volume II a slight bit more, on the failings of late twentieth century Humean Anti-Rationalism. Here I call attention to just one reason why it is unpalatable in practice to anyone seriously interested in the enterprise of Socratic metaethics as a distinctive philosophical methodology. This is that it appeals to the authority of a firstpersonal, interpersonally inaccessible experience in judging, not only what one should do, but what should be done simpliciter under particular circumstances. In consulting only one's moral emotions or intuitions about how to resolve some hypothetical or actual moral problem that need bear no obvious or articulable relation to one's own circumstances, one presumes to legislate how others should behave or feel on the basis of a moral foundation which is cognitively inaccessible to them, and therefore inaccessible to their evaluation. Suppose, for example, that I discover that my best friend is dealing drugs to minors and decide, on the basis of my feelings about him, to protect our friendship rather than betray it by turning him in to the police. There is a great deal you and I may discuss about such a case. But without knowing, and without being able to experience directly the particular nature and quality of my feelings for this person, you may find my behavior simply indefensible. You may acknowledge and sympathize with the deep bonds of friendship and loyalty I am feeling, but find it nevertheless impossible to condone my claim that I just could not bring myself to destroy them by turning him in. You may think that no friendship, no matter how deep or meaningful, should count for so much that it outweighs the right of minors to be shielded from drug addiction before they are mature enough to make a rational choice. And since I cannot convey to you the direct quality of the 1996); Susan Wolf, "Moral Saints," The Journal of Philosophy 79, 8 (1982); First Earl of Shaftesbury, "Selections," in The British Moralists: 1650 - 1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); Francis Hutcheson, Illustrations of the Moral Sense, Ed. Bernard Peach (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1971); Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), Book III. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
