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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 59 obtains between persons of neighboring voting districts, much less communities, cultures, societies, or nations. The prevalence of xenophobia on the global as well as local scales calls into question the extent to which others can be supposed to share with us a common set of basic values (let alone intrinsic values), such that they can be represented as believing and desiring what we would believe and desire were we in their place. Instead, the Principle of Charity would seem rather to hold primarily within relatively small and insulated communities, within which conventions of diplomacy and prohibitions against broaching the topics of politics, religion, or sex are superfluous to maintaining at least the appearance of mutual understanding. Of course the scope of the Principle of Charity could be extended to cover other cases in which such conventions and prohibitions are essential, by sufficiently weakening the qualifications for something's counting as a common system of basic values - of an extrinsic and contingent sort; but then even to state the Principle of Charity as a constraint on our general theory of persons would be otiose. The insufficiency of the Principle of Charity to the facts of social diversity undercuts not only Lewis' assumption of a shared fund of basic beliefs and desires; but thereby the revisionist assumption of the ubiquity of desire more generally. Similarly with the Principle of Rationalization. I argue in Chapter III that there are, in any case, internal, structural problems with this model that constrain its meaningful empirical application. But even were those problems not to arise, it would seem simply to be false empirically that most people maximize utility in their physical behavior, even if that claim is sufficiently weakened by qualification to bring it dangerously close to vacuity. For even if we suppose a rational agent always to act on those beliefs about how best to satisfy her desires, given her incomplete knowledge of probabilities and available resources, inadequate computational skills, distorted judgment, lack of mobility, disinclination to reflect seriously on her true desires, and so on, it is still doubtful whether most agents turn out to be rational, even in this attenuated sense. Neurosis, criminal insanity, weakness of will, and impulsive behavior provide abundant counter-evidence to the empirical applicability of Lewis' Principle of Rationalization. Of course this is not to deny the value of this principle in a possible normative theory of persons (at least not in this discussion). It is merely to restrict its role to the definitional. We may simply stipulate its applicability to some, sufficiently idealized community of human agents, but we should not expect its routine empirical confirmation in the behavior of actual ones. The insufficiency of the Principle of Rationalization to the facts of human imperfection undercuts not only Lewis' good-faith assumption of shared instrumental rationality; but thereby the applicability of the Humean model of instrumental rationality more generally. Both of the Humean conception's models - of rationality as well as of motivation - are © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
