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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 77 Volume II, Chapter VIII.5). This phenomenon is a familiar and comical one: Mildred, a Machiavellian social climber, complains bitterly about the Machiavellian social climbers she must contend with daily, and plots to destroy them; Mortimer, the consummate hypocrite and liar, fulminates earnestly to his friends against the evils of hypocrisy and lying, fabricating examples of honesty to prove his points; Maxine and Chester, fair weather friends to all who know them, castigate Archibald's inconstancy and betrayal of them both; Lucille glibly condemns Vernon for his glibness. In all such cases, the agent sincerely holds a moral principle and fails to recognize her own violations of it - indeed, sometimes violating the principle in the act of denouncing violations of it by others. An observer of the scenario wonders how anyone can be so blind to their own faults even while discussing them in the abstract. More generally: How can someone advocate a moral principle on the one hand, and simultaneously exemplify its violation on the other, without being aware of the inconsistency? Kantian-style explanations to the effect that the agent indulges herself by recognizing the inconsistency and making a just-this-once exception 24 do not go deep enough into the Humean conception of the self. For they assume in the Humean agent a perspective from which the inconsistency is recognizable, i.e. an intellectual and cognitive perspective, detached from the demands of desire-satisfaction and the pull of emotion, that conceives all of the agent's behavior as instances either subsumable under abstract principles or their negations, or with which they are consistent or inconsistent. But a self that is motivated and structured according to the Humean conception allows no room for such a perspective, in which one's actions and character exist in a relation of consistency or instantiation to something more abstract than their effects. We have just seen that such a self is beset by funnel vision. Humeans such as Bernard Williams celebrate this constricted perspective as an index of personal integrity. But we see in Chapter VIII.3.2 that personal integrity does not and cannot require the imprisonment within the personal and subjective perspective that funnel vision expresses. This precludes the stance of detached self-reflection on one's actions and emotions that is so central to a Kantian conception of the self.25 The Humean self in its pure form is limited to assessing its present state in light of its agenda for envisioned desiresatisfaction, from the envisioned spatiotemporal location of those envisioned satisfactions. Kant, op. cit. Note 21, Ak. 424-425. I develop this point at greater length in "Kants intelligibler Standpunkt zum Handeln," in Systematische Ethik mit Kant, Eds. Hans-Ulrich Baumgarten and Carsten Held (München/Freiburg: 2001), in English translation at adrianpiper.com; and in Kant's Metaethics: First Critique Foundations (manuscript in progress). 24 25 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
