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Show Chapter II. The Belief-Desire Model of Motivation 78 The explanation of ignorance of oneself as a particular in a Humean self is simpler: It is that there is no higher-order principle beyond desiresatisfaction itself, embedded in such a self, that it might recognize itself as instantiating. Identified with its desires, the only available vantage point from which its own actions can be assessed is the remote perspective offered by its future-orientation toward its envisioned satisfactions. This is what it means to say that an agent who satisfies a desire at the expense of prudence or duty has "lost perspective": From the envisioned future point in time at which particular deficiencies are supplied and wants replenished, present and salient abstract moral principles are simply items among the array of externally available resources for achieving this. They are instruments like any others, to be invoked, used, applied, or discarded as needed; and their salience and importance varies accordingly. Thus the Humean self is rigid in some respects and malleable in others. It is rigid in its confinement to the subjective and personal perspective of its agenda for desire-satisfaction, which is a characterological constant. But it is malleable in its readiness to adapt opportunistically any principle, any perspective, any situation or resource or state of itself to the achievement of that agenda. For a Humean self, there is no inconsistency in violating moral principle while advocating it, because there is no inconsistency in a strategy that utilizes both advocacy and violation of that which one advocates simultaneously in the service of desire-satisfaction. Such an agent advocates the principle when it is convenient, and violates it when it is convenient; there is no contradiction in the possibility that both may be convenient at the same time. To bring the phenomenon to the attention of the agent herself is to invite detailed explanations as to why her actions do not, in fact, constitute violations of the principle at all, but rather something completely different, required by circumstance. Since the deployment of instrumental means in the service of desire-satisfaction is for her uppermost, her actions really are something different: not violations of her principles, but necessary strategies for restoring herself to wholeness and sufficiency. Who could possibly quarrel with that? 2.4. Attachment and Self-Hatred The representational analysis of desire implies that from the point of view of what one now wants, what one is and has may look more or less promising, but it can never look evaluatively neutral. And in Section 3, following, I argue that it is a consequence of accepting the belief-desire model of motivation that from the perspective of what one really, deeply wants, what one is and has cannot even look promising, by hypothesis. In either case, one's experience of desiring confers evaluative coloration, not only on the world, but on oneself as one is. One must always size up the world with an eye to its resources for satisfying one's desires, and one's present condition as © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
