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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 107 meta-end with a special value-neutral and conceptually necessary status. It is one contingent value among others among which an agent may legitimately choose. It may seem, however, that this conclusion ignores the conceptual distinction between adverbial intention descriptions and one particular group of adjectives and adverbs - call them maximizing words - that may always modify them, i.e. terms like "most," "more," "less," "greatest," "successfully," "optimally," and "maximally." We can always evaluate our actions in terms of how fully, successfully, or maximally they achieve the meta-ends of taste, honesty, efficiency, etc. This fact may suggest that rational action always 16 involves maximizing something, and that the seeming differences among these alternative meta-ends lie solely in the instrumental sources of utility they require us to maximize. If this is true, it means that efficiency or utilitymaximization does have a special value-neutral and logically necessary status after all. For however we seek to realize our object- or meta-ends, it appears, we are acting rationally only if we are efficient in realizing them in precisely that way. But it is a mistake to try to reserve this privileged position for the concept of efficiency or utility-maximization. If I achieve any end I intend to achieve efficiently by virtue of achieving it successfully or maximally, then I act efficiently merely by acting with deliberate intent. This makes the concept of utility-maximization vacuous. To see this, suppose Reginald is a mole in a local governmental bureaucracy, and that his assigned end is to impede the functioning of this bureaucracy as fully as possible. So he deliberately tries to achieve the explicit object-ends of this bureaucracy inefficiently. He achieves this meta-end by flooding himself and his staff with useless paperwork. Thus Reginald aims to achieve the meta-end of inefficiency itself efficiently, via the instrumental object-end of useless paperwork. But he may achieve this effectively obstructive flood of useless paperwork either efficiently, by convincing his superiors of its utility; or inefficiently, by printing up the forms himself and hoping his staff will use them. Assume Reginald chooses the former, instrumentally efficient strategy. Convincing his superiors of the utility of more paperwork is a further instrumental object-end which he may achieve efficiently, by arguing eloquently the advantages of extra paperwork; 16 As D. M. Winch puts it, "the consumer is said to maximize utility, and utility is defined as that which the consumer attempts to maximize. This truism is completely general and cannot be false." (Analytical Welfare Economics (Harmondsworth: Middlesex, 1971), 17). Quoted in David Wiggins, "Weakness of Will, Commensurability, and the Objects of Deliberation and Desire," in Amelie O. Rorty, Essays on Aristotle's Ethics (Los Angeles: University of California, 1980), 260. David Gauthier also holds this view in "Economic Rationality and Moral Side-Constraints," Midwest Studies in Philosophy III: Studies in Ethical Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978), 76-77. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
