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Show Chapter VI. The Problem of Moral Motivation 238 your attentions, or your fear of my revenge should you betray me. Finally, your vocational desire to become a lawyer is other-directed if you believe lawyers are guardians of justice, or that studying the law is an intrinsically honorable and worthwhile activity. It is self-directed if you believe lawyers have social cachet, or can pull down six-figure salaries during the first year out of law school. In Chapter II.2, I offered an analysis of desire that questioned whether any desire could be conscious without being conceptualized in some minimal sense. Rawls does not deny that here. When he identifies such desires as object-dependent and describable independent of any moral or rational conception or principle, he means rather to exclude such desires from any necessary dependence on normative criteria of evaluation, i.e. on principles and conceptions relative to which such desires might be interpreted, criticized or thought worthy of revision. Such desires are object-dependent in the sense that it is the envisioned state of affairs that motivates us to achieve it, rather than our attachment to any principle or conception that state of affairs may or may not instantiate. 2.2. Principle-Dependent Desires Rawls defines principle-dependent desires as those which are (1) dependent on the principle in question for an accurate description of the object or end we desire to realize (82); (2) such that the "force, or weight" of the desire is a function not of its psychological strength, but rather of the principle needed to describe it (82-3, fn. 31); (3) such that the evaluative priority of the desire is similarly "given entirely by the principle to which the desire is attached, and not by the psychological strength of the desire itself;" and (4) are of a kind that only a rational or reasonable agent who can understand and apply such principles can have (82). In this definition, (2) and (3) above seem to be equivalent, i.e. the motivational force of the desire is a function of its evaluative priority in the agent's ordinal ranking. A desire to do the right thing, or to discharge one's responsibilities efficiently, or to preserve one's integrity, or to conserve energy, or to advance the common good, might exemplify principle-dependent desires. He distinguishes two kinds of principle-dependent desires, depending on the kind of principle invoked to describe them: rational principles are those denoted by what I have described as the egocentric principles of rationality that characterize the Humean conception of the self. He identifies as reasonable those which "regulate how a plurality of agents (or a community or society of agents), whether of individual persons or groups, are to conduct themselves © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
