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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 241 Next consider my principle-dependent, reasonable desire to tell the truth, such that I determine, again after careful reflection, that this requires criticizing my supervisor's fashion choices, despite the dangers to my continued and future employment. Again a review of Rawls's fourfold definition of a principle-dependent desire will show that this desire satisfies its criteria. Then suppose that on this basis I ascribe higher priority to truthfully criticizing my supervisor's fashion choices, and so boldly speak out on this score, even though securing my continued and future employment has greater psychological strength for me, and even though I have no objectdependent devotion to my supervisor's sartorial self-improvement. Again this commitment to my higher-priority, principle-dependent desire at the expense of a psychologically stronger, object-dependent one that violates it seems misguided. What is wrong, in both cases, is that an object-dependent desire of greatest psychological strength is subordinated to a principle-dependent desire having strongest normative priority, even though commonsensical rationality would seem to rest with the desire thus subordinated: If I want to be a poet I should be one, even though satisfying this object-dependent desire violates my principle-dependent desire to maximize utility. Similarly, if I want to keep my job I should murmur, politely but unintelligibly, in response to my supervisor's bright question, "Well, how do I look?" - even though this object-dependent desire is incompatible with my higher-priority principledependent desire to tell the truth. What is lacking - for Rawls here as well as for the other Humeans to be considered in Chapter VIII - is a higher-order principle of rationality that would enable us to adjudicate sensibly between these conflicting desires. What is more deeply wrong, however, is Rawls's separation of psychological strength from normative priority in the first place. He wants to claim that a consideration having highest normative priority can thereby have greatest motivational strength independent of its psychological strength. He wants to reserve the psychological strength of a desire for de facto causal explanations of motivation, in which agents are by definition moved by that desire that has the greatest psychological strength for them at that moment, as the Humean belief-desire model requires. Normative priority (or weight, or force), on the other hand, is supposed to determine the relative status of the desire in the agent's ideal ordinal ranking, such that the highest normative priority (or weight, or force) of a desire under particular circumstances is a necessary and sufficient condition of that desire's counting as the best allthings-considered reason for acting. Greatest psychological strength can diverge from highest normative priority, because the desires on which agents do in fact act can diverge from the desires that give them most reason to act. Rawls attempts to close this gap by ascribing greatest motivational strength to that desire with highest normative priority, independent of its psychological © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
