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Show Chapter VI. The Problem of Moral Motivation 242 strength. Rawls's idealization stipulates that citizens of the well-ordered society always act on those desires that most give them reason to act, regardless of the psychological strength of any desires that may or may not conflict with them. But this merely rehearses the Humean externalist's strategy against which - as we see in the next chapter - Thomas Nagel fought so hard. Humean externalists need a distinction between psychological strength and normative priority, in order to explain how a desire can be recognizably rational yet fail to inspire one to act on it. Rawls's idealized moral psychology does not need a separate and mysterious concept of motivational strength to close the gap between reason and action, because in the well-ordered society, there is no reason why normative priority should not directly determine psychological strength in the moral psychology of its citizens. What he should have said was simply that in citizens of the well-ordered society, principledependent desires with the highest normative priority under given circumstances therefore have the greatest psychological strength as well, and that such citizens therefore act without conflict to satisfy such desires. 2.3. Rawls versus Kant What Rawls should have said about principle-dependent desires is similar to what Kant does say about principles dependent on reason, when he speaks to the difference between how we are actually motivated and how we ideally would be motivated: A perfectly good will would thus stand quite as much under objective laws (laws of the good), but it could not on this account be conceive as necessitated to act in conformity with law … ‘I ought' is here out of place, because ‘I will' is already of itself necessarily in harmony with the law. (G, Ac. 414) … for this ‘I ought' is properly an ‘I will' which holds necessarily for every rational being - provided that reason in him is practical without any hindrance. (G, Ac. 449)5 These two passages from the Groundwork assume what Rawls in passage 2.2.(B) above denies, that the psychological strength of one's rational motive can enter into how one should behave, morally speaking. Kant speaks to the psychological strength of one's rational motive by noting that the factor of necessitation, the sense of obligation or duty to act in accordance with the moral law, is absent in the ideal case. Ideally, when reason motivates us "without any hindrance," our psychological state is one of "harmony with the law," and reason itself has the greatest psychological strength. In this case, it is moral obligation - "oughts" and "shoulds" - that is irrelevant to Kant's Kant, Immanuel, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York, NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1964). Academy Edition reference to this work are paginated in the text, preceded by "G". 5 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
