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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 263 merely by the belief that someone else will benefit or avoid harm by it." (16, n.1; cf. 79) These also include any act of "mundane considerateness which costs us nothing, and involves neither self-sacrifice nor nobility - as when we tell someone he has a flat tire, or a wasp on his hamburger." To demonstrate that altruism is a condition of rationality, Nagel tries to demonstrate that principles that prescribe such acts are as rationally "inescapable" as the laws of logic. He thereby means to show that moral principles themselves, broadly construed, rationally necessitate action; and therefore are motivationally effective. I agree with Nagel's aim. But there are other ways of achieving it. My strategy, in Volume II of this discussion, is to analyze, not the inescapability of the principles, but rather their centrality in defining and exemplifying what transpersonal rationality is. Whether transpersonal rationality itself is inescapable is a moot question (but I doubt it).2 Nagel's way of approaching the problem of moral motivation encounters a dilemma almost immediately. He says, It may be thought that this excludes from an essential role in the foundation of ethics the factor of desire (although it is a mystery how one could account for the motivational source of ethical action without referring to desires). The problem about appealing ultimately to human desires is that this appears to exclude rational criticism of ethical motivation at the most fundamental level. As ordinarily conceived, any desire, even if it is in fact universal, is nevertheless merely an affection (not susceptible to rational assessment) to which one is either subject or not. If that is so, then moral considerations whose persuasiveness depends on desires depend ultimately on attitudes which we are not required to accept. On the other hand, the picture of human motivational structure as a system of given desires connected in certain ways with action is a very appealing one, and it can seem that any persuasive justification of ethical conduct must find its foothold in such a system (5). In this passage Nagel's ambivalence towards the belief-desire model of motivation is evident. On the one hand, he literally cannot imagine how we could explain action without reference to desires; on the other, he accepts the Humean view of desires as too subjective and contingent to be subject to rational assessment and criticism. Yet the prevailing conception of motivation as a system of desires causally connected with action is plausible and appealing. The dilemma for Nagel is that moral motivation must be as rationally inescapable as the truths of logic, if moral principles are to have the same stringency as rationality in general. By contrast, the Humean conception treats Thus my argument does not conflict with the important work of Kahneman, Tversky, et. al., that shows that actual agents do not reason decision-theoretically. 2 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
