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Show Chapter VII. Nagel's Internalism 266 and to the conditions of their truth (6). The basis of ethics that serves as a standard for criticizing desires, then, consists in a set of independent requirements on desires which are metaphysical and in some sense necessary, and intrinsically connected to the ethical principles they ground. They also impose certain requirements that ethical motivation must meet. However, the basis of ethics Nagel has in mind is not a justification of altruistic principles. For justification implies persuasion, and this depends on particular, arbitrary and idiosyncratic influences that get people to change their minds. Nagel, by contrast, means to show the inescapability of these principles regardless of the particular empirical influences at work. He means to furnish a psychologically pervasive foundation for ethics that demonstrates the rational pervasiveness of the principles it engenders. Thus he rejects any account of moral motivation that requires a prior, externalist motivational influence independent of moral principle itself. The foundation he seeks will explain the motivational influence of moral principles on action by putting those "principles themselves at the absolute source of our moral conduct." (11) Nagel suggests that the rational inescapability of a moral principle can be shown by our inability to reject it once we become aware of it. But there are several arbitrary desires I might list that I would be equally unable to reject once I became aware of them (so I won't call them to mind by listing them). The rational necessity, or inescapability, of moral principle requires more than this. It requires, not only our inability to reject it once we become aware of it, nor even, in addition, that this inability be explained by our cognitive grasp of its content; but also that this inability - and corresponding action in accordance with it - be explained by our recognition of the rationality of its content per se. In this case, Nagel faces the daunting task of explaining how an abstract object of thought - the property of being recognizably rational - can causally influence anything at all; and, supposing it can, why it should influence an agent's consciousness and action at one particular time and place rather than some other. 1.2. Two Self-Conceptions Nagel must, then, defend a foundation for ethics that has the following four features. First, it does not replace desire as the primary motive of action. Rather, second, it grounds and evaluates desires with an eye to their rational conformity to normative moral principle. Third, it thereby exerts some motivational influence on action. And fourth, it satisfies the rationality requirements of necessity, ethical connectedness, etc. listed above. Nagel's chosen model for providing such an account is Kant's ethics. Kant is an internalist without being a Humean, because he insists both that moral principle is motivationally effective, and also that motivationally effective moral principle does not presuppose any desire of which it must be an object. Kant's idea is that moral principles express the agent's self-conception as free. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
