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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 285 so as to secure my future wellbeing. (Also see pages 36, 39, 40, 44, 45, passim, where Nagel uses the term "expectation" in the same sense.) The problem with the ordinary interpretation already has been mentioned: To construe beliefs, considerings, or expectations as nothing but motivationally effective present mental events is to divest them of any necessary connection with rational rather than merely causal sequences of thought and action. In this case, prudential (and altruistic) action would be no more or less rational than motivation by unmotivated desires - unless Nagel can supply an account of how rational content motivates moral action with rational inescapability. Second, we may opt for the extraordinary interpretation and see how far we can take it. The extraordinary interpretation requires us to make sense of the thesis that a future end - my securing of my wellbeing along some particular dimension - by itself affects me motivationally in the present. How could this possibly happen? Nagel's answer is that if an end is a genuine reason, then it is a timeless reason: It is a reason not just for one particular acttoken, but instead for a class of act-types that promote that end; and that class contains no explicit temporal restrictions on when the act-token must be performed. Of course it must bear a certain kind of temporal relation to the end itself: the act-token cannot temporally succeed the end it is supposed to promote. But this relation itself is perfectly general, in that it does not restrict the occurrence of the act-token to any one temporal domain. Since a timeless reason applies to a temporally unrestricted domain of act-tokens, it cannot explain why a particular act-token that is justified by it is performed at the particular moment it is. By contrast, a dated reason is one derived from a timeless reason that obtains in the present at the time of action. Nagel also argues that dated reasons, in turn, imply timeless reasons plus a statement relating the reason to the time of utterance; and that to accept only dated but not timeless reasons demonstrates a failure to identify oneself as unified through time. Note that a dated reason as such does not entail a dated, occurrent event. Thus Nagel explains the transmission of motivational influence from an end "backwards" in time to the action taken to secure it, by elevating the end in question to a general and unitemporal, or timeless, status. As Nagel expresses it, If there is a reason to do something on a particular occasion, it must be specifiable in general terms which allow that same reason to be present on different occasions, perhaps as a reason for doing other things. All such general specifications, whatever else may be true of them, will share a certain formal feature. They will never limit the application of the reason to acts of one sort only, but will always include other acts which promote those of the original kind. (35) © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
