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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 309 and recognizing P as true; between recognizing P as true and recognizing P as rational; and so on. But these are not obviously insurmountable tasks. This is to assign causal efficacy to certain abstract objects, but only under certain conditions: Our rational faculties must function unobstructedly, our attention must be upon the relevant matters, we must be receptive to the assaultive experience of insight, and so on. When these conditions are satisfied, there is a powerful argument to be made that belief-states with rational moral content - for example, that a certain set of considerations constitute a conclusive justification for action - are motivationally effective in causing moral action whenever they occur because of the rationality of their content, i.e. that rationality itself has a certain pull on us. Nagel could then stipulate rational content as a necessary but not sufficient condition for the motivational efficacy of the intentional attitude of which it is the object, such that that attitude was motivationally effective only if the content of its object were rational, and not otherwise (in the manner of criteria 3.3.(5) - (7)). In this case, this content would fail to move us to action only if we failed to recognize its rationality, but would invariably move us to action whenever we succeeded. Thus rational content could be a precipitating or contributing but never sufficient cause of action. Also required would be my attention to that content, my recognition of its rationality, and a disposition to act on recognizably rational beliefs. If Nagel could show this, he would furnish strong evidence for the motivational efficacy of rationally inescapable requirements of altruism on action indirectly. For even if the occurrence of those particular belief-states were themselves sporadic and contingent rather than rationally inescapable, their effect on action once they occurred might be regular, reliable, and perhaps even necessary. Analogously, in the case of theoretical reason, it might argued, it can be true both that our reasoning does not always take the form of modus ponens (when we reason at all), and also that when it does take that form and we are reasoning clearly, we always infer Q from P Q and P, other things equal. Physically acting on the basis of a rational belief that a certain set of considerations constituted a conclusive justification for action would be like the mental act of inferring Q on the basis of the belief that P Q and P. Thus the rational content of such belief-states would function analogously to the rational content of modus ponens. In both cases, it would be the rationality of the content, not merely the occurrent mental event of belief, that was motivationally effective; and in both cases this content could be described as universal without being ubiquitous, and necessary without being compulsive. This is not a possibility that Nagel pursues. But his discussion provides some of the resources on which I draw in order to address it in Volume II, Chapter V of this project. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
