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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 315 look, any more than my refusal or inability to consider your point of view settles authoritatively the question of who has prevailed in our disagreement. If an authoritative termination of the infinite regress of orders of desire is to be contrasted with an arbitrary one, we shall need a better reason for doing so than that we are too tired, or unwilling, to press further the hard task of selfevaluation. What we need is some criteria by which to identify certain objects of desire - or ends - as rational in some ultimate and noninstrumental sense. We need criteria of rational final ends. Hence if the Humean conception of the self is the correct one, we should experience some difficulties in performing the task of self-evaluation. For any set of desires and interests to which I decisively commit myself is likely to seem arbitrary upon reflection. No action can then fully express my self because none can satisfy the desires of my self. And none can satisfy the desires of my self because there are no n-order desires with which I can fully identify. The consequence is a desired self-conception attenuated by doubts about the worth and authority of that desire, and so about the action it is assumed to motivate. Leaving unsolved the problem of rational final ends thereby exacerbates the problem of moral motivation already discussed. 2.2. Moral Paralysis This calls into question the extent to which a self, on the Humean conception, might be motivated to action at all. If the infinite regress of desires prevents one's rational self-identification with any n-order set of desires, then there can be no actions to which one can commit oneself wholeheartedly and without reservation - not necessarily because one has conflicting impulses, but rather because the worth of any such impulse is automatically subject to doubt. That I am not in fact left with a continuing case of moral paralysis that vitiates my capacity for decisive and principled action suggests that the Humean model of rational equilibrium does not render accurately the psychological facts. Some proponents of the Humean conception seem to embrace moral 8 paralysis as a sign of authenticity. Charles Taylor, for example, seems to believe that it is both irresponsible and self-deceptive to presume that one's chosen action might successfully and conclusively quell the stirrings of conscience. He accepts without reservation the implication that dogged and continuing reevaluation of the choices made by the self, and the principled doubt that any such reevaluation is itself adequate, must be permanent features of an authentic self. 8 in "Responsibility for Self," in A. O. Rorty, Ed., The Identities of Persons (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1976). © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
