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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 333 sums come in from the utility network which the projects of others have in part determined," we suppose that we "should just step aside from [our] own project and decision and acknowledge the decision which Utilitarian calculation requires." [CU, 116] We are alienated from others to whom we have deep attachments if our reactions to them are motivated by "one thought too many," [PC, 18] namely that moral principle condones (or disapproves) those reactions. [Also ME, 227] Moral alienation is, for Williams, the consequence of a purist moral attitude that insists on "abstracting the moral consciousness from other kinds of emotional reaction or social influence." [EL, 195] For under these conditions, impersonal moral consciousness detaches us both from our personal responses and thereby from ourselves. Now we saw that Nagel reproached the personalism and subjectivism of the Humean AntiRationalist with the charge of solipsism. Williams's response is to reproach the impersonalism and objectivism of Kantian and Utilitarian Rationalists with the charge of moral alienation. Thus each levels the charge of dissociation against the other. 3.2.2. Moral Theory 3.2.2.1. Structure First some preliminary remarks on the structure of Williams' thesis. As we have seen, Williams' concept of a desire as a project is reformatory in nature. Desires, he wants to say, are considerably more various and complex entities than many moral theories have recognized. He does not question the basic Humean dictum that all action is motivated by desire; thus, for example, his argument that not every desire aims at pleasure because if it did we could make no distinction between ethical and hedonistic motivations [EL, 49-50] presupposes that desire is the only sort of psychological entity that can motivate at all. But he does claim for desires or projects as "first-order motivations" [UM, 46] that they are not "dissociated" from complex thoughts and judgments we may make about their objects [UM, 52; EL, 36] Thus, for example, he characterizes the Aristotelian account as one in which "my reflection, even if it is about my dispositions, must at the same time be expressive of them. I think about ethical and other goods from an ethical point of view that I have already acquired and that is part of what I am ... [i.e.] someone in whom the ethical dispositions he has acquired lie deeper than 23 other wants and preferences." [EL, 51] Opposed to desires of this more complex kind is what I have described as the Nagelian impersonal moral point of view, i.e. the view we take of ourselves and others sub specie aeternitatis, as one agent among others, 23 Also see EL, 112 and 116, and the discussion of "thick" ethical concepts at 140-142, 200. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
