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Show Chapter VIII. The Problem of Rational Final Ends 350 perceptions of the self are hypothesized to promote. Again a decisive commitment to the veracity and finality of any one such desire as providing the interpretive matrix for understanding the rest must be an irrational and unjustifiable act of faith. The problem of self-evaluation, then, is not ameliorated but exacerbated by the ascription of primacy to first-order desires in a bipartite conception of the self. For anything may be instrumental to the satisfaction of a desire, and any desire may be instrumental to the satisfaction of a further one. The problem of moral paralysis also attacks Williams' version of the bipartite self, from two directions. First, it is inherent in the instrumental structure of first-order desires that no such desire can provide terminating criteria of evaluation of the motives of the self, no matter what their source. For any such motive, including desires, are subject to further scrutiny from the perspective of further desires to which they are presumed to be instrumental. Second, the bifurcation of the self into two parts implies that the problem of moral paralysis also arises in the same form for Williams as it did for Watson. For here, too, it is an open question with which part the self is identified on any particular occasion, and so an open question which part evaluates the other's motivational content. And this leaves open the possibility that, in situations of conflict, neither part may prevail. Again, the reality that we often do make rational and well-informed terminating judgments about our first-order motives, and are not ordinarily stricken with moral paralysis in situations requiring quick responses suggests that neither Watson's nor Williams' version of the bipartite self is adequate to the psychological facts. Clearly, the problems of self-evaluation and moral paralysis can be generated by any multipartite conception of the self. Just as clearly, those problems are also generated by a unipartite conception of the self as structured and motivated by desire alone. The challenge is then to articulate an alternative unipartite conception of the self that both circumvents these problems and also respects the psychological data; and to consider whether the remaining in-house candidate, namely reason, might be adequate to furnish the basis for a unipartite conception of the self that successfully meets this challenge. In Volume II I argue that it is. So Williams' sustained Anti-Rationalism does not succeed in supplanting reason with desire as the final arbiter of what ends we ought to adopt. While his analysis yields a more subtle conception of what a desire is, it answers the question of whether its object is rational or worthwhile by simply asserting its psychological centrality as a "ground project," to which the evaluations of moral or rational principle are irrelevant. But to this claim the appropriate response is the obverse of that made to Watson, and the same as that made to Frankfurt: Simply asserting that rationality is irrelevant to the assessment of final ends does not make it irrelevant. At this point in the discussion the Anti© Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
