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Show Chapter IX. The Problem of Moral Justification 358 Similarly, Anderson's view cannot realistically imply that any such mental state - whether thought, desire, impulse, or perception - has some observable physical manifestation. For we learn to conceal and internalize our thoughts, desires, impulses and perceptions in the process of socialization; to keep our thoughts to ourselves, to suppress our desires, to refrain from acting on our impulses, to register our perceptions without reacting to them. This skill of controlling and internalizing our reactions is, in essence, what the process of socialization teaches; and, as Nietzsche observed, it is the origin of the interiority of our mental lives. But any such state that, for reasons of socialization, individual constitution, or personal control has no physically observable manifestation cannot be meaningfully described as an expressive state at all. So it cannot be true that, as the inclusive conception claims, all internal states constitutive of our mental lives are expressive states; nor, therefore, that all internal states constitutive of our mental lives conform to Anderson's conception of an attitude. However, for later purposes Anderson will want to insist that anything that is an attitude is necessarily expressive. She will also want to insist that an attitude can be expressed appropriately or inappropriately. Since the inclusive conception of an attitude implies the rejection of both of these features, Anderson should reject the inclusive conception of an attitude. By contrast, an exclusive conception of an attitude toward a person or thing might define it as a specifically emotional response, or disposition to so respond, to that person or thing, such that the emotion is caused in part by the agent's perceptions, thoughts and beliefs about the object of valuation. On the exclusive conception, an attitude is an expressive state in that there is a necessary connection between the agent's inner emotional state and some overt physical manifestation. However, it excludes any necessary connection between any such emotional state of the agent and a particular physical manifestation, since Anderson needs to be able to distinguish between the attitude itself and the appropriateness with which it is expressed. For the same reason, the exclusive conception of an attitude excludes any necessary connection between the agent's inner emotional state and any intentional action, whether of execution or of omission. Thus the exclusive conception of an attitude excludes certain thoughts, desires, impulses, and perceptions unless they bear the right kind of causal connection to emotions. And it leaves open whether a particular attitude is expressed only in the most subtle and minimal overt physical changes, or in gross behavior or action of an appropriate or inappropriate kind. This account of an attitude appears to mitigate the objection I raised to Humean Anti-Rationalist views in the General Introduction, i.e. that they subvert in practice the enterprise of Socratic metaethics on which they rely in theory, by appealing to interpersonally inaccessible moral states to justify their moral judgments. The exclusive definition of an attitude mitigates the inaccessibility of such states © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
