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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 359 while suitably restricting their overt expressions. For these reasons, Anderson should accept the exclusive definition of an attitude. Let us assume, provisionally, that she does. Then to value intrinsically a person or thing, is, first of all, to respond with positive emotions to one's perceptions and beliefs about her or it. However, not just any favorable emotional response to a person or thing counts as valuing it. Positive valuations must be "governed by distinct standards for perception, emotion, deliberation, desire, and conduct" (2,3). Parents who value - love - their children will feel not only proud when their children achieve, but alarmed when they are in danger, and disposed to rescue them. Parents who felt pride at their children's achievements but only indifference or regret rather than concern at their endangerment could not properly be said to value them at all. So to Anderson's account we can add that intrinsically valuing a person or thing requires not only a complex of favorable emotions and dispositions toward her or it, but also that this complex exhibit a certain internal consistency determined by our concept of valuation itself. Only a certain specific set of favorable responses, elicited under their appropriate conditions, counts as, e.g. loving or respecting or admiring a person or thing. That is, our valuation concept provides both a criterion for identifying the constellation of favorable attitudes constitutive of it, and also a standard of adequacy against which these responses can be measured. On Anderson's account, valuing a person or thing in a particular way requires that this constellation of favorable attitudes - perception, emotion, deliberation, desires, and conduct "express and thereby communicate one's regard for the object's importance" (11). Here Anderson goes beyond the exclusive conception of an attitude I advocated above. That conception built in only the most minimal notion of expression, namely some overt physical manifestation of the agent's emotional state. The notion of expression Anderson invokes here builds in two further conditions: first, that an authentic valuation should "express [those] valuations in the world, ... embody them in some social reality ... actually establish the relationship to the object of one's concern which is implicit in one's attitudes toward it" (17). This seems right. An agent who is not moved to establish some such connection with the object she values either does not really or deeply feel what she claims to feel, or else her purported values have strictly armchair status. There is a natural causal link between emotion and behavior expressive of it in all cases, no less so in the case of that complex of emotions partly constitutive of valuation. If one really values something, one is disposed to act accordingly. However, we can grant this much without requiring, as Anderson does, that the connection between valuing and action be a necessary one. The connection may be merely sufficient, such that a failure or inability to express one's valuation in action would not imply that it was not an authentic valuation after all. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
