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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 363 point of view from which others can also make sense of them" (95); and that "[t]o justify an evaluative claim is to appeal to reasons that make sense of particular attitudes toward the evaluated object" (97); and finally that "[j]ustification is concerned with making sense of our concerns and attitudes" (111). In these passages Anderson treats some attitudes as a given. Making sense of them is then equivalent to finding the interpretation or explanation of given mental phenomena that makes them most comprehensible to oneself and others. On this reading, to justify one's valuations just is to explain them with reasons why. The interpretive locution has the advantage that it does not beg any questions about what valuations or attitudes any particular interlocutor might think one should have. It is a comparatively weak requirement on justification, in that it requires only that I understand your values, whether or not I share them. To complain that a valuation does not make sense is, on this reading, to complain not that it is personally unacceptable, but that it is unintelligible, i.e. that it violates certain basic conditions of conceptual coherence and consistency. In other passages, however, she speaks prescriptively, of what it makes sense for someone to do. Were two friends to become enemies, she argues, "it would make sense for [one] to stop cherishing" an ugly bracelet given her by the other (19). Similarly, she says, it "makes sense for a person to value most [states of affairs] only because it makes sense for a person to care about the people, animals, communities, and things concerned with them" (20); and "what it makes sense to do now essentially depends on what one has done in the past" (34). Later she argues that "[i]f goods are not commensurable, then it does not make sense to maximize their values" (46). She defines a standard as "authentic if and only if ... it could make sense for a person to guide her responses by it. ..." and as important to a person "if it makes sense for her to care about it" (48). Similarly, she says that "[w]hich higher-order good it makes sense to use in justifying a person's choices depends on the context of decision ..." (54); that "it makes sense to value different good in different ways ...." (72), and that "the conditions that make states of affairs valuable are not other states of affairs, but the people animals, and things it makes sense to care directly about" (85). In these passages, what it makes sense for someone to do is what there is reason for doing. To justify one's valuations is to demonstrate that the balance of reasons prescribes it. And to state that it makes sense for someone to do something is to state that the balance of reasons prescribes it. It is to advocate the doing of that thing. Thus it presupposes and expresses a set of values with which one's listener is assumed to agree. The prescriptive locution in this sense imposes a much stronger condition on justification than the interpretive one. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
