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Show Chapter IX. The Problem of Moral Justification 368 may move from our original class backgrounds to higher ones, and to different ethnic or cultural groups, through education and professional training; through downward mobility and economic contraction we may move in the reverse direction, and thereby into other new ethnic or lifestyle communities - perhaps even into homelessness or penal incarceration; through travel, new technologies, or contact with other cultures that create new possibilities for experience or lifestyle, we may find our most basic values or lifestyle preferences undergoing radical revision. Anderson conceives the relevant contrast along Marxist economic lines, as between individualistic and social conceptions of rational attitudes. But a society as marked by heterogeneous social values as this increasingly global one owes its plethora of anomalous attitudes at least as much to its ethnic and class diversity and mobility as it does to its capitalist economic structure. Agents who undergo these social, economic and cultural shifts are regularly confronted with disparities between their own anomalous attitudes and those that are socially endorsed by the community at hand. Under these circumstances, one always faces the choice of to which source authoritative weight should be ascribed. Either one may conclude that one's own values are inappropriate, and take steps to reform them in accordance with the norms of the community; or one may conclude that the norms of the community are inappropriate, and take steps to reform them in accordance with one's own values. Those who are strongly identified with the norms of a particular community will incline to choose the former alternative; marginalized agents by definition have a greater capacity to choose the latter. Without this capacity, it is hard to see how social and cultural value change could occur. When value change does occur, it does not require that one construct or even envision an alternative community that adopts and enacts the norms of rational dialogue Anderson describes, nor that one rely on such a hypothetical community to endorse and legitimate the anomalous attitudes one may know independently to be rational. A marginalized agent can recognize his anomalous values as rational if, to summarize briefly, (1) he can causally explain them by his experiences, (2) he can in turn cite these values as reasons for his behavior and attitudes, and (3) these values, and the experiences that form them, are internally coherent. Of course this does not imply that they are therefore morally acceptable to any actual or hypothetical community. Whether they are or not, what any actual or hypothetical community thinks about them is irrelevant to their rationality. In Volume II, Chapter VI.8 I show that this characteristic of rationality - its independence (or, if you like, its "individualism") - is crucial to understanding what motivates the whistleblower to withstand the pressures and threats of his moral community for the sake of a higher good. Therefore, social and cultural value change does not require that "if our lives are to be meaningful, then we must adopt a perspective informed by the © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
