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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 369 expressive theory as our global mode of deliberating about and justifying our actions, emotions, and attitudes" (83). Since rationality is itself a value, it is unclear why Anderson, after successfully developing a fully pluralistic theory of value, thinks she needs to ground it with monistic and global criteria of rationality. Social and cultural value change requires only marginalized agents whose anomalous values are sufficiently secure, independent of the community's, and well-grounded in their experience to furnish the distanced critical perspective from which the community's can be found to be lacking. That is the kind of agent for which I believe a genuinely pluralistic, rational attitude theory of value such as Anderson's can and must make room. The alternative is a set of values embedded in and reinforced by social conformity, convention and conservatism; values of a sort that only mire an actual moral community further in the habits of unreflective corruption with which it already is likely to be far too familiar. 2. Deductivism Deductivism attempts to derive substantive moral principle via a conceptual analysis of the foundational premises that purport to generate it. In Chapter VII we encountered in the work of Kant and Nagel two examples of Deductivist metaethical strategies. We saw that just as Kant attempted to derive the moral law from the foundational concept of a free and rational being, similarly Nagel attempted to derive a principle of altruism from a selfconception of oneself as just one person among many - i.e. from impersonality and objectivity conjoined. In both cases, the argument proceeded by elaborating and explicating what was presumed to be contained in the concepts of, respectively, freedom and rationality in Kant's case; and being one person among many others in Nagel's. Deductivism, then, is a central technique of Anglo-American analytic philosophy applied specifically to the analysis of moral, political, or otherwise value-laden concepts. However, Deductivism aspires to more than merely unpacking what is analytically implied by certain foundational moral concepts. It chooses which concepts to unpack with an eye to drawing forth from the analysis prescriptive moral principles whose rationale is to be found in the foundational concepts from which they are said to follow. This is not easy. On the one hand, the derivation must not have the tautologous form, If P then P, for fear of eliciting bored yawns. So, for example, it would not do for Kant to derive from the concept of freedom merely the principle that a free agent is not unfree, although that certainly would seem to follow by conceptual analysis of "freedom." On the other hand, however, the more interesting but suspect form, © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
