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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 371 interesting result from weak, morally neutral and widely shared premises that were not previously thought to contain it. However, avoiding tautology may tilt the derivation in the opposite direction, of fallacious inference: if one did not inject anything about freedom into one's foundational premises, it is very unlikely that one is going to get anything about freedom out of them, at least according to the standard rules of inference. So if the prescriptive moral principles one derives as conclusions have a great deal of highly satisfying content, whereas one's foundational premises are as nondescript and value-neutral as any premises can be, one has cause either for great exultation or - what is more likely - for serious concern. Either one has managed to achieve what no other philosopher in the Western tradition has; or else it is likely that something, somewhere in one's derivation has gone awry. The Strict Deductivist must take care, not only that she has not pumped into her premises the prescriptive content she wishes to derive, but also that she has not surreptitiously pumped into the steps of her derivation itself the prescriptive content she so scrupulously barred from her premises. 3. Gewirth's Deductivism Alan Gewirth is a Strict Deductivist. In Reason and Morality,5 he answers both of the questions with which this chapter opened, (1) Are there any final ends aside from desire-satisfaction it is rational to aspire to? (2) Can we be motivated independently of desire-satisfaction to accept and aspire to achieve such rational final ends? in the affirmative. He both articulates a substantive vision of the good society as a final end, and, in order to motivate its acceptance, enlists a thorough and exhaustive analysis of possible objections and alternatives. By attempting to derive a substantive moral theory from weak, valueneutral premises through straightforward conceptual analysis, Gewirth follows Nagel as a second and more recent contemporary philosopher committed to the Kantian tradition of Deductivism. What distinguishes Gewirth's approach from Kant's and Nagel's is the explicit nature of his commitment to the procedure of rational derivation through conceptual analysis. In the explicitness and rigor of this commitment, Gewirth takes his cue from John Rawls's similarly explicit and rigorous attempt, which I examine in Chapter X, to justify his moral theory as a derivation from the theory of rational choice. Gewirth matches Rawls's essentially Humean strategy with a Kantian one that is just as ambitious in scope and just as (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Henceforth all page references to this work will be parenthecized in the main text. 5 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
