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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 379 this assumption is true or not is a separate question, and its answer may be independent of what any individual, including the agent addressed, thinks about it. The explanation of my carrying out a prescription you issue to me may be entirely unconnected to your belief, and indeed my belief, that I freely choose to do so. For example, I may have been socially conditioned by my upbringing to carry out reflexively just the sort of prescription you issued in just the tone of voice in which you issued it. If the assumption that agents can freely carry out moral precepts is not true, this does not necessarily mean that an agent whose behavior conforms to such prescriptions does not perform bona fide actions. It may be simply that individuals who issue moral and other precepts are mistaken in their conception of what an action is. It may be that a person whose behavior is not controlled by unforced choice has nevertheless performed an action; and so that the individual who prescribed it has envisaged action incorrectly. Basing the derivation of the PGC on a conception of action as envisaged by those who issue moral precepts is risky if that conception turns out to be too optimistic and too demanding for the action-capacities human beings actually have. So even if action as envisaged by moral and other precepts really is behavior controlled by unforced choice, this does not mean that is what action is in fact. If a behavior can be an action without being an action as envisaged by moral and other precepts, then voluntariness as Gewirth defines it is not invariant across all action, but instead only across those actions envisaged by moral and other precepts. Then the normative judgments such actions entail are not logically implicit in all actions, but only - perhaps - in those as they are envisaged by moral and other precepts. That is, they are logically implicit in a limited subclass of conceptual representations of actions, and not in actions per se at all. This narrows considerably the scope of actions that are supposed to entail the PGC; and to the extent that action as envisaged by moral and other precepts are envisaged incorrectly, undermines its justification. Narrowing the scope of actions to those as they are envisaged by such precepts also calls into question Gewirth's claim that voluntariness - again, as Gewirth defines it - is morally neutral. It may be neutral among competing moral theories, but it is biased toward those which issue some moral precepts or other. As we saw in Chapter V.1.1, not all moral theories do this. Someone who does not already care what various moral precepts prescribe will not be swayed by what they assume in common about action. Someone who does already care, and wonders whether he rationally should, will regard what these precepts assume in common about action with an equally skeptical eye. To this extent, whatever Gewirth can then derive from this conception of action will not answer the authoritative question of morality, of why in general we should be moral (2.1.(1), above). It will not try to supply reasons for being moral, but instead - like the authoritative question itself - © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
