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Show Chapter IX. The Problem of Moral Justification 382 difficult to challenge. But by defining action in such a way that forced choice actions are excluded, Gewirth immediately opens himself to such challenges from any moral view with a broader and weaker concept of action. Aristotle, for example, does not require that voluntary actions be free in Gewirth's sense. On the basis of a distinction between choosing an action and desiring it, Aristotle suggests that although such actions are performed under duress, they still may be voluntary because it is always within the agent's power to choose the less desirable alternative.8 So Aristotle could challenge Gewirth's premises on the grounds that the latter defines voluntary action too narrowly. Similarly, although moral precepts in Kant's moral philosophy enjoin us to perform certain actions as though we had voluntary control over our behavior, we are not excused from moral responsibility for behavior that indicates weakness of will, such as my bankrupting myself in the service of my empirical inclination to play slot machines. Actions whose maxims violate the categorical imperative are not for that reason excluded from the realm of action altogether. So Kant could challenge Gewirth's premises on the grounds that the latter defines action itself too narrowly. Gewirth's justification of the PGC cannot be conclusive if its underlying conception of action is so quickly susceptible to challenge by competing moral views that enjoy such broad support. Certainly there is no unanimous agreement among action theorists about what an action is. But there are at least some generally acknowledged minimal conditions all actions must satisfy. The weakest of these is that an action must be intentional, i.e. goal-directed. This excludes such behavior as the kicking reflex, but might include such controversial cases as the blinking and coughing reflexes. It also might include other behavior that is goaldirected but not necessarily conscious. For this reason it seems too weak, and is at best a necessary but insufficient condition of action. A stronger condition would be that an action must be not only goaldirected but also conscious. This seems insufficient because it fails to exclude the above cases of reflex behavior in which we are both conscious and behaving goal-directedly but are not conscious of the goal at which our behavior is directed. For this, formulating the condition as one of consciously goal-directed behavior, such that one is conscious of the goal, is only minimally better, since it does not decide borderline cases such as absentmindedly scratching an itch (you're conscious of wanting to relieve the itch, but only minimally aware, or unaware, of scratching it) or lighting up after having foresworn smoking (you're conscious - always - of wanting a cigarette, but light up out of reflex or habit, without attending to what you are doing at all). Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, trans. T. E. Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985) Book III, 1110a16-17. 8 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
