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Show Chapter IX. The Problem of Moral Justification 390 speaks aloud or mutters to himself vocally, but rather that in acting and thinking as he does the agent uses or makes judgments that can be expressed in words (42). Gewirth's reasoning, then, is that in acting, the agent necessarily thinks; and in thinking, the agent necessarily makes implicit judgments we can ascribe to him. This reasoning needs to be examined very closely. First, it is not obvious that I necessarily think on any level about what I am doing. Sometimes I do, sometimes I do not. I can act unselfconsciously just in case I act intentionally and achieve a goal I would confirm if someone were to ask me, but of which at the time I have no conscious conception. Driving a car or dancing or playing a musical instrument, among many other examples, can have this unselfconscious quality, and they, too, might be objects of moral precepts under given circumstances. Second, do I necessarily make judgments about what I am thinking about? Only if I think only and always in categorical declaratives, which most human agents do not. An agent can think about S, have S on her mind, without ascribing any predicate P to it; I defend this claim at length in Volume II, Chapter II.2, and rely here on its intuitive plausibility. Therefore an agent can think about S without making a judgment about it. So even if it were true, which it is not, that I always thought about my actions, it would not be necessarily true that any particular judgments would be ascribable to me in virtue of them. Now Gewirth answers this objection by stipulating that the linguistic expressions ascribed to agents refer to dispositions to describe retrospectively what they did, if asked. But I may have no coherent answer, if asked, if my thoughts were not propositional in form; or if, since I really did not think about my actions at all, I have no retrospective speculations to offer. When asked, for example, what I meant to accomplish by placing the mushrooms on the exercise wheel and the hamsters in the salad bowl, I shrug my shoulders helplessly and respond forthrightly that I simply was not thinking about what I was doing. Thoughtless actions are still actions; and again they may count as such even under the restrictions Gewirth imposes. Moreover, retrospective interpretations of my own action may suffer the same handicaps as thirdpersonal interpretations of that action. Having failed to retain in memory the details of my past, I may be unable to reconstruct accurately what my motives, goals and thoughts were at the moment of action. Certainly I can offer more or less plausible interpretations of what I must have had in mind. But these may have no more or less prima facie plausibility than their thirdpersonal counterparts. Gewirth's dispositional provision assumes that an agent can always produce a plausible verbal story of his actions on demand. He describes this as "practical thinking." The dialetically necessary method consists in rendering such thinking in equivalent, explicit linguistic expressions and © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
