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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 391 drawing out their logical implications. It is necessary because it examines statements the agent implicitly makes from within his standpoint that are "necessarily attributable to every agent because they derive from the generic features that constitute the necessary structure of action" (43-4). For example, the method does not proceed by saying merely that some person happens to say or think that X is good; rather, the method proceeds by saying that every agent necessarily says or thinks that X is good. The basis of this necessity is found in one or another aspect of the generic features of action and hence in the rational analysis of the concept of action. Thus, although the dialectically necessary method proceeds from within the standpoint of the agent, it also undertakes to ascertain what is necessarily involved in this standpoint. The statements the method attributes to the agent are set forth as necessary ones in that they reflect what is conceptually necessary to being an agent who voluntarily or freely acts for purposes he wants to attain (44). But first, if the basis for claiming that every agent necessarily thinks X is good is the two generic features - voluntariness and purposiveness - of action in Gewirth's "strict sense," then these two generic features undermine rather than ground the claim. They circumscribe the range of action to those which have these two generic features, and so to those agents who perform this restricted class of actions. The population of agents excluded from this putatively universal claim would seem to be quite large, consisting, as it does, in all of those agents who almost always act under duress of one form or another: agents who, for example, are coerced by poverty into giving up their children for adoption, or into working at dangerous and ill-compensated jobs, or are coerced by threats of violence or death into remaining in abusive environments, or by fear of job loss or financial ruin into accepting brutality or sadism from colleagues. So even if it were true that every agent did in fact tacitly or dispositionally think about "what is conceptually necessary to being an agent who voluntarily or freely acts for purposes he wants to attain," it could not be true that, for any designated X, every agent necessarily thinks that X is good. Only those lucky enough to control their behavior through unforced choice would; and this would be a matter of contingency rather than necessity. Second, is it true that every agent does tacitly think about "what is conceptually necessary to being an agent who voluntarily or freely acts for purposes he wants to attain"? In the above passage, Gewirth goes considerably beyond his account of practical thinking. The necessary statements he claims are attributable to the agent encompass not only expressions of the thoughts the agent is presumed actually to have in order to have performed the action she performed. They also encompass necessary conditions of free agency. However, no free agent need ever actually have thought about these conditions in order to fulfill them, nor need any such © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
