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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 393 interpretation etc., one is not committed to the implications. So, for example, my behavior of putting myself through law school does not imply anything about "what is conceptually necessary to being an agent who voluntarily or freely acts for purposes he wants to attain," unless I explicitly conceive my behavior in those terms, or would if questioned about it, or a third person correctly interprets it in those terms. In the latter case, that person's interpretation of my behavior would determine the judgments ascribed to me, and so their implications. But the particular judgments that person ascribes to me also might be incorrect. There is nothing in my mere behavior that necessitates them. However, Gewirth's argument depends on their necessity. He reasons that all agents "implicitly judge" their purposes to be good, and therefore that they have rights to freedom and well-being; that all agents who have purposes must claim these rights (i.e. must judge similarly); therefore every agent is logically committed to the generalization that all agents who have purposes have rights to freedom and well being (48). I show in Chapter X that this line of argument is, in outline, the reverse of that which Rawls defends. Whereas Rawls begins in the original position with free and equal agents who are claimed therefore to value their goals and therefore to possess self-respect, Gewirth begins with the definition of goals as valued by their agents; and on the basis of this premise argues for such agents' right to freedom. So an agent is logically committed to the PGC only if she "implicitly judges" her purposes to be good. But we have already seen in Chapters VI and VIII.3.2.2.2 that it is not a matter of necessity that an agent judge her purposes in this way; and in Section 3, above, that even if she did this would not, on Gewirth's view, suffice to qualify them as actions. Were Gewirth's dialectically necessary method without these troubling complications, it would enable him to ascribe to the agent certain judgments about actions that the externalist - and Nagel - seemed to deny were motivationally effective. These judgments as particular mental events would be, on Gewirth's thesis, necessary logical implications of acting that were internal to the agent's personal point of view. As mental events, these judgments would be internal, subjective, and personal. As logically necessary implications of action, they would be external, objective, and impersonal. They thereby would furnish a psychologically integrated alternative to the practical solipsism that threatened Nagel's account. The internality of such judgments would tackle the problem of moral motivation, while their objectivity would tackle that of moral justification, and so that of rational final ends. Thus the potential importance of Gewirth's dialectically necessary method to satisfying his criterion of conclusiveness is clear. So are the problems that stand in its way. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
