Rationality and the structure of the self: volume I, the Humean conception

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Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 401 instrumentally rational for a very wide range of ends, and so objectively justified to that extent. Note that the intuitive appeal of the above reasoning depends on two connected features. First, the ends to which having courteously are instrumental are assumed to be motivated by the desire to achieve them. This is true by definition, relative to the Humean model of motivation. For on this model, the only thing that can motivate action in the service of some end is a desire for that end. On the Humean model, if I am motivated to achieve an end, i.e. if it is really my end, then I have a desire to achieve it. The second, connected feature of the above justification is the substantive weakness of the resulting constraints. The sole motivational constraint is that one has a desire to promote one's ends. The sole constraint on those ends is that they do not appear to threaten the ends of those to whom one is to behave courteously. These constraints leave open to an impressive extent the substantive nature of the ends that may be promoted by behaving courteously, and so the substantive motivation of any agent who may be persuaded to do so. They give everyone whose reasoning is accurately described by such a justification a reason to behave courteously. So the above argument counts as a candidate for an objective justification of behaving courteously and not just as a bit of correct practical reasoning contingent on the particular ends an agent happens to have, because the argument in question gives each of us, as audience, a reason for adopting this as a rule of conduct irrespective of the particular antecedent ends each of us happens to have. A reason for your adopting this action as a rule of conduct - a reason that is assumed to approximate objective validity as the number of agents for whom it is a reason increases - is not just that it promotes your ends; this would make it merely your reason. An objective reason for you to adopt it is - as Nagel has shown - that it promotes everyone's ends. Hence its status as a reason, to that extent, does not depend on the particular antecedent ends you happen to have. It is an objective reason precisely to the extent that it is everyone's reason. Of course the fact that behaving courteously promotes everyone's ends cannot constitute an objective moral justification of behaving courteously. For among the ends that behaving courteously promotes may be recognizably immoral ones; as when, for example, I behave courteously because this enables me to accumulate political favors which I then cash in for the purpose of ruining my enemies. If immoral ends of this kind, too, are among those which behaving courteously promotes, and if part of the persuasive appeal of behaving courteously is its all-purpose character, then this argument supports the pursuit of immoral ends. This means that the Instrumentalist strategy cannot yield a moral justification of a moral theory, if it shows the actions or set of social arrangements that the theory prescribes to be instrumental to the © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin