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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 403 than an observation, i.e. a bit of correct practically reasoning contingent on the particular ends some other agent may happen to have. Certainly this reasoning may be supplemented by further argument to the effect that you ought to be the kind of person for whom such beneficent final ends outweigh other kinds. You may or may not find such arguments persuasive. If you do not, you will need to be persuaded that you ought to want to be this kind of person; and if not by this argument, by an argument that you ought to want to want to be this kind of person; and so on. You will need to be persuaded, at some point in the regress, that you have some terminating, rationally authoritative obligation, however tenuous, that links you in your present state to the promotion of beneficent final ends, in order for you to recognize the promotion of beneficent final ends as a justification for giving one's money away. But even if you do so recognize them, it is hard to see how any of these latter arguments will succeed in justifying to you your giving your money away, if you do not in fact have beneficent final ends. For they will not demonstrate the instrumental rationality of that action to any end you actually have. So the success of the Instrumentalist strategy depends on the inclusiveness of the range of ends to which the prescribed action or set of social arrangements is in fact instrumental. In order to insure the unanimity of the choice among actions or sets of social arrangements, all agents must be presumed to share final ends toward which the prescribed action or set of social arrangements is instrumental. If the prescribed action or set of social arrangements requires a significant degree of beneficence or altruism, the agents' final ends must be characterized accordingly; and if not, then not. In either case, only if your ends are among them will it justify that action or set of social arrangements to you. And only to the extent that most people's ends are similarly among them will that justification seem to approximate objective validity. Thus Instrumentalist moral philosophers have two choices. They may water down their normative prescriptions for action to the point of providing little more than a rationale for the status quo, in order to secure for those prescriptions the largest number of final ends to which they are instrumental; Sidgwick would be a classic example of a philosopher who approaches objectivity at the expense of normative substance. Or they may issue normative prescriptions that may require rather a great deal of personal selfimprovement in order for most people to follow, and simply stipulate that they speak of and to only that much smaller range of agents who share such ultimate aspirations to begin with. Rawls' more recent views would exemplify this alternative. But the smaller the range of ends promoted by the action, the fewer the individuals likely to hold them, and the less the instrumentalist justification will approximate objectivity. Call such an action or set of social arrangements © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
