| OCR Text |
Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 407 act. If my end of acquiring as much personal power as possible in order to ruin my enemies is vengeful, then I can be regarded as acting vengefully in accumulating political favors in order to achieve it. These three examples show that moral predicates ascribed to an end can be applied equally to the action taken to achieve it, regardless of how vaguely or specifically either is characterized. It is the value of our ends, not their popularity or the efficiency with which they are pursued, that confer value on the actions we take to achieve them. This may not seem obvious. It may be objected that, for example, if I have the virtuous end of improving social relations among my colleagues at work, and a necessary means to that end is that I dress warmly before going to work in the morning, it does not follow that my action of pulling a second pair of woolly socks over my feet is virtuous. But my claim is neither that any such action must be so characterized, nor that it cannot be characterized alternatively. My claim is simply that it can be so characterized, in so far as it is understood as promoting the good end in question. However, this conclusion does not extend to just any terms in which an agent's ends are characterized. For example, it does not follow from the fact that my ends are varied that the actions I perform in their service are varied as well. Nor should it be thought that the morally specific terms that characterize an action necessarily have prospective application to its end. From the fact that behaving courteously is morally virtuous it does not follow that all the final ends it promotes can be characterized as morally virtuous as well. But this asymmetry is to be expected. For part of what we want to say is that some actions are susceptible of moral evaluation independently of the further ends they promote. The problem with an Instrumentalist strategy that uses a shrinking means is that it does not allow us to say this. If a shrinking means can always be regarded as constitutive of the moral end it promotes, then as we have just seen, its status as an efficient means to that end cannot be what "justifies" it. It is rather the value conferred on it by that moral end itself that does the justificatory work. Indeed, the whole point of imposing moral constraints on the range of ends an agent is assumed to desire to promote via the action or set of social arrangements in question is to subordinate efficiency considerations to moral ones. This implies that moral considerations are overriding in evaluating the suitability of means to our moral ends. So we who share that moral end are not persuaded to adopt a shrinking means because it efficiently achieves that end. Any action that could be characterized similarly in terms of it would have the same persuasive force. For example, even if distributing fliers promoted our beneficent ends less efficiently than giving our money away, that they did so would "justify" distributing fliers just as well. Certainly we might want to invoke considerations of efficiency in choosing between the alternatives of giving our © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
