| OCR Text |
Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 439 On the other hand, such judgments of plausibility may have to be sacrificed if the hypothesis has been carefully formulated on the basis of sufficient inductive evidence and rules of inference scrupulously observed. In this case, the strangeness or improbability of the predicted results may not warrant further revision or rejection of the hypothesis before experiments have been performed. Should the results of such experiments then be equally strange or improbable, a commitment to the rational integrity of the procedure necessitates sacrifice of those epistemic intuitions, not an insistence that its integrity must have been violated somewhere along the line. Thus in the scientific case, an overriding commitment to the rationality of scientific procedure requires conceiving of it as an instance of pure procedural truth; whereas an overriding commitment to one's prior conception of what might plausibly constitute scientific truth - a commitment that might, in a particular case, require rethinking or revising the procedure in order to conform to it - requires conceiving of this procedure as an instance of perfect procedural truth. The question is, to paraphrase Humpty Dumpty, which - scientific procedure or conception of scientific truth - is to prevail. Analogously in Rawls's theory of justice. Which - deliberative procedure or commonsense moral intuitions - is to prevail? If our commonsense moral intuitions about what justice requires are the final arbiter in evaluating the plausibility of the two principles, or of their derivation from the original position, or of the original position itself, such that we are unwilling to sacrifice these intuitions to any counterintuitive results Rawls's stipulated decision procedure (correctly carried out) might have, then Rawls's deliberative procedure is in fact one of perfect procedural justice. For by insisting that the outcome of this procedure finally conform to our commonsense moral intuitions about what justice requires, we will have subordinated that outcome, and indeed the procedure itself, to prior preconceptions about what justice requires that the procedure is designed to approximate. Only if our moral intuitions are equally vulnerable to sacrifice in the service of the rational procedure of deliberation Rawls describes can he make the claim about justice analogously to that one might wish to make about science. Only if rationality may outweigh moral intuition in metaethics just as it may outweigh epistemic intuition in science is Rawls's view truly an instance of pure procedural justice; and so only then can he claim to have met the standard of moral objectivity he set for himself in 1951. We will be in a better position to settle this question after we examine more closely what Rawls's deliberative procedure entails. 6. The Continuity Thesis With at least some of the basics of Rawls's theory in place, let us now look at the implications of a certain metaphysical thesis the truth of which is presupposed in various early objections that were raised against A Theory of © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
