| OCR Text |
Show Chapter XI. Brandt's Instrumentalism 466 [R]ational desire ... can confront, or will even be produced by, awareness of the truth; irrational desire cannot (113). With this modification, Brandt attempts to escape what we saw to be one of the most central and frequently repeated criticisms of Rawls's metaethics, namely that the conditions defining the original position - self-interest, freedom, equality, the veil of ignorance, the desire to maximize primary goods - were not independently rational but rather already biased towards a certain liberal democratic conception of justice for which no independent justification had been provided. That is, it was objected that Rawls's metaethical methodology was too loaded with value assumptions of its own to provide an objective justification of the well-ordered society it was supposed to support. We saw that this resulted from a more general tension inherent within the Instrumentalist strategy itself, that it can succeed in providing an objective justification only to the extent that it sacrifices the aim of providing a moral justification; and can succeed in providing a moral "justification" only to the extent that it sacrifices the aim of providing an objective justification. But Brandt's admirable allegiance to the value-neutrality of his conception of rational choice undermines the justificatory force of his Instrumentalist argument for his particular moral theory, just as it did for Rawls. We will see that by stipulating restrictive conditions on motivation and on final ends as part of the rational chooser's psychology at the outset, he robs the derivation of his theory of its rationally persuasive force for us. As did Rawls's derivation, Brandt's also ends up being strictly deductive - but without any pure procedural method comparable to that of wide reflective equilibrium to ensure its soundness. 2. Brandt's Theory of Justification Brandt means to escape the Instrumentalist dilemma by deploying a weaker, more value-neutral conception of rationality as fully informed choice to provide the metaethical underpinning for his justification of the Ideal Code Utilitarian society (185, 189-193). He means to argue, not that this social arrangement will provide the best resources for satisfying just anyone's desires, but that it will provide the best resources for satisfying anyone's rational desires. But he then further qualifies this strategy in a second way, by arguing that this social arrangement will provide the best means for satisfying anyone's benevolent rational desires. By restricting the agent's scope of ends and of motivation in these two ways, he makes the agent's resulting choice of something like an Ideal Code-Utilitarian society a foregone conclusion. Of course an agent whose highest priority is the satisfaction of rational desire will choose to live in a society whose moral code is ideally crafted to achieve © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
