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Show Chapter XI. Brandt's Instrumentalism 476 higher pleasures. On the democratic interpretation, any pleasure the informed majority chooses is in virtue of that choice identifiable as a higher pleasure; i.e. the informed majority confers that status on a pleasure in virtue of its choice. On the elite interpretation, the informed majority chooses a particular pleasure because their education and experience enable them to recognize it as higher independently of their choice of it. Correspondingly, there are two possible ways of understanding Brandt's cognitive psychotherapy criterion of rational desire. On the democratic interpretation, any desire that survives it, for whatever reason, thereby qualifies as rational. On the elite interpretation, a particular desire survives cognitive psychotherapy because one recognizes its rationality independently of its psychological survival. That is, confrontation with relevant and available facts and logic enable one to see which desires are in fact rational and which are the result of idiosyncratic associations or warped reasoning. Whereas Mill chooses the elite interpretation of his informed majority criterion of higher pleasures, Brandt chooses the democratic interpretation of his cognitive psychotherapy criterion of rational desires. He thereby avoids linking the rationality of a desire to its particular content, or to the agent's recognition of the rationality of its content. Instead, a desire's rationality is entirely a function of its contingent psychological survival for a particular agent, irrespective of its content. This is a fateful choice that has several unfortunate implications. First notice that Brandt builds a circularity into his definition of what counts as relevant information in the criticism of intrinsic desire. He suggests that if information causally affects desires and aversions then it is relevant; and that if it is relevant, then it will causally affect desires and aversions. So relevance is a function of causal efficacy exclusively. In an attempt to ensure the value-neutrality of his conception of rational desire, Brandt offers no substantive intellectual criterion by which the content of the information might be assessed for its relevance. But this criterion is then so weak that it cannot generate an identifiably rational choice at all. On this view, it makes no sense to criticize an agent's desires on the grounds that he is not taking seriously information that is relevant to his choices; for if it does not affect those choices it is by definition not relevant, however pertinent it may seem to a third-person observer. And if no information causally affects that desire, then no information is relevant to its rationality. Therefore it is in itself rational for Brandt, regardless of its content or object. So, for example, if my desire for alcoholic oblivion is unaffected by what I have read in The New England Journal of Medicine about what alcohol does to the liver or how it shortens one's life, then this information is irrelevant to the rationality of my desire for alcoholic oblivion. If my desire for alcoholic oblivion does not © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
