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Show Chapter XI. Brandt's Instrumentalism 480 is the end we most overridingly desire. Now many alternatives of prudential action are presented to us as possible ends of action only once in our lives. We get to choose only once whether to go right off to graduate school or take a year off after college; only once whether to speak up or remain silent at the moment we first discover a particular injustice; and only once whether to begin saving now at a fixed interest rate of 12% or defer that plan until later when the proffered rates may be lower or higher. In each of these cases, Brandt would say, rationality requires that we examine the cognitive origins of each of our thought-activated action-tendencies in the situation, in order to know which choice we should make. Of course it is particularly important to examine the cognitive origins of that action we have the strongest net tendency to perform, since that is the one that expresses our motivationally overriding desire. However, on Brandt's view, the only way we can know which action we have the strongest net tendency to perform is by performing it; that is how the strongest net tendency to act is identified. This, then, is also the way we identify our motivationally effective desires. The implication of Brandt's action-tendency account of desire - at least on the tautologous interpretation - is that we cannot know that any such newly manifest desire is motivationally overriding in advance of having acted on it. Therefore we cannot correct any such newly manifest desire in light of cognitive psychotherapy in advance of making a decision upon its basis. On the actiontendency account of desire, we may evaluate the rational prudence of many of our decisions only in retrospect. In Section 2 I argued that a non-tautologous reading of Brandt's acttendency account of desire commits him to the orthodox Humean account of desire as an occurrent mental event, if he is to retain his allegiance to the Humean conception at all. On this model, he encounters no such problem. If I can know which desire of mine is strongest before I act on it, I can - at least in theory - subject that desire (in addition to all the others) to the scrutiny of cognitive psychotherapy, and make my decision on the basis of its results. In this case the precipitating cause of action will be, not the thought that performing the act will satisfy my desire, but rather the thought that the desire itself is rational and therefore worth satisfying. Reason, to use Kant's terminology, would be an efficient cause of action in such cases. It turns out to be not so easy for Brandt to maintain his allegiance to the Humean conception as it might first seem. Through exposure to facts and logic I may also produce new desires in the manner described briefly in Section 3. But these newly produced desires will not be thought-activated dispositions to act. Such exposure to reality is not the same as the lengthy process of habituation by which character dispositions are gradually fashioned. It is to character habituation as invasive surgery is to © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
