| OCR Text |
Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 491 from there to the conclusion that a benevolent rational chooser would choose to live in an Ideal Code Utilitarian society: [T]he main inference is quite obvious. For a perfectly benevolent rational person will tend to do whatever will maximize expectable happiness. He will most support that system which as a whole - taking into account probable effects on behavior and the resulting contribution to happiness, and also the costs of the system such as restrictions on individual freedom, the unpleasant pangs of guilt, and the effort of moral education - will maximize the expectable happiness of all sentient creatures. In that sense we can say that he will opt for some kind of 'utilitarian' moral system (217). Brandt's reasoning here is quintessentially Instrumentalist; and the same problems that beset Rawls's Instrumentalism beset Brandt's. First, the resulting "derivation" is a tautology. Certainly if we assume at the outset that an agent desires to maximize happiness, then, other things equal, she will choose a system that maximizes happiness. In this case Brandt has built into his major premise the conclusion he wants to derive, and the resulting derivation does not, after all, generate a normative moral theory from valueneutral premises. Instead it generates a normative moral theory laden with the same values as were the premises. As we saw in Chapter IX.4.4, Brandt thereby trades an objective justification of Ideal Code Utilitarianism for a moral "justification" that presupposes what it claimed to prove. Brandt must find some other basis on which a fully rational chooser might justifiably choose the Ideal Code Utilitarian society in which to live. Is there one? We have already seen in Chapter VI that "looking out for number one" is the uncontroversial case of rational action within the Humean conception of the self; and Brandt acknowledges that cognitive psychotherapy may be 9 unable to produce benevolence in such a self-interested person (145). What he presupposes but does not explicitly state is that cognitive psychotherapy may easily produce self-interested desires in a formerly benevolent person: Through maximal and vivid exposure to facts and logic, such a person might, for example, come to revise her sunny conception of human beings as naturally entitled to happiness; and conclude that only those few, herself 9 Brandt's term is "selfish;" but he must be conflating this with self-interest. A person can be both selfish and also benevolent if she desires both not to share her resources with others and also to produce happiness in them. There is no incompatibility here: if she could satisfy the latter desire without sacrificing any of the former resources she would do it. By contrast, a purely self-interested person would not desire to produce happiness in others unless it promoted her own self-interest in the weak sense defined in Chapter VI. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
