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Show Chapter XI. Brandt's Instrumentalism 494 a fateful choice with unfortunate implications. I have just enumerated some of them. What might have been the implications of choosing the elite interpretation instead? Recall that on the democratic interpretation, any desire that survives cognitive therapy, for whatever reason, thereby qualifies as rational; whereas on the elite interpretation, a particular desire survives cognitive psychotherapy only because one recognizes its rationality independently. On this reading, confrontation with relevant and available facts and logic enables one to see which desires are in fact rational and which are warped by idiosyncratic associations or faulty reasoning. On the elite interpretation, it is the rational content of the desire rather than the contingent matter of its psychological embeddedness that ensures its survival. This interpretation would have required a greater degree of idealization in Brandt's account of cognitive psychotherapy, for it would have required him to ignore the non-ideal case in which the rationality of a desire - for friendly social relations, for example - is obvious, yet we are blinded by other emotions that obstruct our ability to recognize it as such. The elite interpretation also would have required Brandt to say a great deal more about our cognitive capacity to recognize rational content when we are confronted with it, and what it is about us, and about rational content itself, that enables us to do this. In particular, it would have required him to elaborate further the rational capacities we bring to the apprehension of facts and logic, and the rational content of his conception of the Ideal Code Utilitarian society itself. It then would have required him to say what facts about us and it specifically might enable us to recognize its desirability for self-interested as well as benevolent readers. That is, it would have required him to say more about exactly what facts and what logic successful cognitive psychotherapy requires in this case, and how they operate. Just as Brandt's qualified definition of relevant facts and logic was anchored to the content of a particular desire, similarly his elaborated analysis of cognitive psychotherapy as a criterion of rational desire would have been anchored to the content of the particular desire proposed as a candidate for it. If Brandt had spoken directly to the "fit" between our capacity for independent recognition of the rational and the conception of the good society proposed to be rational, he would have thereby dispensed with the Instrumentalist justification on which he in fact relied; and indeed would have abandoned the Deductivist strategy of which Instrumentalism is an example altogether. Instead he would have lent support to Nagel's Kantian thesis, of attempting to show that our recognition of objectively valid and impersonal reasons can directly motivate action in the absence of desire. And he might have provided indirect support to Kant's own agenda, of arguing that the kingdom of ends is the form of social organization best suited to rational © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
