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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 513 weight which each party can be expected to assign, and thereby can expect each other to assign, to the alternative of keeping the agreement to play tennis (or, alternately, of telling the truth about which button one has pressed). But these predetermined expectations themselves presuppose that one can successfully keep agreements or tell the truth in this version of the ideal Utilitarian society. And whether one can or not is, of course, the very question with which Hodgson confronts us.29 A refutation of Hodgson's dilemma would, then, have to demonstrate that these practices - and any others that derive part of their utility from satisfying expectations - could be established in an ideal Utilitarian society by Utilitarian reasoning alone, that is, independently of non-Utilitarian expectations. For what Hodgson shows is that if we give no weight to expectations based on the prior existence of truth-telling and promisekeeping, there is no way, consistent with Utilitarian reasoning, of introducing them into deliberation about what to do. Any act that derives part of its utility from the satisfaction of expectations can never be performed, for it will be expected only if it has greatest utility, and it will have greatest utility only if it is expected. But since neither its utility nor whether it is expected can be independently determined, there is no reason for it to be performed at all. Now one apparent solution to the problem can be found in the plausible assumption that moral precepts or rules of thumb (such as telling the truth and keeping promises) as general guides to conduct have carried over or are remembered from the historically prior non-ideal society. The problem for the members of the ideal society is then simply to publicly incorporate them into the recognized corpus of acceptable Utilitarian behavior. And since, on the Utilitarian account, these rules of thumb have the status they do just because conformity to them usually has best consequences, this should not be too difficult to achieve.30 Or so it may seem. However, how are the members of the ideal Act-Utilitarian society to achieve this? To the extent that this program requires them to expressly agree A similar charge can be leveled against the solution proposed by Singer (op. cit. Note 11 above), for the basis on which he assumes the positive consequences of truth-telling and promise-keeping to hold in an ideal society seems to me to beg the question in much the same way. 30 I owe this solution and its elaboration in the second paragraph following to John Rawls, in discussion of the 1975 course paper on which this chapter is based. In his Political Liberalism, Rawls states that "any conception of justice that cannot well order a constitutional democracy is inadequate as a democratic conception. This might happen because of the familiar reason that its content renders it self-defeating when it is publicly recognized." Second Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 3536. Conceivably my 1975 paper for his course, and its revised article form ("Utility, Publicity and Manipulation," Ethics 88, 3 (April 1978), 189-206) are possible sources of this familiarity. 29 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
