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Show Chapter XIII. Baier's Hume 530 pretending that these imbalances do not exist in order to bring about their eradication, she argues, we obscure from ourselves the true nature of our moral relationships to others who are inferior or superior to us in power; and so we often do violence to ourselves as well as to them (MP 28). About the Social Contract-Theoretic conception of freedom of choice Baier is equally pessimistic. She points out that moral relationships to others - for example, of child to parent, or of later to earlier generation, are not always freely chosen. Shifting the moral emphasis from contractual justice to care, she argues, "goes with a recognition of the often unchosen nature of responsibilities of those who give care, both of children who care for their aged or infirm parents and of parents who care for the children they in fact have" (MP 30). I think what she means here is that elevating care and concern for others to a central moral role, rather than simultaneously presupposing and devaluing it, as she claims the contract-theoretic tradition does, assigns priority to the moral quality of the social relationships we actually have, rather than to a conception of ourselves as moral agents who can create the ones we want ab nuovo. Baier also levels a frontal attack on the rationalism she finds inherent in the Contract-Theoretic moral tradition, i.e. on the "assumption that we need not worry what passions persons have as long as their rational wills can control them" (MP 30). If unequal power relations - in particular those between parent and child - are the moral norm, rather than contractual relations among equals, then the primacy of rationality must be re-evaluated accordingly (in this conviction I am, obviously, squarely in her camp). Rational control may be a necessary condition for adequate parenting, and maybe even sufficient in a distant father-figure who has no substantial involvement in day-to-day child-rearing. But "primary parents [usually mothers] need to love their children, not just to control their irritation" (MP 31). Finally, Baier's critique of the Contract-Theoretic notion of rights begins with her acknowledgement of the fundamental connection between rights and speech. To speak at all, she observes, to assert or claim anything, is implicitly to assert or claim the universal right to speak and the right to be heard. "We are a right-claiming and right-recognizing species," she says, "and these claims have a built-in potential for contested universalization" (MP 224-5). If Baier is correct in maintaining that language expresses respect for persons (MP 232, fn. 5), and that rights language expresses our emerging selfconsciousness as individuals and the externalization of our individual powers (MP 232-3; also cf. 236-8, 240-1), then rights would seem to have a foundational role that conflicts with Baier's agenda to displace the ContractTheoretic model from ethical primacy. But rights, on Baier's view, are not only individual but also individualistic. She finds an inverse correlation between our increasing © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
