| OCR Text |
Show Chapter XIII. Baier's Hume 532 impressions of reflexion as "feeling responses to how we take our situation to be" (MP 131). Baier thinks Hume's sentiment-based concept of reflection performs the same function as Kant's concept of reason (MP 72), but without its coercive and individualistic connotations (MP 62). Reflection and premeditation will "make a difference to the operation of natural motives and passions" (MP 66), just as Kantian reason is purported to do. Like Kantian reason, it separates mature and self-critical moral agents from mere conformers (MP 72). And Humean reflection carries with it the same potential for self-deception, i.e. the tendency to overlook or dramatize our moral derelictions in ways that obscure our effective moral beliefs (MP 67). Moreover, there is a developmental progression in levels of reflection, from a child's instinctive feeling of sympathy for another, to our more considered sympathy for another's resentment at insult or injury, to the "reflexive turning of these capacities for sympathy, for self-definition, and for conflictrecognition onto themselves, to see if they can 'bear their own survey'" (MP 72). Humean reflection, Baier concludes, thus can provide an account of moral development analogous and in some ways superior to the prevailing KantPiaget-Kohlberg model. Finally, Humean reflection may play the same authoritative role in deliberation as reason: Hume's reduction of rational inference as traditionally understood to custom and habit is coupled with the stipulation that those customs and habits of thought are authoritative that survive the test of reflection (MP 81). This Baier interprets as meaning, first, that we must be able to continue the custom or habit in question even after we have "thought long and hard about its nature, its sources, its costs and consequences" (MP 81); and second, "we must be able to turn the habit in question on itself and find that it can 'bear its own survey'" (MP 81-2). The most authoritative survey is that which is administered by the passions, including socially dependent ones, on all the operations of the mind traditionally identified with reason - understanding, memory, demonstration, causal inference, and the assumptions of physical and mental continuity. Of these the passions ask, "'Would we perish and go to ruin if we broke this habit? Do we prefer people to have this habit of mind, and how important do we on reflection judge it that they have it?'" (MP 82). Baier defends this method of reflective survey as our only resource for evaluating our values. "We ... can do no more," she argues, "to revise lower-level evaluations, than to repeat our evaluative operations at ever higher, more informed, and more reflective levels" (MP 84). Humean reflection, according to Baier, thus trumps Kantian reason on two counts: first, Kantian reason itself is nothing more than custom and habit; and second, it, like all such habit must be subjected to higher-order authoritative evaluation by directing the passions upon it. Interestingly, Baier's advocacy of Humean reflection as a better substitute for reason represents a revision from her earlier identification of reason with © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
