Rationality and the structure of the self: volume I, the Humean conception

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Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 541 colleagues, friends, and citizens. And she is surely right to argue that analysis of the use and abuse of power and responsibility should play a much more prominent role in the construction of normative moral theory than it does. Yet does this imply the irrelevance, or even the noncentrality to moral discourse, of the Contract-Theoretic concepts of freedom, autonomy, individuality, equality and individual rights? I am not convinced. For it is only with the aid of these concepts that we can understand what is wrong with neglecting the important contributions of women and mothers to the creation of a moral community in which the benefits of freedom of choice, voluntary association, or autonomy of life-plan are available to others; or in which these benefits might be rejected for others in which care, concerned intervention in the lives of the powerless, and grass-roots political work in one's community of origin rather than one's community of choice have greater priority. Similarly, it is only with the aid of the Social Contract-Theoretic concepts of freedom, equality, individuality, autonomy and rights that we can understand what is wrong with failing to respect the special needs of children, or with failing to treat them as individuals, or with assigning them too much or too little power and responsibility for themselves and their environment in relation to their age. And it is only with the aid of these concepts that we can come to understand the responsibilities and obligations of those with greater power - in the home, workplace, marketplace, or social or civil sphere - to those who have less. It is hard to see how we could come to grasp the moral implications of unequal power relations in any of these contexts, without these background Contract-Theoretic concepts to give them meaning. What we see from Baier's analysis is that women, mothers, children and other disenfranchised groups have the same rights as those who traditionally have arrogated those rights to themselves. But we need the background Contract-Theoretic concepts of rights, freedom, equality, and individuality as a measure in order to understand what is amiss. Of course this does not imply that everyone in actual fact is or should be exactly alike in degrees of freedom, autonomy, or power. No Social Contract Theorist claims this. That traditional Social Contract-Theoretic assumptions do not apply concretely and realistically to actual human agents does not show that they are not central to moral theorizing. What it shows is that they cannot be expected to do the practical work Baier rightly expects the lower-level generalizations of a normative moral theory to do. But no Social Contract Theorist claims that they can. Now we have also seen in Section 2 that Baier has particularly harsh words for Kantian Rationalism, i.e. the assumption that all we need do morally is to subject our passions, whatever they are, to rational control. Kant himself did not make this claim, and I know of no Kantian who has. Kant himself devoted a great deal of thought to the question of how to cultivate © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin